From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-A Dissenting View- “Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform-For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Workers Vanguard No. 988
14 October 2011

“Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform

For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!

Below we print excerpts from an October 8 forum by Spartacist League spokesman Irene Gardner in Oakland.

This past Wednesday my comrades and I were at the mass demonstration in downtown Manhattan with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, roughly 700 of whom were arrested by the NYPD at a march over the Brooklyn Bridge a few days earlier. I think the scale and popularity of these protests have surprised the New York City ruling class somewhat. It’s another indication of how much anger is out there.

Each day we open up the paper and discover another set of horrible statistics about the effects of the capitalist crisis on poor and working people. The reality is a lot worse than the numbers. Back in 2008, the con men on Wall Street, whose financial swindles were central to the economic collapse, were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. But the working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing jobs, homes, pensions and just about anything else that makes life livable.

Today, one in six people of working age in the U.S. are unemployed, with long-term unemployment the highest since the Great Depression. The Census Bureau now reports that 46.2 million in the U.S. live under the poverty line, and of those, 2.6 million fell into poverty just in the last year alone. Those who still have a job are being squeezed to work harder, faster and longer for lower pay. And there are plenty of people who have given up even looking for a job altogether. A new census report also shows that one in five New Yorkers now live in poverty, the highest level in a decade. Another astounding figure: in New York City the number of homeless students in public schools has quadrupled since 2008, to almost 43,000 as of last October.

Meanwhile, during the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the manufacturing and productive capacity of the U.S. has dropped significantly. And now we’re in a global financial crisis with Europe ready to implode.

Even billionaire New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mentioned that riots could happen if job prospects don’t improve. It is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns union-hating Bloomberg and other multibillionaires like Warren Buffett. President Obama has now been pushing a new tax rate for millionaires (the so-called “Buffett Rule”) in exchange for Democrats’ support to more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In reality, this token “tax the rich” scheme is meant to be sugarcoating on another round of anti-working-class austerity.

Obama and the Democrats want to appear as if they care about “the little guy,” but in reality Obama championed the same austerity agenda as the Republicans all summer long, pushing for massive budget cuts. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a political party of the capitalist class. As one Verizon striker put it, “The Democrats are doing the job of the Republicans, only with a smile.”

Economic crises, booms and busts, are nothing new—they are endemic to the capitalist mode of production. A key contradiction that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified is that under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor. Those who own the means of production—the factories, mines, railroads, banks—constitute the capitalist class, also known as the bourgeoisie. Those who subsist only on their labor power—their mental and physical ability to work—constitute the working class, the proletarians. Between these two classes lies a variety of merchants, independent professionals and others known as the petty bourgeoisie. But the main, decisive classes are the capitalist class and the working class.

Consciously or not, labor seeks to resist exploitation. It comes into constant conflict with the uncontrollable drive of capitalist production, which is the drive for the accumulation of more and more capital, and the production of more and more profit. This is the basis for class struggle—the irreconcilable class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The Imperialist Epoch

V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, described how capitalism in the late 19th century reached its highest stage—imperialism. He described how the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates with ever-growing needs for investment funds and other financing, leading to the dominance of finance capital, centrally the giant banks. As the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries strove for newer markets to exploit, they carried out wars to redivide the world and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed people around the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II and waged countless bloody wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.

The way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when workers took power in their own hands, expropriating the bourgeoisie and establishing the Soviet workers state. It is high time that working people, who create the wealth in this society, run this society! We need an all new ruling class—the workers! Fight, don’t starve! Labor must rule!

In a climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse, even under Stalinist bureaucratic misrule.

When the capitalist world was in the midst of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union actually increased its industrial output. As Leon Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936:

“Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia long for the days when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers struggles in other countries.

Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. However, China’s Stalinist regime also undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we call for proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.

From Spain’s Indignados...

I want to talk a bit about Europe and in particular Spain, where I visited this past summer. Along with the wild roller-coaster ride of the stock market, Europe has been in the news just about every day with the imperialist rulers desperately trying to keep the economies afloat. In Europe, the financial crisis has sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union (EU), an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states, some richer, some poorer. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. As proletarian internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. We say that only the conquest of state power by the working class can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.

In Spain, youth unemployment is around 45 percent. Factories are closing, hospitals are cutting back, and evictions during just three months of this year numbered over 15,000, more than 150 a day. When I was in Spain I got to discuss with some of the “Indignados” (“the indignant”) at their encampment in Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid. The Spanish Indignados are essentially a petty-bourgeois movement that arose in response to the austerity measures being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) before its huge defeat in the municipal and regional elections in May. The PSOE in power has carried out a relentless capitalist austerity drive.

Those who started the Indignados movement were inspired by the best-selling book Indignez-vous! (Be Indignant!) by Stéphane Hessel, a French anti-communist bourgeois ideologue. They were also inspired by the protests in Egypt and Iceland. They occupied squares in major cities throughout Spain, numbering in the tens of thousands, mostly youth, calling on people to “stand up against indifference in a peaceful uprising.”

Their main organizers, around a group called Real Democracy Now, put out a manifesto calling for an end to corruption and an end to the dictatorship of the markets, “real democracy.” But what is democracy in a class-divided society? Under capitalism, it is democracy for the ruling class, those wealthy few who own the means of production and carry out laws to defend their private property. There are no laws that will establish equality between the capitalists and the working class. The capitalists have a state apparatus, armed bodies of men (cops, courts, prisons) to keep the bourgeoisie in power and repress any challenge to their rule.

So how do the Indignados propose to change society? By endless protests and encampments? You can be indignant all you want, but to really make a change you have to ally with the social power of the working class, the only class that has the power to stop production and has the historic interest to overthrow capitalism. But the leadership of the Indignados movement is anti-union and therefore anti-working-class, because unions are the basic defense organizations of the working class. In Spain early on, the Indignados assemblies would not allow any union or political organization to join with them, “in order to guarantee the political neutrality of this citizens’ movement”! Their so-called “non-political” stance is actually very political—in the direction of anti-communism. This is shown by their exclusion of left groups from speaking at assemblies and attempts to censor left groups from distributing their literature.

Even their anti-leadership emphasis on “consensus” decision-making is undemocratic. Instead of using majority votes to make decisions, people are supposed to debate endlessly until they all agree. Then, of course, a non-elected clique usually makes the decisions in the background.

While the Indignados leadership pushes anti-union politics, it seems that many of the youth don’t necessarily buy into it. One example is that there have been large teachers strikes in Madrid recently, and some Indignados have put out a statement in support.

Many of these youth hate the effects of capitalism but do not see socialism as an alternative. The whole “death of communism” ideology pushed by the bourgeoisie following the fall of the Soviet Union is reflected in such low-level protest movements. This is also a reflection of the betrayals of the Social Democracy and the Communist parties, which have engaged in decades of class-collaboration—the Spanish labor union bureaucrats work hand in hand with the Socialist Party government! We fight to win youth over to the side of the working class, to the program of international socialist revolution, and to the understanding that you need a Bolshevik vanguard party to accomplish this.

...To “Occupy Wall Street”

The new Occupy Wall Street encampment, which has been gaining steam around the country, is in solidarity with the Spanish Indignados, raising similar demands against corporate greed and for a “leaderless resistance movement.” As one columnist put it, it’s like a “festival of frustrations” and people are plenty mad. They also look for inspiration from the “Egyptian Spring.” But look at what has happened in Egypt—the workers continue to get screwed under a renewed military dictatorship. What’s needed is not endless protests and occupations of squares but workers to power!

For many of the youth in the encampment, this is their first protest. Many are pro-union, but they view the working class as just another base of support for their all-inclusive “movement.” We’ve been intervening into the Occupy Wall Street protests, distributing lots of Workers Vanguard, looking to win over those who are open to a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.

Many of you have seen the video of the Wall Street protesters getting viciously attacked by the NYPD during a march to Union Square, where 80 people got arrested. The videos show several young women being corralled inside a movable police pen and pepper-sprayed by cops. Others were kicked, bruised and thrown over barricades by the police. And then last weekend 700 were arrested when the police trapped them on a march over the Brooklyn Bridge. According to a recent New York Times article, the NYPD is geared up to deal with “unrest.”

Many of the protesters are saying that the problem with the cops is that they were “unprofessional.” But these cops are as “professional” as they come! They are precisely carrying out their “profession” as the capitalist state’s armed bodies of men. There are massive illusions that “the cops are workers, too,” with slogans like “NYPD is a layoff away from joining us” and “The 99 percent includes cops.” No, the cops are not a part of the working class—they have a special role to play as part of the capitalist state apparatus. We say cops, prison guards and security guards out of the unions!

What we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street protest is lowest-common-denominator politics, which does not at all challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie. An example of this was seen in the attempt to create a General Assembly declaration: Somebody objected to using the phrase “redistribution of wealth” because it sounded “dangerously similar to theft”! So it was decided, via consensus, to remove this phrase altogether. If you look at their final declaration posted on the Web, it does not even oppose capitalism, it just raises the same appeals for classless “democracy.” This is not new. A lot of these same themes were put forward during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s, here and in Europe, which did not go anywhere.

Many of the slogans raised, like “We are the 99 percent,” are totally compatible with the Democratic Party’s line. In fact, the Democrats are working to get on top of these protests as a way of invigorating Obama’s campaign for the next election and to counter the Tea Party. Not only has Obama empathized with the protests, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported that even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke have expressed sympathy! You also have celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon there—one of the first things she asked was if people were registered to vote. And there are the left-talking Democrats like Charles Barron, all looking to corral youth toward the Democratic Party.

As I mentioned at the start, several unions have called for joining the Occupy Wall Street protests. A recent article noted, “The decision by organized labor to join the demonstrations has given them an extra jolt of numbers and credibility, since unions have historically played an important, but waning, role in mobilizing voters on the left” (New York Times, 6 October). The labor bureaucrats’ program is not about class struggle. It’s about pressuring the Democratic Party to go a little easier on their membership during a period of union-busting austerity.

One of the more vocal unions in support of the protests has been the New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU). Like other unions, the TWU is under heavy attack by the bosses. TWU members showed real social power when they went on strike in December 2005, defying the state Taylor Law banning public workers strikes. But the workers were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other NYC unions and the TWU International, and in the end were sold out by their own local union misleaders.

TWU bureaucrats and the rest of the AFL-CIO officialdom are pushing impotent “tax the rich” schemes along with reformist left groups like the International Socialist Organization, the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. These “tax the rich” demands are tailor-made to fit in with the current Obama administration and Democratic Party platform. The corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash, but you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.

This past spring, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters (including students) came out to occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up collective bargaining for public workers unions. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon. Instead they channeled the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators, which failed miserably. Wisconsin public employee unions have been dealt a real defeat.

Within the labor movement, the proletariat is saddled with a pro-capitalist union bureaucracy that promotes the lie that the interests of labor and capital are compatible. They tie working people and the oppressed to the capitalist system, especially through support to the Democratic Party. The trade-union misleaders poured a whopping $450 million into the 2008 elections, backing capitalist politicians like Obama as “friends of labor.”

It is absolutely necessary to forge a new leadership of the unions to mobilize labor in struggle for its class interests, to fight against all forms of discrimination and for full citizenship rights for immigrants. A strategic question for the American workers revolution is the fight against black oppression, which is rooted in the very foundation of capitalism in the U.S. If the unions are to fight for their very existence, they must take up the defense of the ghetto and barrio poor by fighting for jobs, quality housing, education, health care and more.

The decades of betrayals by the labor bureaucracy have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. Right now International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 in Longview, Washington, is in a battle for its life, fighting against the union-busting of the EGT multinational conglomerate. They have been facing court injunctions, arrests and police assaults, including pepper spray and cops in full riot gear, in a fight to defend their union.

Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. It is crucial that we build a revolutionary vanguard party that will bring the critical element of consciousness to the proletariat, to transform it from a class in itself to a class for itself, fighting to do away with this entire system of wage slavery. Join us in the fight for a socialist future for humanity!

The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!

Click on the headline to link to a BBC online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.

Markin comment:

The international working class movement and its allies, including in the Occupy movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule

The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!

Click on the headline to link to a BBC online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.

Markin comment:

The international working class movement and its allies, including in the Occupy movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule

*From The Blogosphere-From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor

Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Markin comment:

As always in such general strike and possiblly pre-revolutitonary situations a call by communist propagandists for independent working class organizations to take power is in order. For A Greek Communist Party-Greek Trade Union Federations (and whoever else of the up-against-the-wall middle class and student elements they can bring in) government!
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 983
8 July 2011

European Crisis and the Bankruptcy of Capitalism

Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-
For a Socialist United States of Europe!

On June 29, as a two-day general strike virtually shut down the country and tens of thousands protested outside, the Greek parliament approved a new round of brutal austerity measures demanded by the Greek bourgeoisie and its imperialist overlords. The demonstrators—who included, in addition to workers, a broad range of the population from students and other youth to professionals and retirees—were viciously attacked by club-wielding riot police. More than a year of unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the Greek population has resulted in seething unrest across broad layers of society. In the last year alone, there have been at least a dozen one-day general strikes and massive protests. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost, homelessness has skyrocketed and many people, especially pensioners, are reliant on soup kitchens for their survival.

Video footage of the wanton violence meted out by the cops has provoked widespread indignation, as has another video documenting collusion between the police and hooded provocateurs who infiltrated the protesters. Police fired endless volleys of tear gas and stun grenades and pummeled protesters with chunks of masonry. At least 38 were reportedly arrested in what was blatantly a cop riot. We demand that all charges be dropped against the anarchists and other anti-austerity protesters, including those arrested during the earlier general strikes!

It is clear for all to see that working people are being fleeced to pay for a crisis they are not responsible for. The economic crisis gripping Greece—a particularly severe expression of the world capitalist crisis—was triggered in the spring of last year as global financial capitalists, fearing that the heavily indebted Greek government would default on its loan obligations, began spurning Greek government bonds. The plummeting price of those bonds threatened European banks, especially in France and Germany—foreign financial institutions are exposed to some 340 billion euros in Greek public and private debt.

To try to head off the crisis, at least temporarily, the European Union (EU) and the IMF agreed last year to a 110 billion euro “rescue package” on condition that Athens impose draconian austerity measures on Greece’s working people. The October 2009 elections replaced the right-wing New Democracy (ND) regime with the bourgeois-populist Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of George Papandreou, with the bourgeoisie calculating that the masses would more readily accept “sacrifice” if demanded by PASOK. The PASOK government answered the EU and IMF’s ultimatum with a year-long campaign of slashing public sector workers’ wages, gutting pensions and ramping up taxes. These attacks hit hardest at the poorest in society, including immigrant workers. In addition, Greek officials, in response to EU/IMF demands that they raise cash by privatizing a host of state-owned enterprises, have launched what the bourgeois press describes as a “fire sale,” auctioning off airports, ports and prime land.

European capitalists fear that a default by Greece could immediately pose a similar collapse by other heavily indebted countries such as Ireland and Portugal, which have already received bailouts from the EU and IMF, and Spain, whose economy is larger than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. Fearing the potentially catastrophic effects of such contagion, the EU/IMF hastily agreed last month on a second “rescue package” for Greece, amounting to a further 120 billion euros. Yet hardly anyone believes that these bailouts will do more than delay the inevitable default.

Everyone can see that the fate of the Greek working class, and much of the petty bourgeoisie, will be ever more dire without a radical solution. The working masses have demonstrated their combativity time and again. But the workers’ leaders, whether the despised PASOK-loyal tops of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and the Confederation of Public Servants (ADEDY) or the far more militant-sounding Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its PAME labor front, have thus far succeeded in channeling workers’ anger into what amounts to militant parliamentary lobbying. In effect, they appeal to the Greek capitalists to stand up to their senior partners in Germany and France. This nationalist class collaboration is a recipe for demoralization and defeat.

The allies of the Greek proletariat are to be found not among its “own” exploiters but among the workers elsewhere in Europe and beyond. A proletarian upheaval in Greece could trigger a wave of class struggle throughout Europe against the ever more brutal and incessant attacks of the capitalists against the jobs, benefits and living standards of all workers on the continent. A workers government in Greece would immediately repudiate the imperialist debt. Such an act would require a direct appeal to the proletariat, from Germany and France to Spain and Portugal, to come to the defense of their Greek class brothers and sisters against the combined forces of the European bourgeoisies.

As long as Greek workers are mobilized primarily against the foreign diktats of the IMF and EU, they will be unable to see that opposing the imperialists is intertwined with overthrowing the Greek bourgeoisie. The Greek government is not simply a tool of the European and other imperialist powers, as some signs in the Athens demonstrations suggest, but of the Greek bourgeoisie that has always exploited, suppressed and bled the working class in the pursuit of profit.

The question that is objectively posed is the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of working-class rule. Yet there is a huge disparity between the objective needs of the Greek working class and oppressed on one side and the political program of their leadership on the other. The repeated strikes and protests are designed to dissipate the anger of workers, whose militancy is clearly not the issue. The problem is that the working class is hamstrung by a leadership that accepts the need for the working class to bear some degree of austerity to “bail out” capitalism, while objecting that the terms and conditions dictated by the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB) are too severe.

The program of the labor bureaucracy—defined by what is “practical” under capitalism—has led to disaster for the working class. To overcome the gulf between the workers’ present consciousness and the necessity for a workers government based on organs of proletarian power, a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party would put forward a series of transitional demands, starting from the felt needs of the masses and pointing the way toward the seizure of state power by the working class and the expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class.

To combat mass unemployment, it is necessary to demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works. To protect even their current living standards—already among the lowest in Europe—workers must demand that wages be indexed to inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the industrialists and bankers, workers should demand that the capitalists open their (real) books. With the imperialists demanding the dismantling of state enterprises, the proletariat must fight for the expropriation of the productive property of the capitalist class as a whole and the establishment of a planned economy under workers rule, where production would be based on social need, not profit.

Combat National Chauvinism!

Throughout Europe, the capitalist press and politicians have been whipping up a chauvinist frenzy against Greeks, who are portrayed as lazy, ungrateful scroungers. Last year the right-wing German Bild (27 October 2010) screamed: “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks…and the Acropolis too!” A recent London Financial Times (9 May) editorial demanded: “Athens must be put under the gun.” For all the talk of bailing out Greece, the only “bailout” that is taking place is that of Europe’s banks. Columnist Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times (21 June): “It is far less embarrassing to state that one is helping Greece when one is in fact helping one’s own banks.”

With chauvinist arrogance, the European imperialists, led by Germany, are seeking to impose on Greece, an EU member state, the kind of diktat they are accustomed to issuing to neocolonial countries in the Third World. The Financial Times (17 June) reports that officials of the “troika”—the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission—are demanding that “outsiders” be brought in “to make Greece’s privatization program happen,” adding that “because Greece seemed incapable of collecting taxes, international experts would come in to do that, too.” The article further reports that Finnish officials were insisting that “Athens assets should be securitised so they could be used as collateral. If Greece defaulted, lenders would gain an airport or some other utility.”

The imperialists’ dismissive attitude to Greece’s sovereignty has in turn fueled national chauvinism in Greece. Right-wing opponents of the EU/IMF’s bailout include New Democracy, Greece’s main opposition party. ND represents Greek business interests that have no intention of paying the imperialists’ extortion themselves and fear, as BBC economics editor Paul Mason put it, “a tax bill the like of which they have never dreamed, nor indeed paid.” However, ND and PASOK are united in the determination that Greek working people pay for the country’s economic crisis.

Recent months have seen the explosive growth of a new movement, the so-called “indignant citizens” movement. The “Indignados” placed themselves at the head of the mass mobilizations outside parliament, where Greek flags proliferated, the Greek national anthem was sung and anti-American and anti-German sentiment was rife. Protesters have waved EU flags with a swastika at the center—equating “German” with “Nazi” and invoking the spectre of World War II, when Greece was occupied by German imperialism (followed by rampaging British troops).

In Spain, the Indignados movement arose in response to the austerity measures that were being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Party government before its huge defeat in the last elections. In Greece, the petty-bourgeois Indignados emerged in the context of the abject failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to present any way forward for the struggles of the working masses. The two main trade-union federations, the GSEE and ADEDY, representing the private and public sectors respectively, are controlled by PASOK, which is imposing the austerity measures. Despite the “socialist” reference in its name, and the credentials given to it by opportunist left groups, PASOK is a capitalist party.

Broad layers of the middle class that could be rallied behind an insurgent proletariat struggling for power are instead being drawn into virulently chauvinist, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class movements. Displaying overt hostility to the organizations of the working class and the left, the Indignados present themselves as a “pro-democracy” movement of all classes. As in Spain, all leftist political parties and trade unions, as well as red flags and banners, were banned from the Greek protests at first. Not surprisingly, given the nationalist fervor whipped up by the Indignados, Golden Dawn and other fascist outfits have been seen at the protests.

There has been an ominous rise in racist attacks, as desperately impoverished immigrants are used as scapegoats for the economic devastation. Earlier this year, fascist thugs rampaged through a heavily immigrant area of Athens, killing one person and wounding many more. Golden Dawn got over 5 percent of the vote in municipal elections in Athens late last year. According to the London-based Institute of Race Relations, Golden Dawn’s Nikos Michaloliakos, accompanied by eight apparently armed bodyguards, gave a Nazi salute at a council meeting in Athens in January.

The fascists are emboldened by the racist policies of the government. Greece’s border with Turkey is one of the front lines of “Fortress Europe,” with EU border patrols employed to keep immigrants out. The Greek government has announced plans to build a razor-wire fence, equipped with sonar systems and thermal sensors, along the border. The workers movement must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to unionize foreign workers. For union/minority mobilizations to stop fascist provocations! For integrated workers defense guards to protect immigrant neighborhoods!

Communist Party: Left Face of Greek Nationalism

The Stalinist KKE adopts a posture of militant opposition to the PASOK government and promotes PAME as a class-struggle alternative to what it calls the “government- and employer-led” trade unions. But the Greek Stalinists present no fundamental alternative to the betrayals of the GSEE/ADEDY union misleaders. Despite its occasional verbal radicalism, the KKE is hostile to the program of workers revolution to overthrow Greek capitalism.

The KKE’s political bankruptcy is evident in regard to the Indignados. In an article in Rizospastis (5 June), the KKE correctly noted that “the ‘anonymous’ leaders of the ‘movement of the squares,’ the ‘non-partisan,’ ‘spontaneous,’ ‘non-politicized’ citizens, appear to be politicized, declaring themselves ‘anti-left’.” The article adds that with their slogans “Out with the left,” “Parties out” and “Trade unions out,” the Indignados are “not that democratic, or, to be more accurate, they are undemocratic.” What the KKE cannot challenge, though, is the virulent nationalism of the Indignados, which the KKE itself shares.

Indeed, the KKE has made defense of “national sovereignty” its own calling card, and is particularly virulent in espousing Greek nationalism in relation to Turkey, the traditional enemy of its “own” bourgeoisie. For example, in a speech last year, KKE general secretary Aleka Papariga complained that the EU was not taking account of “our national sovereignty rights” when considering Turkey’s bid for membership. She went on to chastise Papandreou for “trying to cover up the issue by dividing the Aegean, something that will have an adverse effect on the islands’ defense.” Nationalism within the workers movement is the chief obstacle to constructing a genuine revolutionary workers party in Greece.

It is a travesty that the KKE retains a reputation as militant fighters against capitalism based on the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Greek Civil War of 1946-49. In pursuit of its program of class collaboration with the Greek bourgeoisie, the KKE handed power back to the bourgeoisie following World War II. The working class, backed by the peasantry, was the decisive force in the anti-Nazi Resistance, mounting massive strikes and demonstrations from late 1942 until the withdrawal of German troops in 1944. The working class, arms in hand, had state power in its grasp. But its leaders, the treacherous KKE, actually welcomed the arrival of British troops into Greece, enabling the imperialists to stabilize the situation, bring back the hated monarchy and massacre the workers.

The Greek Stalinists lived up to the terms of the secret Tehran agreement, whereby Stalin granted the imperialists the “right” to preserve capitalist rule in West Europe and Greece. Politically disarming the proletariat, the Stalinists went so far as to join a “national” government of the bourgeoisie. In February 1945, they signed the Varkiza agreement, which physically disarmed the KKE-led Resistance forces as British troops and the Greek National Guard were preparing to unleash a full-scale wave of terror against the masses. Only in February 1946 did the KKE finally abandon its suicidal policy and take up the “armed struggle” again. In October 1949, after ferocious repression, the Civil War was ended. The KKE ranks had fought heroically. But needless to say, the KKE learned nothing from the tragic consequences of its treachery and continues to pursue its bankrupt program of subordination to the Greek bourgeoisie.

What the Trotskyists wrote at the end of World War II holds true for the role of the Stalinists throughout the Civil War:

“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle to the fight for capitalist democracy.”

—“Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945

The social-democratic reformists in Greece—such as the Socialist Workers Party (SEK), which is affiliated to the British group of the same name, and Xekinima, the Greek affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)—stand to the right of the KKE in their enthusiasm for the anti-Communist, anti-working-class Indignados. For example, Xekinima calls to “Extend the movement to all work places, workers’ neighbourhoods, and the youth” (socialistworld.net, 27 June). The notion of classless “democracy” that these groups promote has long been an anti-Communist code word that actually means support to bourgeois class rule. Thus, both the SEK and Xekinima supported capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92 and hailed counterrevolutionary forces such as Polish Solidarność and Boris Yeltsin’s Russian “democrats.”

For Workers Revolution!

The Trotskyist Group of Greece fights to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party capable of leading the working class to power. Above all, this means breaking the workers from nationalism and winning them to a revolutionary internationalist perspective. During Round One of the present crisis, the TGG issued a 28 April 2010 leaflet that opposed the widespread Greek nationalism as “poisonous to class consciousness.” Any effective struggle against the bosses’ attacks must begin with the understanding that the workers have no country, until they seize the one they’re in. Our comrades insisted: “What is needed is international workers solidarity across the EU against capital” (see “Down With PASOK Government’s ‘Stability Program’!” WV No. 959, 21 May 2010).

The Greek financial crisis has increased the seething national antagonisms in Europe, as seen in the diplomatic spats between France and Germany. German chancellor Angela Merkel, unpopular at home and with a shrinking majority in the Bundestag (parliament), has clashed with French officials and with the ECB over whether the bankers have to accept some losses. Following pressure from the IMF, Merkel agreed to a new bailout package while the French banks have offered to roll over Greek debts for 30 years. Whatever divisions there may be within bourgeois circles over how to deal with the catastrophic financial situation, in Germany, France, Britain and Europe as a whole, each government is determined to make the working masses pay for a crisis that is caused by the capitalist system itself.

The EU is an imperialist trade bloc, centered on a pact between the French and German capitalist rulers to ratchet up the exploitation of the working classes at home while trying to gain advantage over their imperialist rivals as well as the smaller European states. At the same time, the EU is an unstable formation that intensifies national antagonisms and fuels chauvinism.

We Marxists oppose the EU from the perspective of proletarian internationalism. The comrades of our German section, the Spartakist Workers Party, last year published an article titled “Solidarity with the Greek Workers! For Class Struggle Against the German Capitalists!” (Spartakist No. 183, May 2010), which noted:

“The chauvinist campaign against Greece is being set in motion so as to prevent the German working class from hitting on the idea of placing blame for the crisis at the feet of the capitalist system and its own rulers. The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in the immediate future. The witchhunt against Greece also serves to split and weaken the multiethnic working class in Germany.”

Today, despite the relentless bleeding of the Greek working people, the country remains mired in deep recession. The bankrupt capitalist class manifestly does not have any crumbs that it is willing to throw to dampen workers’ anger. Short of a struggle for working-class power, the workers’ struggles will continue to be frustrated. The perspective for Greek workers must be that of common class struggle with their class brothers and sisters—from Turkey to Germany and elsewhere around the world.

As the TGG wrote in its leaflet: “What’s needed is a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state that will lay the basis for building a socialist society. For that, you need to build a revolutionary workers party—a party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks—which will fight for a workers government. The TGG, Greek sympathizing section of the ICL, seeks to build such a party” (our emphasis).

* From The Voice Of NPR's Legal Reporter- The 2008-09 United States Supreme Court Session- 3 Key Decisions

Click on title to link to National Public Radio(NPR) Legal Reporter Nina Totenberg's take on some important legal decisions from the 2008-09 sessions. Let's make it easy-get rid of their capitalist 'injustice' legal system by getting of their whole system. Right?

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery

Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry, a report on the world wage scale, aptly termed sweatshop.

Markin comment:

Karl Marx said it long, too long ago- not a fair day's wage but abolish wages. He spent his life also saying, and more to the point for us- don't just analyze the world, do something about it. And you know what that means.

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken 

By Will Bradley

Here is genesis. A couple of years ago, at a time when fake news and alternate facts were in their infancy, no, when they surfaced after leading underground cultist existences and “all the news that’s fit to print” was the official mantra I got as one of my first assignments a dueling film review partnership with old-time “corner boy,” meaning one of those present at the creation of this publication when it was in hard copy form, Seth Garth to give our respective takes on one Sherlock Holmes (an alias real name Larry Lawrence but to avoid confusion here I will stick with his more well-known moniker). The original idea was that he was to give his review from an old guy perspective of one who grew up with the legend of this so-called master private detective and I from a young guy who was clueless about the guy perspective. Both of us dug deeply into every aspect, every public aspect and a few private ones of how Holmes’ legend got its start.

What we both found out was that the legend was made out of whole cloth, that Holmes was a fake, a fraud, and much more despite the big press agent, publicity department build-up with which the unknowing British people were hammered with from day one of the press campaign. Led by an English firm called Christie and Doyle at the time, although there were later dummy corporations to make it harder to track the bums down but whatever the name those were just covers for lots of illegal activity to get Holmes’ name in the prints and over the radio and in the movies, television had not come along by then. One example, Winston Churchill, yes, the guy who was President, Prime Minister or whatever the call the kingdom’s top lap dog kowtowing to royalty at every step, received a ton money, thousands of pounds, British money, for saying out loud that he wished some his Scotland Yard coppers were half as good as this Holmes. Another example, one of the Lords, a lord who later turned out to a mouthpiece for the Nazis during World War II took a big pay-off to try to get Holmes a knighthood, a “Sir” before his name, the OBE. One slow news days these flaks were able to get the London tabloids to print whatever swill these bums threw out as press releases usually the paper just cutting off the top putting one of their paid-off reporters names on it and let it fly. All for cold hard cash. And you thought this stuff only happened in long-ago ward-heeling America or in the post-Citizens United. Wise up, please.

Seth when he has time, or if he can remember, can fill the reader in on what he uncovered, the same basic swill but usually rawer, stuff about getting Holmes’ name into “girlie magazines” to show how virile he and Nigel somebody, his dear friend, Seth’s expression not mine, were to guard against those ever present insinuations that they were more than just dear friends. The best one I remember was the way these hounds were able to drop some poor bedraggled professor from Oxford into the deep blue sea, Moriarty I think the name was, and faking documents naming him as the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot, or some such evil endeavor against the royal family, King George, at the time. This professor who had trouble tying his shoes or knowing what day it was. Beautiful. The guys and gals who are running big time publicity operations for starlets and reality television show entertainers could learn a few tricks from these guys as much as I hate to say it. The one thing that grizzled old Seth and I agree on.      

The battle between Seth and me which stretched endlessly and mercilessly over something like fourteen films each more cravenly worshipful of Holmes and his live-in dear friend Nigel than the last was a “no holds barred” fight to the end though as far as exposing this bum of the month (and indirectly putting the slams on C&D although those guys were able to ride out the storm grabbing a big contract from clients who wanted to build up the Robin Hood legend to claim some odd-ball inheritance by primogeniture, or some cloudy claim). Seth, maybe reliving some of his youthful anti-gay (then fag, homo, Nancy, “light on their feet” stuff) feelings, concluded that Holmes’ whole legend was the work of what he called the “Homintern” (which he told me was a word created as a take-off on the Comintern which guys he knew like Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender hung around by the English poet W. H. Auden, himself a known gay, or maybe not then but now known, who hung around with the British private school gay cotillion). The idea was to create myths about guys who were gay (I don’t know about lesbians since this never came up in our duel so I will stick with gays) to make them more intelligent, more virile, more cultured than ordinary guys and protect the clan.

Seth’s whole approach was to identify various aspects of Holmes’ life starting with his relationship to his “dear friend” Doc Watson in their little love nest on Baker Street and expose him as a second or third-rate private eye who was clueless about how solve a murder mystery without the aid of a battalion of Scotland Yard agents. He did present some strong evidence including eye-witness account of Holmes and Doc hanging around the notorious KitKat Club and haunting waterfront taverns looking for sailors who were looking for kinky kicks-on land. Something seemed wrong about his gay-baiting approach, something that didn’t seem to jell with the facts once I looked at Holmes’ police sheet (which is how I was able to figure out the Holmes name was an alias and his real name Larry Lawrence and which Seth was clueless about in his quest to discount anybody in the 20^st century because he was gay). Of course one size fits all Seth would not have dreamed of checking police records even if he only was looking to see if he or Nigel had ever been arrested like poor Reading Gaol-bound Oscar Wilde for the “love that dare not speak its name.”

I was thus more than happy to concede that Holmes was gay, that he was playing house with Nigel on Baker Street but what of it. My take from the beginning had been though that Holmes was essentially asexual, was driven more by a lust for gold than for another man’s body, certainly not Doc’s (whose real name if I didn’t mention it before was Nigel something but don’t make a fuss about names because they were changed like underwear). Maybe it was a generational thing but who cared if they slept together or not. The key was an arrest made by the London bobbies when they made one of their periodic raids of the KitKat Club where Holmes and Doc had been hiding out. The coppers found tons of stolen goods, drugs, sexual paraphernalia, pornography, guns. As it turned out, although it was never conclusively proven as to the extend, Holmes was the master thief behind half the robberies, kidnappings, beatings, purse-snatchings and what have you in London. He spent six years in Dartmoor (under the name Larry Lawrence which is why it was originally hard to figure out why the legend was nothing but a press agent’s dream, dreamed up by a guy who worked for the publicity firm, Christie and Doyle who later turned state’s evidence or what every they called the British Empire in court.

But enough of Holmes and his man Doc. What that eye-opening experience led to for me was an extreme interest in finding out about other legends, see what some press agent dreamt up out of the blue to invent guys, gals too but as in much of history mostly guys got their stories told, true or not. Since them I have exposed guys like Robin Hood as a two-bit rack-renting landlord (despite the best efforts of those latter-day clients of Christie who never did prove their right to inheritance but who started a backlash by the descendants of those yeoman and tenant farmers who Hood gouged looking for their family lands back or reparations), Captain Blood as nothing but a dregs Middle Passage slaver (and whose still intact estate in Jamaica is the subject of a separate reparations effort), Don Juan as some convent maiden’s hormonal urgings and so on (no basis for reparations and in any case the initial outburst by that frustrated maiden ignited so rapidly it would be hard to see who to claim reparations from and the only realistic recourse would be to have Don Juan posthumously put in the dock for child molestation and unwanted sexual advances amounting to assault).

The more modern legends like Superman (proven to be a ninety-eight pound weakling who one day found a matchbook cover ad for developing muscles to shed the reputation that girls could kick sand in his face and that kryptonite stuff was just another PR hustle, this time by Mad Men working overtime to create somebody to save the sorry modern world on the quiet) and Batman (who in the end wound up facing charges of sexual assault on his “protégé” Robin and destruction of public property) dismissed out of hand as mutants and foul balls. What has spurred me on, what has let site manager Greg Green let me have free reign and moved me up the food chain in this dog eat dog journalism business is a recent survey conducted by UCal (and supported by the well-respected Harrison Foundation) where as a result of my work, and that of others, there has been a sharp decline in many legends. I take this as simple proof, contrary to what most of the writers here had expected, that at least some people are beginning to rebel against fake news and alternate facts, which is what legends live on that I have been successful.         

Moreover, as I have recently demonstrated with my defense of the Green Lantern, both the individual and universe-wide organization which is protecting us even I as write and of the luscious Red Sparrow, the Russian espionage agent who is keeping a check-up on things under Putin I am not dismissing all legends out of hand. Only those which are fake, made up, undeserved. I have worked out, no, am working out a kind of guideline to determinate who or what deserves legendary status.

The pro-legend cases just mentioned can serve as an evaluation tool for such efforts. The Green Lantern, organization first, is pretty much of a no-brainer, a motley band of citizens of the universe, 3600 in all earthlings take notice with your bloated military and security budgets that protect no one from serious harm by evil forces, have volunteered to protect us all. Hats off. Beyond that they are working in the service of the greater good, the struggle against fear that grips us all at times and which the evil genies depend on to wreak their havoc. As for our section protector Green Lantern, one Hal Jordan, yes, the Hal Jordan who flew, really flew the top of the line fighter planes and broke a million records for speed and altitude his record speaks for itself. While cynics have sneered that he took the Lantern job just to impress his girlfriend and have made fun of the fact that he can as the first earthling since Icarus’ ill-fated adventure fly without some superstructure holding him back, he is the real deal. Hats off again.

The Red Sparrow, the former ballerina turned seriously trained Russian espionage agent who was turned by her revulsion at the current situation in Russia, now working with the CIA via a field operative who went rogue to bring her in from the cold kind of speaks for herself. Every aspect of her case checks out. With those cases in mind I can truthfully say I have been very successful thus far in weeding out the bum of the month crowd from the real stars.  

Except, one big except in the case highlighted by the headline to this piece, the fake legend of one Johnny Cielo whose ratings have actually gone up as a result of my hammering his faded reputation. (I would add that a similar spike occurred in belief in angels which sobered me a little in the belief that people were buying into rational argument across the board. I will investigate the finding on this phenomenon more when I receive the actual data from UCal-maybe it is a skewed sample or maybe we are not further away from the primordial slime than I have led myself to believe.) Yes, Johnny Cielo who I didn’t know from Adam when I started my crusade has defied my best efforts to send him to well-deserved oblivion. Frankly when I started out slaying undeserved legends, I knew nothing about the guy and only half-consciously remembered him as having something to do with early aviation, although even that I was not sure of and had to look up in Wikipedia or one of those other Internet information services.  

How I even got the name was that a fellow reporter, a free-lancer, who has since caught on with the Miami Herald was in that town on a “spec” assignment from the Washington Post about continued CIA attempts to destabilize the Castro regime in Cuba (this before Fidel passed and Raul stepped down). They never showed up at the Flamingo bar where they were to meet my friend. Having been “stiffed” and with time on his hands he bellied up to the bar and started ordering shots of whisky straight up (a bad habit I gave up about three weeks after I came of legal drinking age). A guy, who called himself Billy Bond, as usual don’t make much of names in this legend business or you will go crazy with despair, asked my guy to buy him a drink. He did. They got to talking after four or five shots when this Billy started talking about how when he was a kid he had met the legendary, Billy’s word, Johnny Cielo, who was quite a character and who had flown guns and supplies to Fidel and his crowd back in the late 1950s when it counted. My guy sensing a story to replace the one that had just fallen down kept buying rum-dum Billy shots while pressing for details.     

The gist of what Billy had to say was that this Johnny had been the real guy who had followed Icarus’s dream, had been the first guy to fly and gave some details about places and times. Had been there later when Howard Hughes was ready to make aviation a mass consumer product worth billions of dollars with his TWA operation.

This next part is where things get interesting and where eventually I had to step in to break down this bogus legend which even by duped legend standards was a whopper. Johnny had been running various airmail services, essentially into the ground as I would find out later, when he had to flee the country since guys, tough guys, working for guys who had loaned Johnny money based on his “connections” with Howard Hughes were looking high and low for him. He wound up in golden Barranca in Central America running that airmail service into the ground. You ask so what. Well according to Billy and the other cultist believers Johnny had the real movie icon drop dead beautiful Rita Hayworth on his arm as he entered the country. I will get to debunking in a minute but the final act in the legend, literally, was that bit about Johnny running guns to Fidel over in Cuba. Billy added that Johnny had fallen down into the ocean, into the Caribbean on one desperate flight and that was that for poor Johnny.

After my reporter friend pumped Billy for whatever he could, whatever a dozen whiskey shots got him he left the bar, went to his hotel room and started making plans to verify the story. (Those were the halcyon days when reporters actually verified stuff before sending it along unlike today when everything is made of whole cloth and fast in the 24/7/365 news cycles.) That entailed going to Key West which is when Johnny operated out before he fell into the sea, and where Billy claimed he met Johnny as a kid in the 1950s. And that is where the story began to unravel. Not through refutation by anybody who knew anything there because everybody who knew about Johnny believed the legend intact. By the simple fact that no way Johnny could have been at the beginning of aviation, been with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Some cultists had built a shrine to Johnny Cielo, a small memorial with his name and dates of birth on it. Johnny was born in 1910 and died in 1958. It took a minute for my guy to realize that the Wright Brother followed Icarus (without his tragic fate) in 1903. From there everything else fell down, fell like a house of cards. That is when my friend contacted me knowing that I was interested in busting fake and undeserved legends.

Silly me I thought like with Sherlock and the more modern legends I would break this thing like a twig would expose the fakery once I got an handle on how it started, who benefitted from keeping the legend alive. Naturally it was as I surmised a work of an overzealous press agent, publicity guy who had been hired by the crowd of cultists in Key West to keep Johnny’s legend intact. No that was later after Johnny died. Johnny had hired the guy originally when he was in the chips running high-    end passengers from Key West to say Naples up the West Coast of Florida so they wouldn’t have to drive and get all sweaty or something. That is where John Kerr entered the lists in behalf of bedraggled Johnny Cielo.  John Kerr, yes, that John Kerr who had worked as the Society Page guy for the Times is the villain of the piece, is the guy who has through his long-ago work thwarted my efforts to bring some rational thought to the real life bum whose every breathe seemed to be a lie.    

Let me go by the numbers, go in order to yet again try to bring some sense to this damn Cielo legend. I have already mentioned that birth date which precludes Johnny being present at the creation. Funny there are of plenty of photographs of Wilbur and Orville, working their magic, at the museum, shrine whatever you want to call it which is nothing but a gold standard money-maker between the admission fee and the “company store” material for sale but not one picture of Johnny with them. Same thing with the Hughes so-called connection. There is every conceivable photo of the handsome Hughes and his various experimental planes and his first efforts with TWA but not one except one of Johnny working the engine of some beat down plane, some crate that would last about one minute in the air. Checking out employment records from the time, Hughes was a fanatic about many things and keeping tight fiscal accounts was one of them, I found out through the Hughes Archives that Johnny had worked in Omaha for the Hughes corporation but had been let go for stealing tools.

How Kerr buried that is a story I would dearly love to hear. See part, no, most of the roadblocks which I have encountered in busting Johnny’s legend have been set up by John Kerr who is the guy who set up the Johnny shrine in Key West and is the main beneficiary of the dough that comes pouring in from poor saps who don’t know enough history to know Johnny wasn’t even born when the Wrights went skyward. It took me a while, took me to investigating the so-called Cielo-Hayworth romance to realize the ninety-something Kerr was still working his PR bullshit on a gullible public using his former reputation for truth at the Times and rubbing stardust in the eyes to get away with some really crazy stuff.     

The Hayworth “affair” takes the cake. I don’t know all the details about why Johnny had to flee America except he was such a poor manager that he ran every airmail operation, including his brief stint delivering the U.S. mails, into the ground and so he was in hock up to his eyebrows. He wound up in fabled Barranca working for the bigwig postal guy there and since that guy didn’t know about the stuff in America hired him to deliver outpost mail. It didn’t hurt that he had that even now to the eye drop dead beautiful “Rita” on his arm, eye candy for guys away from foxy women for a while. I will tell you right now if you have not guessed already that was not the real Rita on his arm but some whore he met either a bordello or dime-a-dance joint in Hoboken. No question from the million photographs at the shrine although that this woman looked very much like Rita that it was not her, no way. First because even a fairly quick look can tell that she had been beaten down, been working on her ass too long and would not age well, not at all. Secondly, again a blow against alternate facts for what good it has done me thus far, the real Rita Hayworth in the time frame mentioned was playing footsies with a guy named the Aga Khan, a bigwig over in Morocco somewhere. By the way I will forewarn you that the number one selling items at the company store are photos and other memorabilia connected with Rita’s presence on Johnny’s arm.    

Now for the final blow, what should be the final blow, Johnny’s work for the heroic Castro brothers, Che and the fistful of other guerilla fighters up in the Sierra Madres looking to beat down America-supported Batista. The Kerr storyline which even got play in the Times supposedly the place that only deals with “all the news that’s fit to print” but where he had powerful connections from his previous work there, was that Johnny fell down into the Caribbean going on a gun run. Nonsense. Johnny did fall down, or at least I am willing to believe he fell down there in the Gulf of Mexico when his plane, his freaking stupid ass Piper Club ran out of gas and he had to ditch the plane with hm and three high society passengers aboard who were heading to Sarasota. The real deal was that Johnny finally did make some dough, enough to hire John Kerr, in the 1950s by ferrying passengers from Key West to points north. So much for the gun run noise. Never happened, totally made up by one John Kerr when he saw his meal ticket was being punched.  

Okay those are the bare outlines of the Cielo legend. One would think that it would be easy, very easy to just blow that away with the wind. Especially as I have gone way out of my way since my reporter friend tipped me to this story to document stuff. Still the cultists and desperate hero-worshipers have hung on, mainly by the brainwashing from Kerr. Here is what I have done to refute the legend to no avail. I have a notarized photostat of John Robert Cielo’s birth certificate from Elmira, New York his birthplace. I have sworn statements by people who knew Rita Hayworth, knew where she was, and where she wasn’t in the 1940s. I have that Hughes employment and unceremonious discharge record from Hughes Aviation and I have the flight manifests for Johnny’s last flight from Key West to the never gotten too Sarasota.

You would think that would be enough proof to sink any legend, any legend for guys who at least had done some of the stuff that their press agents distributed. No, all I get is so-called anonymous communications denying that I had the right Johnny, the right Johnny on the birth certificate when they claim he was born in Elmira, Ohio (checked out, no go). That “so what” if Johnny and Howard didn’t see eye to eye when Johnny was trying to save him money on some Golden Goose plane by saying it wouldn’t work, was not economically feasible, at the time. That Rita wasn’t down in Barranca with Johnny didn’t matter, implying that the foxy whore before she ran out on Johnny when he ran out of dough or was run out of Barranca when he ditched the postmaster’s last serviceable plane, was good enough for them to hang onto. Here is the clincher, the one that says it all about whether Johnny ran guns for the Castros or was just a bush pilot running tourist around sunny 1950s Florida went that place was a haven for the rich gringos. They claim that the Stalinists, the Cuban Communist, the “commies” the way one Johnny aficionado put the matter, have kept the archives locked up so we will not know for maybe fifty years what Johnny’s role with Castro boys will turnout to have been. Alluding to the possibility that Johnny at some point helped out the revolution. That has the mark of John Kerr all over it. Enough said.   

From The Living Archives Of Boston Veterans For Peace-They Ain't Your Grandfather's Veterans-By Site Manager Greg Green-First Night Against The Wars In Boston New Years Eve Day-A Ralph Morris-Sam Eaton Story

From The Living Archives Of Boston Veterans For Peace-They Ain't Your Grandfather's Veterans-By Site Manager Greg Green-First Night Against The Wars In Boston New Years Eve Day-A Ralph Morris-Sam Eaton Story

By Site Manager Greg Green  

“Everybody knows the story about how Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton met and how they got there and how they became VFP stalwarts, right?” asked Don Mack, local Boston chapter coordinator just as the post-“First Night Against The Wars” party was about to begin at his house. The event held each year at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve had become a staple of the yearly activities of the organization since it had been formed by a coalition of peace and social action groups about a dozen years before. After what was usually a cold to bitter cold afternoon’s work the participants and other friends and supporters would meet at Don’s house in Brighton for the annual New Year’s Eve party which would bring in the new year in a somber if not sober way.  

The reason that Don had asked if the people present knew of the Ralph and Sam story is because Frank Jackman, usually pretty knowledgeable about the personal histories of the local members had mentioned to somebody at the anti-war stand-out within Don’s hearing that the pair had grown up together in Carver and had both been in Vietnam, although not together and not at the same times. That got Don to realize that Frank either had forgotten the particulars of their story or had had a senior moment, or both. When Don got a mixed set of answers to his question he realized that perhaps it was the time and place to tell the story, or rather have the pair who were present at the party as usual tell the story as a very good way to show a lifetime of commitment to the anti-war and social justice movements and how that came about. Don had remembered that one night when they were at Jack’s over in Cambridge after an anti-Raytheon weapons-maker stand-out that both Ralph and Sam had declared that if had not been for the Vietnam War and their reactions to what it had done to their respective sensibilities that they would not be sitting in that room ready to bleed out once again their collective story.

Here is what Ralph, then Sam had to say that night to the couple of dozen people gathered around their seats:         

I was strictly a working- class kid growing up in the rough and tumble Tappan Street section of then, as now, run down Troy upstate New York right next to Albany, the state capital. Was the son of a then struggling owner of a small high-end electronics components company which my father had scratched to make a go of. Growing up though we were pretty poor before my father caught a few breaks from the major employer in the area, General Electric, GE, when they were starting to outsource high tech electronics stuff. As you know, when Dad retired, I took over after working many years for him and now that I am retired my son, my youngest son since Ralph III didn’t want to do it finding a career as a senior software engineer has taken over.   

The important part of growing up poor, fairly poor if not as bad as Sam who can tell his own story later was that I shared all the prejudices of my father and the neighborhood’s about things like patriotism, the horrible Russians who were ready to take our bread and freedom away, and especially about race, about keeping black people out of the Tappan Street neighborhood. Maybe those ideas were not just among the poor of Tappan Street and more pervasive in society than we thought but they were definitely a driving force on the social front. I am ashamed to admit it now and it is hard to say but the only word I knew for blacks, for black people, before I went into the Army was the “n” word. It was around the neighborhood like that too. The worse though was that when I was in high school I stood shoulder to shoulder with my father and other neighbors when a black family tried to move into the neighborhood. To keep them out come hell or high water, and we did. Did keep them out.

Given what I just said you can probably guess that it was no big deal for me when it came time to go in the Army, especially as I went in during the early days of the build-up of the damn Vietnam War, the war which would turn me around but which then was just something to do to fight the local commies in Vietnam there who wanted to snatch our bread and freedom. My father and most of the neighborhood fathers had been veterans, proud veterans of World War II and so the idea of serving was seen as a duty. I remember my father refusing a neighborhood guy, my friend Jimmy Snyder’s father Rudy a job at his shop because he had not served in their war. After high school having nothing else going and prodded on by my father to go and learn a trade, learn electronics, then pretty primitive compared to now so I could come work for him after the service. As I just mentioned in a round about way I did that except through the GI bill not through “learning” the trade in the Army. There was never any thought about waiting to be drafted or stuff like that. It just wasn’t done among the guys I grew up with. It was more likely that guys would go into the Army after getting in trouble with the law and taking the Army as the “easy way out” when the judge gave them a choice between the military and jail.       

I signed up, signed up under the gentle guidance of that bastard recruiting sergeant who is probably still laughing at me for believing word one about what he had to say. He had promised me that I would get first crack at electronics school which I mentioned was in its infancy then at least as compared to now. My idea, boosted by my father was that I would “learn a trade,” his trade for after the Army. As you also know and this is no lie just then, just 1967 or so the war in Vietnam was getting ratcheted up by Johnson, McNamara and the gang of hawks who ran the show then and the demand for infantrymen, grunts, cannon fodder as I, we, learned to call it later when we finally figured out what the hell we really were I was sent to AIT after basic training down at Fort Dix, down in New Jersey. AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training, meaning just enough training to put your ass in trouble, big trouble when Charlie, the name we had for the VC, the Cong, the whole shooting match of soldiers under the authority of the North Vietnamese.        

After AIT, after the inevitable orders to report at Fort Lewis in Washington state for transport to Vietnam, that “inevitable orders” just then since Uncle Sam, a mythical figure who actually got his start out in my part of New York, just then was in desperate need of replacements for the infantrymen who were being chewed up and spit out like crazy when Charlie pulled the hammer down. I had no more thought of not going through with my orders than the man in the moon. Although I was uneasy about what I had been hearing as the war dragged on it kind of went over me. There was no way in my life that I would join the various resistance and refusal movements either civilian or military at the time. If anything I saw things the other way, saw the “hippies” and resisters as cowards and unpatriotic. That was then, that was before the baptism of fire.

I won’t go through my experiences in Vietnam, not for this crowd, and I don’t feel any need to. This is how I have put it for a long time. I did things, saw others do things and most importantly saw my government do things to people I had no quarrel with than even now I cannot live down although working the peace movement for this long time helps some. I was pretty shattered coming back to the “real world,” had a very hard listening to guys like my father who were still red meat hawks, hell, he would support the war even after all was lost. Got by some kind of osmosis into something of a semi-hippie mode when I met a girl who was a wild child in Albany. Overall though outside of the drugs and alcohol things were pretty hazy and loose, I was drifting.      

Then in early 1970 I was walking down the street near Russell Sage College, that wild child girlfriend was going to school there, or pretending to, in those days things were pretty loose then on the campuses when I saw, not heard, a group of guys, mostly guys, some in military garb, some looking the classic hippie look of the time walking silently down the street to some kind of marching cadence.

I saw a huge banner being carried in front by about four guys all in military garb which read “Bring The Troops Home”-signed Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). There were other signs, home-made signs but that one stuck out. As did the only voice you could hear over the megaphone. “Any Vietnam vets who hated the war, hated what they did, join us, fall in.” And without hesitation I did. Right after the march I joined VVAW, learned more about the group, learned about the war I had fought in than I had known before and I had fought there and took part in all the demonstrations and actions they sponsored in Albany or in Washington, the ones I could make since I was taking some classes in electronics through the GI bill. That was why I was in Washington, D.C. during May Day, 1971 when National VVAW called for us to try one desperate attempt to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war. Everybody knows, and if you don’t, I was arrested that May Day and thrown in RFK stadium, the overflow holding area we were put in. That is where I met Sam when he saw my VVAW button and we started talking, talking about how I, and he, had gotten into that jam. Sam can now tell you his story, but let’s take a little break and have some wine and some food.                

And after the break with a couple of people drifting away from the talk Sam gave his story:

Its funny that I am talking about this experience since I thought everybody kind of knew about Ralph and me, thought it was kind of an unspoken legend. But maybe it is good to run this against and maybe since I am the writer of the two of us, although when Ralph gets motivated his can whip my ass writing anti-war stuff sometimes, I will write it up and put it on the website, or in the archives. I really think that one of the things that has held Ralph and me together in this antiwar business is that we came essentially from the same kind of backgrounds, working class, working poor so we knew a few bumps already unlike some of the anti-war activists from other organizations. I grew up south of here, down in Carver, down in what was then called “bog” country, down where they grew cranberries in the bogs used to product the crop.         

They called those who worked the bogs, my family, “boggers” and that was not meant as a compliment, kind of drew what I would later call the class line between us and “them” in town life. It came up in strange ways like I remember liking a girl in high school who also liked me but when she found out I was a “bogger,” or maybe her parents did that was that. Stuff like that.  

The big thing you have to know, the thing that got this whole story business rolling was that while I am a proud member of VFP I am not a veteran, am as you know we have a “supporter” member, an associate. The reason I am not a veteran, although in other circumstances I might have been, was that in 1965 just as the Vietnam War was beginning to take its bite out of a whole generation which can be felt even today my father, my “bogger” father had a massive heart attack and died leaving my mother alone with four sisters and me. I might add that whatever caused the heart attack my father was a drunk, drank away many a dollar in the town bars and elsewhere. Even now I bristle when I say this. In any case I was the sole male supporter of my family and the local draft board of the time exempted me from military service for that reason once I graduated from high school in 1967. The way I supported my mother and sisters was working in Mr. Carey’s print shop on Washington Street during high school and later when I graduated. As some of you know after my “wild days” in the early 1970s I would take over that operation from Mr. Carey when he retired and run it until my son who is much more tech savvy than I could ever be knowing which way the wind was blowing in the printing business took it over a few years ago.         

If you think about it there is nothing in that profile which would lead anybody to believe, to believe today at this far remove, that I would wind up as a long-time peace activist with some arrests for civil disobedience and other things. I, like Ralph, and many others if you heard their stories was as patriotic as the next person, drew in the full propaganda about the red menace and other Cold War bullshit. Believed that we needed to destroy the commies root and branch, go after them to save the world. Believed fully in that domino theory that was touted then as the reason to go to war in Vietnam even if I couldn’t explain the theory then. For me the thing the sole thing that switched me on the war and then on a lot of other things was the death in Vietnam of my best friend from second grade on-Jeff Mullins. Sorry, I still shed a tear every time I say his name, get worse every time I pass the town memorial or I go to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington where his name is etched in black granite with thousands of other names.    

Like I said I had known Jeff from early childhood so I knew him pretty well, knew that when he said something it stuck. He had been gung-ho to go into the service as much for getting the hell out of “bogger” Carver to see the big wide world as he said and away from horrible parents as patriotic fervor but that was serious factor. He also bought into all the myths that I had as I mentioned before. I wish I could talk about him more about his dreams, but you get the idea.  A few months before Jeff was killed down in the Mekong Delta while on patrol, he had sent me a letter, a long letter basically foretelling his doom and his hatred for the lying war. Made me promise that if anything happened to him and he couldn’t get back to tell the real story, his story about the goddam war that I was to do so. Once we got the message that he had been killed I went crazy -and went to work.

Of course I knew there were people against the war, you could not watch the news at least in Boston without seeing somebody demonstrating against the war or resisting the draft which despite my lucky status I still supported or maybe resisting to the thing is what bothered me, but I was clueless how you would contact anybody especially down in Carver where I don’t think anybody was publicly against the war. So I started from scratch a funny scratch when you think about it since what I did was go to Cambridge one Saturday afternoon to see if anybody knew anything about the anti-war struggle. I hear laughing, knowing laughing but like I say I didn’t know anything about what was happening except that something was. I had never been to Cambridge before or at least I wasn’t aware of it so the whole thing was not only an adventure but very informative as well. As it turned out the best way then to find out what was happening was to look at a place like the world-famous kiosk in the Square at the posters that were plastered on poles or anything that would take paper and glue, or wallpaper paste. What I noticed was that there was to be a big SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, meeting later that afternoon to plan something for what was called the Spring Offensive. SDS then pretty notorious and another grouping that I had previously scorned but I figured I was young enough to fit in. 

That was decision was decisive in a lot of ways since at that meeting people were encouraged to speak up about why they were there and what they expected to do for the Spring Offensive. There were probably a hundred people in I think it was Memorial Hall, or a large room off of it and when I stood up and trembling told the crowd my reason, the death of Jeff Mullins I was applauded which I couldn’t understand until later because I thought they would hate the idea that I was doing this to support a fallen soldier. That was one off the great lies of the war that these anti-war people for the most part were hostile to the private solider. Although it would not be until about a year later that there would be any serious attempts to link up to disgruntled and war-weary soldiers. In any case off of that meeting I met Jim Thorn, the big local activist who kind of took me under his wing, taught me plenty about the ins and outs of the war and how it got out of hand and got a lot of young guys who had plenty of other stuff to do with their lives killed for no good reason. Two or three weeks later I went to my first anti-war demonstration in downtown Boston, on the Common, sponsored by SDS and a bunch of other groups, none still around at least in that form. That demo was the first leg of a planned Spring Offensive to stop the war and I was very happy to walk the walk holding a photograph of Jeff with the legend “No More.”        

That is the important part and I would attend many more such events in Boston, New York and Washington. Along the way I got my speaking voice, spoke from the heart about my mission for Jeff, and would sometimes read a few passages of that Jeff letter urging me to fight the good fight if he didn’t make it back. Along the way I got as frustrated as almost every young person and got progressively more radicalized as the Cambridge milieu went further to the left and with more aggressive tactics. That led up to my going to Washington with a Cambridge group called the Red Brigade to stop the government if it would not stop the war. And the fateful meeting with Ralph after seeing his VVAW button. Sometime let Ralph and me tell you about the details of that meeting but tonight we are about how we met. And remember Ralph was the real deal antiwar Vietnam veteran and I was and am a supporter of VFP except not a veteran. Let’s have a drink.       

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Save The Date- First Night Against The Wars Stand-out Copley Square Boston New Year’s Eve Afternoon December 31^st  

The Smedley Butler Brigade, VFP, Chapter 9 has helped sponsor along with other peace and social action groups the annual (this the 13^th year) First Night Against The Wars stand-out at the Boston Public Library entrance across from Copley Square on December 31^st, New Year Eve’s afternoon starting around noon until about five o’clock.

  

Usually the weather is cold on that day so we ask people to volunteer for an hour or two during the day. Dan the Bagel Man has his food for activist operating to keep us in hot drinks. If you are coming and have a flag or a poster please bring whatever you have with you. Hope to see you there.