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This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Saturday, December 08, 2012
Fifty Years of Struggle for Trotskyist Leadership
Golden Dawn Fascists Feed on Economic Crisis-Capitalists Bleed Greek Working Class
Workers Vanguard No. 1013
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23 November 2012
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Golden Dawn Fascists Feed on Economic Crisis-Capitalists Bleed Greek Working Class
Down With the European Union! For a Workers Europe!
The following article is from a leaflet by our comrades in the
Trotskyist Group of Greece. It was written as an introduction to “Greek
Elections: Workers Face More Austerity” (see WV No. 1005, 6 July). The
leaflet was distributed at events marking the anniversary of the 17 November
1973 suppression of the Polytechnic student uprising by the military
dictatorship, which fell the following year.
Coming off last June’s election, the government alliance of New
Democracy, PASOK [the bourgeois Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement] and the
Democratic Left have worked to deliver a further €13.5 billion [$17.25 billion]
in barbarous austerity cuts to the Greek capitalists and the imperialist
overlords of the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
latter demand the most savage deprivation of the workers and oppressed as the
price for so-called “financial aid,” that is, money to keep the bloodsucking
international bankers afloat and rescue the Greek bourgeoisie from a default.
Not content with slashing even more billions from health care, education,
pensions and salaries, the imperialist rulers demand that Greece carry out
“labor reform.” This reform is so vicious that even a toady to the capitalists
like Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis said it would “demolish what is left
of workers’ rights.”
Official unemployment has soared to 25 percent for the population
as a whole, and to over 50 percent for young people. Almost 60 percent of the
unemployed are women. Another 25,000 jobs are slated to be slashed from the
public sector within the next year. Meanwhile, the Greek bourgeoisie has driven
down labor costs in Greece nearly 12 percent in the last year alone while
inflation continues to rise. The Troika [the EU, European Central Bank and IMF]
demands that the national labor agreement apply only to unionized workers so
that the bourgeoisie can starve the most vulnerable workers and further divide
and weaken the labor movement.
In addition to the desperate conditions facing the working class, a
section of Greece’s large petty bourgeoisie faces ruin, especially small store
owners and family businesses. One in four stores around the country have closed
in the last year and in Athens 42 percent have gone out of business. The
all-round social crisis is also reflected in a public healthcare system nearing
collapse, with regular shortages of medicine and basic supplies. Hundreds of
thousands of unemployed people have been left with no health care whatsoever. As
an Athens cancer doctor quoted in the New York Times (24 October) put it:
“In Greece right now, to be unemployed means death.”
In response to the ever worsening conditions of life for workers
and their families, there have been many protest strikes in different sectors so
far this autumn, along with several one and two-day general strikes called by
the GSEE and ADEDY union federations. Large protests during German chancellor
Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens last month made a mockery of the government’s
attempt to ban demonstrations. Despite these displays of working-class anger and
militancy, the imperialists and their domestic lackeys in the Greek bourgeoisie
are determined to use the financial crisis to turn back the clock and destroy
the few remaining gains workers have won from their struggles against unbridled
exploitation.
Nazi Worshippers Feed on Capitalist Reaction
In opposition to a restive working class, the capitalists are
willing to enlist not only the repressive forces of the capitalist state—the
cops and the courts—but also the shock troops of national chauvinist reaction,
such as Golden Dawn. With anger at the governing parties growing every day, the
latest polls show increased support for both the [leftist] Syriza coalition and
the fascist Golden Dawn, who are ominously coming third. The disintegration of
Greek society is fueling a deep political polarization. The atmosphere of
heightened state repression against immigrants, leftists and workers combined
with the lack of a revolutionary leadership to lead the working class out of
this impasse is the context for the growth of fascist reaction.
The rapid rise of the Nazi-loving Golden Dawn is not an
aberration—the capitalists hold the fascists in reserve because they are a
useful weapon against the workers in times of instability. Indeed, the Greek
bourgeoisie has a long history of great savagery against the working class,
resorting to right-wing terror, bonapartist dictatorships and military rule to
smash the workers movement. Golden Dawn is the latest incarnation of this Greek
tradition. In a country where hundreds of thousands perished under Nazi
occupation during World War II, Golden Dawn occasionally denies its Nazi
inspiration and makes a show of handing out food parcels to impoverished Greeks
and “protecting” elderly residents from crimes supposedly committed by
immigrants. But their Hitler salutes and Nazi-inspired insignia and slogans are
unmistakable. Their electoral success in June and growing popularity since have
emboldened these racist terrorists, who regularly carry out bloody rampages
against immigrants and their defenders.
Contrary to the hypocritical pronouncements by the government
against Golden Dawn, these fascist marauders are taking their cue directly from
the Greek capitalist state, which has rounded up over 16,000 immigrants just
since August. The government is completing a fence along the Turkish border to
keep out immigrants, many of them desperate refugees from the hells created by
the imperialists in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya. Golden
Dawn goes one further by proposing to plant land mines along the border. The
capitalists and their Golden Dawn minions try to deflect the blame onto
immigrants for the crisis that the capitalists themselves have brought upon the
masses. In opposition to this, the workers movement must fight for full
citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!
It is no surprise that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of police
sympathize politically with Golden Dawn given that repressing leftists and
terrorizing immigrants are an essential part of police work. A vivid example of
this was the police torture of 40 anti-fascist activists arrested on September
30 and October 1, as publicized by the London Guardian. The first 15 of
these activists were arrested after courageously defending immigrants against
Golden Dawn scum in the streets of Athens, while the other 25 were arrested for
protesting in their comrades’ defense. One of the activists interviewed by the
Guardian explained: “They spat on me and said we would die like our
grandfathers in the civil war.” We, the Trotskyist Group of Greece, demand that
all charges against the anti-fascist activists be dropped immediately! The
Minister of Public Order threatened to sue the Guardian, and two
television reporters, Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, were summarily
suspended because they had the courage to hint that the minister could not
pursue his threat because the reports of police torture were credible.
Among the defenders of immigrant rights in the sights of Golden
Dawn is lawyer Yianna Kourtovik, whom Golden Dawn attacked with eggs and beat up
on September 25 outside the Agios Panteleimon police station as the police, not
surprisingly, looked on. Well known for her defense of leftists and immigrants,
Kourtovik has been taunted on the street by policemen chanting “Blood! Honor!
Golden Dawn!” It is hardly a secret that the cops and the courts collude with
the fascists—the press reports that residents complaining to the police about
immigrants in their neighborhood are directed to Golden Dawn to take care of
matters.
KKE: Touching Faith in the Capitalist State
The TGG stands against the deadly illusion, spread by the Greek
Communist Party (KKE) and other groups on the left, in the capitalist state and
its police forces. In a September 7 article in Rizospastis, the KKE
reports as positive its participation in a demonstration by the Pan-Hellenic
Federation of Police Employees, quoting the statement of KKE leading cadre
Spiros Halvatzis to the cops:
“We believe that the working people of the security forces should
not allow themselves to be used as the long arm of the bourgeois state to smash
the working-class, trade-union movement. What is needed is unity, rallying,
common action with the rest of the workers.”
This grotesque appeal for unity with the police is the polar
opposite of a Marxist understanding of the state. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin
explained in his key work, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state
is “the ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the
bourgeoisie.” Lenin explained that this state power “consists of special bodies
of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.” In other words, the
security forces of the state exist for the very purpose of smashing the working
class and the unions when they pose a threat to the capitalist class. Appealing
to the cops to stop being the guard dogs of capital is nothing more nor less
than pleading for the peaceful and democratic reform of the dictatorship of
capital. In doing so, the KKE tops foster the lie that the capitalist state can
be made to serve the interests of the working class.
At the same demonstration, a KKE trade unionist, Ilias Stamelos,
said: “PAME [KKE trade-union formation], with its presence, wishes to express
its solidarity with the just demands of those in uniform, the majority of whom
live on poverty wages.” Far from shedding any tears over the “poverty” of those
whose job it is to attack workers and the oppressed, the TGG calls for:
All cops, prison and security guards out of the unions! As Leon
Trotsky wrote: “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the
capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next? Vital
Questions for the German Proletariat, 27 January 1932). While the KKE
leadership has no problem standing in solidarity with the fascist-infested Greek
police in their demands for better pay, it outrageously smears anarchist
protesters as allies of the fascists: “Let’s not forget that these kinds of
fascist forces acted jointly with para-state, hooded anarcho-autonomes”
(Rizospastis, 16 October).
Deadly Threat to Immigrants, Gays, Workers
Golden Dawn has lately joined forces with reactionaries of the
Greek Orthodox church, a central pillar of the capitalist order in Greece which
fuels all-sided social reaction and national chauvinism, in particular against
Turkey and Muslims, in order to tie the exploited to the Greek bourgeoisie. In
Athens on October 11, Golden Dawn members and a religious rabble wielding icons
and crucifixes terrorized patrons and performers of a play depicting Jesus and
the apostles as gay men. A journalist was brutally assaulted by Golden Dawn
members shouting anti-gay and racist epithets in full view of the police.
Lately, there have been a number of attacks on gay men. It is in the interests
of the working class to defend gay people against this poisonous reaction, as we
wrote in “The Founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece” (November 2004):
“A Trotskyist group must be a Leninist ‘tribune of the people.’
And for Greece, where the ultra-reactionary Orthodox church has enormous
influence, the oppression of women is extreme. The Greek ‘holy trinity’ of
‘homeland-religion-family’ which the capitalist state promotes is strongly
connected with the national and the woman questions. A central issue for
Trotskyists must be the fight for the liberation of women through socialist
revolution and opposition to women’s oppression. We fight for full democratic
rights for homosexuals, in opposition to the male-chauvinist, homophobic Greek
society and the Greek left. We are for the separation of church and state.”
Our call for the separation of church and state is underscored by
the recent arrest of a man from the island of Evia on charges of blasphemy. Due
to a protest in parliament by a Golden Dawn MP, this man faces charges that can
result in up to two years in prison for the “crime” of satirizing a famous monk
as Elder Pastitsios [a pun on a popular pasta dish] on Facebook!
For Workers United-Front Mobilizations Against the Fascists!
While Golden Dawn currently aim their attacks primarily against
immigrants, gays and leftists, their ultimate purpose is to crush the
organizations of the working class in order to save the capitalists, as
Mussolini’s forces did in Italy in the 1920s and Hitler’s in Germany in the
1930s. Having led the October Revolution alongside Lenin in 1917, Leon Trotsky
sought to bring the lessons of that struggle to the German proletariat in the
early 1930s as they faced the rise of the Nazis. In What Next? Vital
Questions for the German Proletariat, Trotsky explained the social roots of
fascism:
“Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses
of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized
lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself
has brought to desperation and frenzy....
“The gist of fascism and its task consist in a complete
suppression of all workers’ organizations and the prevention of their revival.
In a developed capitalist society this goal cannot be achieved by police methods
alone. There is only one method for it, and that is directly opposing the
pressure of the proletariat—the moment it weakens—by the pressure of the
desperate masses of the petty bourgeoisie.”
Trotsky consistently warned that the reformist misleaders of the
Social Democratic Party (SPD) and of the Stalinist Communist Party (KPD)
downplayed the danger represented by the fascist menace and urged the KPD to
initiate mass united-front actions jointly with SPD workers to defend the
workers and the oppressed against the Nazi stormtroopers and to destroy them
while they were still small.
Central to the fight against fascism then and today is an
understanding of the centrality of the working class. As Trotsky pointed out in
1931:
“The main army of fascism still consists of the petty bourgeoisie
and the new middle class.... On the scales of election statistics, a thousand
fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of
the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a
force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their
wives, and their mothers-in-law.”
— “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”
The recent brutal abuse of anti-fascist protesters by the Athens
police underscores that the strategy of small groups of leftists mobilizing to
defend immigrants against fascists, while courageous, is not an effective means
of destroying the Golden Dawn menace.
The violent racist attacks on immigrants and others by mobs of
Golden Dawn fascists pose the urgent need to mobilize contingents of workers,
based on the trade unions, to defend immigrants and sweep the fascist vermin off
the streets. What is necessary is to fight to remove the political obstacles to
mobilizing the power of the trade unions against Golden Dawn. The KKE has the
social weight in the trade unions to take the lead in doing this, but its
promotion of illusions in bourgeois democracy and its nationalist populism are
barriers. The reformist organizations that compose groups such as Antarsya also
reinforce the political obstacles, in particular by tailing the pro-EU Syriza
coalition, which promises to provide immigrants more “humane” conditions of
imprisonment and to put more cops on the streets to fight “crime.” While groups
in Antarsya may claim to be against the EU (or for Greece to get out of the EU),
their preference for a “left” capitalist government headed by Syriza and
aspirations to pressure such a government show how hollow their anti-EU posture
is. In an interview with International Viewpoint (June 2012), Dimitris
Hilaris of the OKDE-Spartakos (part of the Antarsya coalition) stated: “Syriza
has been able to provide a credible solution to the situation, through the
slogan of a left government” (“Toward a Government that Will Break with the
Troika?”). Given that the EU is responsible for driving down the conditions of
life in Greece and fueling the growth of the fascists, you can’t lead a struggle
against fascism without trenchant opposition to the capitalist EU.
The leadership of the KKE has lately argued that a front against
fascism is not needed and that Golden Dawn merely needs to be “exposed.” In a
speech to the European Communist Meeting in Brussels on October 1-2, KKE general
secretary Aleka Papariga acknowledged that Golden Dawn is developing along the
lines of the “hit squads of the Hitler period” and that cells of the security
forces of the capitalist state work with them. However:
“It cannot be dealt with on the basis of an anti-fascist front or
a front against violence in general whatever its source, because such a stance
will lead to an attack on the movement itself. Golden Dawn must be dealt with by
the organized movement itself, in the workplaces, the sectors, in the popular
organizations, by exposing its role as a supporter of the system, and dealing
with the criminal offences they commit with their murderous attacks which they
name as taking the law into their own hands.”
What the KKE means by “dealing with the criminal offences they
commit with their murderous attacks” is to rely on the capitalist state to
prosecute them. An example was the demand by PAME leaders on the Minister of
Public Order, Nikos Dendias: “We call on you to take measures for stricter
control for the safety and protection of all citizens, Greek and immigrant”
(Rizospastis, 18 July). In fact, the biggest danger of “an attack on the
movement itself” comes from believing in the democratic pretensions of the
capitalist state, which is exactly what the KKE misleaders do when they beg the
minister to send forces of repression to “defend” immigrants. Mass proletarian
united-front mobilizations against the fascists are the only way to ensure that
the fascists cannot continue to grow and attack the organized workers
movement.
Because it is capitalism that gives birth to the scourge of
fascism, the struggle against forces like Golden Dawn must be linked to the
fight for the overthrow of capitalist rule in Greece and internationally.
Indeed, the working class can only win the ruined petty bourgeoisie to its side
and away from the fascists by fighting for a socialist solution to the
capitalist crisis. It must fight to combat mass unemployment by demanding the
sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public
works. To stop the decline in living conditions, 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. 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. This struggle must extend from the countries most severely
ravaged by the crisis in Europe so far like Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain
and from the superexploited proletarian masses of neocolonial countries like
South Africa and India, to the imperialist powers like the U.S., Germany and
Japan, where workers are also under the gun.
The capitalist European Union serves to pit workers of different
countries against each other. In opposition to the national chauvinism whipped
up by this capitalist crisis, we understand that the fight for international
socialist revolution and a Socialist United States of Europe is key to leading
the Greek working class out of its desperate situation. As Trotsky noted in
1930, “the slogan of the proletarian unification of Europe is...a very important
weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist chauvinism” (The
Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany, 26
September 1930).
Outrage Over Death of Woman Denied Abortion-For Free Abortion on Demand!-Ireland
Workers Vanguard No. 1013
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23 November 2012
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Outrage Over Death of Woman Denied Abortion-For Free Abortion on Demand!
Ireland
Across Ireland, thousands of people, representing a broad cross
section of society, came out on November 17 to protest the cruel death of Savita
Halappanavar. Seventeen weeks pregnant, she was admitted to University Hospital
in Galway on October 21 with severe back pains and was told she was having a
miscarriage. Despite her repeated requests for a medical termination, doctors
refused to do the procedure on the grounds that the fetal heartbeat was still
detectable. After days of agony, she died of septicemia, a victim of the
anti-woman, clericalist policies of the Irish capitalist state.
The demonstrations are the largest rallies challenging Ireland’s
draconian ban on abortion since the “X case” in 1992, when a court ruling barred
a 14-year-old rape victim from leaving the country to obtain an abortion. The
mass protests at that time forced the Supreme Court to lift the injunction in
this one case, and the teenager was allowed to travel to England for an
abortion. The court said that a woman could obtain an abortion if there was a
“real and substantial risk” to her life, but in general women could still be
legally barred from leaving the country to get the procedure. Abortion remains
criminalized under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, buttressed by the
anti-abortion Eighth Amendment to the constitution, and runs directly counter to
the entrenched Catholic “ethos” of the hospitals, many of which are still
controlled by the church.
We reprint below a November 16 Spartacist League/Britain leaflet
distributed by International Communist League comrades at protests in Dublin and
outside the Irish Embassy in London.
* * *
The agonising death of Savita Halappanavar on 28 October, after
being repeatedly denied an abortion, is the latest atrocity against women by the
Irish clericalist state. It shows that, 20 years after Ireland was swept by mass
protests over the “X case,” nothing fundamental has changed: a woman can not get
an abortion to save her life. The barbaric treatment of the young Indian woman
in hospital has caused widespread outrage and there is massive support for an
end to Ireland’s virtual ban on abortion. Halappanavar’s mother bitterly
condemned Ireland’s abortion laws, saying: “In an attempt to save a 4-month-old
foetus they killed my 30-year-old daughter” (The Hindu, 15 November).
The question starkly posed today is how come, in the 21st century,
a woman who was suffering a miscarriage was denied an abortion that could have
prevented her death? Ireland is “a Catholic country,” the dying woman was told.
Make no mistake: any effective fight for abortion rights necessarily means a
hard-fought struggle against the full force of clerical reaction and against the
capitalist state.
The mass protests in 1992 forced the Supreme Court to rule that the
young woman known as “X” could go abroad for an abortion. At the time, the
liberals and leftists who led the campaign lulled the mass movement into
thinking that legislation for abortion rights would follow automatically. Such
illusions in the Irish capitalist state were used to demobilise the struggle. We
warned that:
“The women of Ireland and all those who favour abortion rights
still face a bitter struggle for what is needed: free abortion and
contraception on demand. It can rarely have been clearer that it will take
working-class revolution to break the power of the church in society, and that
the reformist parties of the Irish working class are utterly tied to the
capitalist system of austerity, oppression and bigotry.”
— Workers Hammer No. 129, May/June 1992
The struggle for abortion rights, for the separation of church and
state, as well as for decent healthcare and education provision, means a fight
against the whole reactionary edifice of capitalism. It is in the direct
interest of the working class—men and women—to take up the fight for free
abortion on demand, as part of the struggle to free itself from capitalist
austerity, exploitation and oppression. Irish society is no longer in thrall to
the clergy, as it was for many decades. But the church maintains much control of
education and healthcare—many hospitals abide by Catholic ethical codes. The
right to an abortion should not be subject to the moral views of doctors or
hospital management. For free abortion on demand! For free public
healthcare for all! For separation of church and state!
Under capitalism, democratic rights are the product of social
struggle and must constantly be defended against attack. In the 20 years since
the “X case,” anti-abortion forces have relentlessly tried to reverse any
opening for abortion rights that has been won, such as the right to information
on abortion services and to travel abroad for an abortion. It is delusional to
think that the capitalist parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, or for that matter
Labour, a bourgeois workers party, will mount a fundamental challenge to
reactionary Catholic forces over abortion rights. Yet these are the parties that
reformists are capitulating to, restricting their demands to calling for
legislation conforming to the Supreme Court ruling in the “X case.” This boils
down to calling for abortion to be legalised only in cases where
the woman’s life is in danger. The call for “free abortion,” which the Socialist
Workers Party [Irish followers of the late Tony Cliff] tacked on to the end of a
leaflet issued on 14 November, is merely a fig leaf covering their prostration
before the Irish state.
Labour Tánaiste [Deputy Prime Minister] Eamon Gilmore has promised
that the government will introduce guidelines stating when abortion is
permitted. Of course Marxists defend any legal right to abortion, however
limited, that might be achieved. Any legalisation of abortion
would cause a rift within the government, with several Fine Gael TDs [members of
parliament] insisting that no legislation be produced. A dividing line also runs
through Sinn Féin, as [its president] Gerry Adams admitted, saying: “I realise
there are strongly held opposing views, including within Sinn Féin and
throughout society, on the issue of medical termination.” Adams concludes with
the standard call for the government to provide legislation, no doubt assuming
that such legislation will pander to the anti-abortion bigots, including those
within his own party.
Clare Daly (formerly of the Socialist Party) and other TDs elected
on the United Left Alliance ticket, put a motion in the Dáil [Irish parliament]
earlier this year, solely designed “to provide for termination of pregnancy
where a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother exists” (Irish
Times, 22 February). In the Dáil debate following the death of Savita
Halappanavar, seven “left” TDs—Patrick Nulty, Mick Wallace, Clare Daly, Joan
Collins, Richard Boyd Barrett, Joe Higgins and Catherine Murphy—all pleaded with
the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government to legislate “for abortion under the
terms permitted by the Supreme Court ruling in the X case” (thejournal.ie, 15
November).
Labour Party senator Ivana Bacik likewise demands legislation, to
“save the lives of pregnant women” (Irish Times, 16 November). Bacik
cites the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 2010 that Ireland must
clarify the legal position on abortion. The government set up an “expert group”
to produce recommendations on how to comply with the European Court ruling, but
would prefer to postpone a decision as long as possible. Many today still look
to the European Union to liberalise Ireland’s laws on abortion, and to permit
gay marriage, etc. Such hopes are likely to be in vain. We oppose the European
Union, an imperialist club that is dictating savage attacks on working people in
Ireland, as well as in Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Limiting the demands for abortion rights to cases where the woman’s
life is in danger is a betrayal of the basic needs of Irish women, thousands of
whom are forced to travel to Britain every year for an abortion. To get an idea
of what government legislation might look like, women in the South need only
look across the border to Northern Ireland, where abortion is only available in
cases where there is “a risk to the life of the woman or a risk of real and
serious adverse effect to her physical and mental health on either a long-term
or permanent basis.” Abortion in the North is regulated by criminal law, and is
“punishable by a maximum sentence of life imprisonment” (Irish Times, 12
October).
The newly opened Marie Stopes private clinic in Belfast, offering
non-surgical abortions up to nine weeks, met with howls of protest from both
Catholic and Protestant reactionaries. An article in the Irish Times (22
October) noted: “Last year only some 43 legal abortions were performed in the
North while the Family Planning Association referred 40 women a week from there
to British clinics for a private abortion. Like their Southern counterparts, the
boat to Britain has been the only real option.” For the overwhelming majority of
working-class and poor women, the “right” to have an abortion without the means
to pay still leaves them without much “choice.” Women in Ireland, North and
South, depend on the availability of abortion services in Britain, where
abortion was legalised in 1967. However today the right to abortion in Britain
has faced repeated threats, including an attempt to reduce the time limit of 24
weeks. Birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist
world by the state, by the institution of the family, and by organised religion,
which all serve to enforce women’s oppression.
The fight for abortion rights must be linked to the struggle for
women’s liberation through socialist revolution. As we noted in 1992, in
opposition to liberals and reformists who trimmed their demands to what they
thought was least likely to provoke reactionary forces: “This Gordian knot of
bourgeois ‘constitutional’ legal wrangling can only be cut in a progressive
sense by a tough, principled, iron-hard fight: not for this reform or that
wording but for what is needed by women and the working class”
(“For a Working Class-Centred Fight for Free Abortion on Demand!” Workers
Hammer No. 129, May/June 1992). Socialist revolution will tear down the
clericalist capitalist system in the South and that of the Loyalist masters in
the North. The construction of a planned economy alone can provide quality
healthcare and make abortion and contraception free and safe, on demand. Such a
society would provide jobs for everyone, laying the material basis
for the genuine liberation of women. We seek to build proletarian
internationalist parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism
on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish Sea.
Economic Crisis and the Politics of Fear-Obama’s Re-Election: The Shell Game of Lesser-Evilism
Workers Vanguard No. 1013
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23 November 2012
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Economic Crisis and the Politics of Fear-Obama’s Re-Election: The Shell Game of Lesser-Evilism
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
On all sides the 2012 U.S. presidential election can be captured in
one word: fear. Amid a persistent economic crisis, which has left working people
in ruin across the globe, the Republicans thought they could ride back into the
White House on the votes of the Tea Party yahoos, Christian fundamentalists and
other such reactionaries who believe that Obama and the “takers” are driving
America down the road to a socialist Sodom and Gomorrah. Against the backdrop of
millions of unemployed and a growing army of homeless, hungry and destitute,
Mitt Romney reviled the “47 percent” of this society who “believe they are
entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” As Romney called
on the nearly 12 million “illegal” immigrants in the U.S. to “self deport,”
other Republican candidates raved about “legitimate rape” and reveled in
biblical scripture against gays and other “deviants.”
When measured against their Republican opponents, it wasn’t
difficult for the Democrats to come off as the “lesser evil.” They didn’t even
have to promise much of anything to the working class and the oppressed. A
couple of sops were thrown as Obama allowed that his personal views had
“evolved” toward tepidly endorsing gay marriage and granted some undocumented
immigrant youth a temporary reprieve from deportation. Labor got nothing, not
even a repeat of the empty promises from last time around to push through the
Employee Free Choice Act card checkoff for union organizing—an effort that the
union officialdom has simply dropped. This year nothing was necessary to piece
off the union misleaders, who once again rallied the troops and spent massive
amounts of union funds to get out the vote for the Democrats. As for the
increasingly indigent black masses, the most they’ve gotten from the Obama White
House is a lecture to pull themselves up by their nonexistent bootstraps.
While the hope and enthusiasm aroused by the election of America’s
first black president may have waned, there remains a deep sense of racial pride
and solidarity with Obama among the black population. This was reinforced by the
backlash from Republican Party “birthers,” who question Obama’s U.S.
citizenship. In these types, black people correctly perceive the forces of
racist reaction that want to roll back the remaining gains of the civil rights
movement, seen not least in various unsuccessful schemes to suppress black voter
turnout. The reactionaries also want to take a hatchet to the Fourteenth
Amendment, which granted citizenship to former black slaves after the Civil War
and extended this right to anyone else born in the U.S., namely the children of
immigrants. What black people feared was seen at the campus of “Ole Miss” on
election night, when white students rioted after learning the results, screaming
racial epithets and burning an Obama-Biden election sign.
By the count of the Electoral College, Obama won handily, and he
beat Romney in the popular vote by roughly three percentage points. Romney
captured the lion’s share of the white vote, particularly men and particularly
in the vast majority of the states of the former Confederacy as well as the
rural areas of the “heartland.” Obama was backed by well over 90 percent of the
black electorate and more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans, also
getting the support of single women, young people, gays and families with annual
incomes under $50,000.
Although Obama’s 2008 election was celebrated as the beginning of
the “end of racism,” black people overall are far worse off today than they were
four years ago. Black unemployment has spiked, wages have flatlined and median
wealth has crashed. The wave of foreclosures has black families staying in
homeless shelters at seven times the rate of whites. This is not to mention the
White House-led assault on public education that has written off ghetto schools.
The stark reality is that black oppression, which is structurally embedded in
American capitalism, is not going to be overcome short of socialist revolution,
whereby the working class rips the economy out of the hands of the racist
capitalist rulers and reorganizes it on an egalitarian socialist basis.
The Devil Didn’t Make Him Do It
On the heels of the president’s re-election, liberals, the
trade-union bureaucracy and black Democratic Party politicians are peddling the
myth that “now Obama will fight for us.” By their lights, Obama was prevented
from doing so in his first term by the economic and other “messes,” such as the
imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, left behind by his Republican
predecessor, George W. Bush.
As we wrote at the time of Obama’s 2008 election:
“From the standpoint of the international working class and
oppressed there is nothing to celebrate in Obama’s victory and
much to fear. Enthusiasm among large sections of the bourgeoisie, on the other
hand, is justified. After nearly eight years of one of the most incompetent and
widely despised regimes in recent U.S. history, they now have in Obama a more
rational face for their brutal, irrational system. Obama has also inspired
illusions in the trappings of bourgeois democracy, the means by which the
capitalists disguise their rule with the appearance of a popular mandate.
Abroad, Obama provides an invaluable facelift for U.S. imperialism, the main
enemy of the world’s working people.”
— “Obama: Commander-in-Chief of Racist U.S. Imperialism,” WV
No. 925, 21 November 2008
Since then, Obama has cut the losses for U.S. imperialism by
drawing down the number of troops in Iraq, leaving behind a residual military
force to help police the region, and is preparing an eventual pullout from
Afghanistan. At the same time, his administration has ratcheted up the global
“war on terror,” with the numbers of those killed by U.S. drones soon to top
3,000 under a president who keeps his own “terrorist” kill list. While liberals
hail White House plans to trim some Pentagon spending—a bit of economic
correction by the ruling class—this will not in the least cut into the military
predominance of U.S. imperialism, which spends more on its war machine than the
next 14 largest spenders combined. On the home front, with its electronic and
other monitoring of the purported “enemy within,” the Obama administration has
outstripped the Bush-Cheney government in assaulting the constitutional rights
of the population.
As for the notion that it was Bush administration plans that forced
Obama’s hand in bailing out the Wall Street bankers whose financial swindles had
triggered a global economic meltdown, let’s hear it from the man himself. Not
long after Obama came into office, he had his first meeting with these
high-rolling perps. In his book Confidence Men (2011), Ron Suskind cites
a top banking executive: “The president had us at a moment of real
vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about
anything, and we would have rolled over.” Instead, Obama assured the assembled
titans of U.S. finance capital: “My administration is the only thing between you
and the pitchforks.... I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting
you.”
Here is a pure expression of the role of the Democratic Party as
one of the dual parties of capital. Its occasional posture as the “friend” of
labor, minorities and the poor is aimed at heading off class and social struggle
against the capitalist rulers. The lunacy of the Republican Party is simply an
extreme expression of a decaying system whose masters see in the present
economic crisis an opportunity to further starve the poor, bust the unions,
drive down wages and slash such social programs as remain. The Democrats do the
same thing because they serve the same interests; they just try to put a
“kinder, gentler” face on it. In his 27 September column on the presidential
contest, titled “From Hope to Fear,” America’s foremost class-war prisoner,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, summed it up: “Truth is, both are essentially advocates of
austerity. One wants to slap people with it; the other slaps you as well. He
just says he hated to do it.”
That the presidential election was among the most polarized on
racial, social and, in many ways, class lines in recent U.S. history speaks to
the anger and discontent at the base of this society. But such discontent is
massively distorted by the electoral circus, a keystone of the whole fraud of
bourgeois democracy. In The State and Revolution (1917), Bolshevik leader
V.I. Lenin succinctly described bourgeois elections as providing voters with the
chance to “decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to
repress and crush the people.”
As revolutionary Marxists, it is our purpose to fight to translate
discontent among the toiling masses into a conscious understanding that the
working class needs its own party—not a parliamentary vehicle vying to be the
administrators of the capitalist state but a party championing the cause of all
the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers rule. A
central obstacle to this fight is the labor bureaucracy, which has long
subordinated the struggles and interests of the proletariat to the class enemy,
particularly through the agency of the Democratic Party.
The Labor Lieutenants of U.S. Imperialism
The AFL-CIO tops are patting themselves on the back for their role
in Obama’s re-election, particularly in such battleground states as Ohio and
Wisconsin. These two have also been battleground states for labor, with Ohio
auto workers and Wisconsin public workers getting pummeled thanks to their
misleaders’ prostration before the Democrats. In 2009, the United Auto Workers
tops worked hand in glove with Obama on the GM and Chrysler bailouts, which
wrested massive concessions from a union that was once the powerhouse of the
labor movement. In 2011, the anger of tens of thousands of workers and their
allies who rallied against Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker’s
union-busting assault on public workers was channeled into a campaign to recall
Walker and replace him with an anti-union Democrat. Even that crime didn’t pay,
as the recall went down to defeat.
Such has not curbed the enthusiasm of self-proclaimed socialists
like the Workers World Party, whose editorial “Obama Wins, Struggle Begins”
proclaims: “While unions have been declared dead many times by bourgeois
pundits, they showed their muscle, going door to door in places like Wisconsin”
(Workers World, 7 November). What a shameless statement of the bankruptcy
of the reformist left, whose politics mirror those of the labor bureaucracy whom
they serve as water boys.
Far from “showing muscle,” the labor officialdom is so averse to
employing the strike weapon to defend what exists of organized labor—much less
to replenish its ranks through organizing the millions of unorganized
workers—that in Michigan they put up a referendum to enshrine collective
bargaining rights in the state constitution. To make absolutely clear where they
stand, the bureaucrats explicitly allowed that lawmakers could ban public
employee strikes! Even with such reassurances, this measure sparked an all-out
propaganda counteroffensive and was handily defeated. No wonder: the union
misleaders were appealing to a voting public that includes the big bosses, small
businessmen, preachers and others for whom the unions are a scourge.
The rights of workers to organize, strike, picket and shut down
production have never been codified in the Constitution. The reason is simple:
they collide with the only actual guaranteed rights in this society, the
property rights of the capitalist owners that are the foundation for the profits
they extract through the exploitation of labor. Everything of value that workers
have won has been gained through hard-fought, often bloody, class battles
against the employers and their state.
With Obama now turning his attention to the government’s supposed
fiscal crisis, the name of the game for the labor tops is mobilizing the ranks
to back him. Two days after the elections, the union bureaucracy organized
rallies in more than 100 cities to demand higher taxes on the rich and no cuts
to programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Service Employees
International Union president Mary Kay Henry explained: “We expect to have the
president’s back on the agenda that the voters just declared support for,”
adding that “the president has always said he needs a movement behind his
mandate” (New York Times, 13 November).
The very idea that the U.S. economy is about to take a nose dive
off a “fiscal cliff” is an invention. As even the New York Times (15
November) admitted, manufactured budget crises have been a convenient means,
going back to the Reagan administration, of enforcing “unpopular tax and
spending actions.” Playing the race card by decrying mythical black “welfare
queens” living off the tax dollars of “hard-working” Americans, the Republican
Reagan manufactured a debt crisis to shred the “war on poverty” programs that
were enacted to buy social peace following the mass ghetto upheavals of the
1960s. But it took Democratic president Bill Clinton to finally eliminate
“welfare as we know it.” As he did during the 2011 “debt ceiling” crisis, Obama
has now made it perfectly clear that he is willing to strike a “grand bargain”
with the Republicans that would cut billions from programs like Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid as long as they throw him a bone on the Bush tax cuts.
In a 7 November editorial, Socialist Worker online,
publication of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), declares: “We
Don’t Want ‘Four More-of-the-Same Years’.” The key for them, as always, is to
make the Democrats fight. In the words of Chicago Teachers Union vice president
and ISO supporter Jesse Sharkey: “Democrats respond when they are pushed.... If
the wind’s blowing hard enough they’ll move” (London Guardian, 9
November). No doubt in the offing is the ritual huffing and puffing by the
reformist left to demand that Obama “tax the rich” to provide money for jobs,
education, welfare and other programs.
The banks and corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the
ill-gotten gains of a system based on the exploitation of the many for the
profits of the few. The problem is that you’re not going to get your hands on it
by appealing to the capitalist rulers to reorder their priorities to serve human
needs. Contrary to the bourgeois-democratic myth of government by and for the
people, the policies of U.S. imperialism are determined not by the electorate or
by “pressure from below” but by the interests of the capitalist ruling class, as
overseen by Democrats and Republicans alike. To win what’s necessary, the
working class has to smash the rule of the bourgeoisie! What’s needed is a
workers government that expropriates the capitalists’ productive wealth and
establishes a rationally planned socialist economy.
It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!
On election night, dejected FOX-TV commentator Bill O’Reilly blamed
demographics for the results, lamenting: “It’s not a traditional America
anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff.... The
white establishment is now the minority.” It is worth noting that white
Christian fundamentalists, first introduced into the political mainstream not by
the Republicans but under Democratic Party president Jimmy Carter, have lost
political sway. But it is not as if they ever represented the views of the
majority of the population. Rather, they were a convenient ideological battering
ram wielded by the capitalist rulers to roll back the gains of the civil rights
movement, regiment and “morally rearm” the population to ward off social
upheaval and advance the Cold War against “godless Communism” abroad.
With millions unemployed or scrambling to get by through miserably
paid part-time work, with many thrown out of their homes, with pension and
health care benefits looted and lengthening lines for whatever public assistance
is available, people do indeed “want stuff,” like a decent job, a place to live,
food, education for their children, health care. The Republicans overplayed
their “kill ’em all, god will know his own” glorification of robber baron
capitalism. At the same time, the decades of betrayals by the fakers sitting
atop the unions have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they
can get away with further impoverishing the working class, starving the ghetto
and barrio poor and killing the sick and aged. But it is not possible to
eliminate the class struggle, which is born of the irreconcilable conflict
between labor and its exploiters.
Much pressure has been building at the base of this society, and at
some point it can and will explode. Harnessing and directing this anger toward
the eradication of a system based on exploitation and rooted in racial
oppression is, at bottom, a question of leadership. The key to unlocking the
social power that lies in the hands of the multiracial working class is to break
the political chains forged by the trade-union misleaders that have shackled
labor to its exploiters. To end the ravages produced by the anarchic system of
production for profit requires forging a revolutionary workers party. Defending
the interests of workers, blacks, immigrants and others against the exploiters,
such a party would provide the necessary leadership for sweeping away the entire
system of capitalist wage slavery through proletarian socialist revolution.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-In The Juke Box Rock And Roll Night, Circa 1958
Jake LeFleur (nee Jeanbon, but no one called him that, except old country mere and grandmere called him that, not if you didn’t want as much corner boy trouble as you could handle, maybe more. Jake, like many French-Canadian (F-C) next generation guys wanted none of that old country patios-church bow down-poor boy from hunger stuff but to be a pure vanilla American be-bop daddy and bon this and bon that was not part of the program, not against the Downeast Yankee and Irish toughs) had it bad, had it bad as a man (young man, okay, twenty-three) could have it for a girl (oops, young woman, twenty-two) and still be able to breath, breath normally.
And she, Marnie Capet she, the object of one Jake LeFleur’s palsied breath, knew that hard fact, and depended on it for a time to keep Jake in that state.But before you say “dames what can you do with them, or without them” like all of Jake’s corner boys whom he hung around with in front of Jimmy Jake’s Diner I (run by Jacques Jean LeBlanc who had enough sense to anglo-up the names of his establishments, that one on Atlantic Avenue, number II, for the touristas and blue-haired lady luncheon specials and the one on Main Street, number I, that catered to the younger set, and that had a be-bop bop jukebox with every possible tune for the music hungry young to deposit their three for a quarter selections in) said every time they heard the latest installment of the Marnie leading Jake by the nose saga hear her side. Then, perhaps, you will not worry so much about the how and whys of Jake’s breathing.
Marnie, for all the world to know, for all the important world to know in 1958 in Olde Saco, Maine, and that meant her friends, her friends known since high school, if not before, now mainly working alongside of her in the front offices of the MacAdams Textile Mills which drove the town’s economy, her girls, whom she hung around on Friday and Saturday nights in front of, guess, Jimmy Jake’s Diner (the one on Main Street, naturally) , had been minding her own business when one Jake LeFleur came swooping down on her a few months before. And she would swear on a stack of seven, hell, seventy sealed bibles (as all her “corner girls” would attest to after they had heard the latest installment of the Jake leading Marnie by the nose saga) that she had no intention of finding herself riding in Jake’s ’55 two-toned souped-up Chevy after a few minutes of Jake smooth talk. But she did, although she would also swear, at least for public consumption, that she had a problem breathing when she found herself in that position (or later in more intimate positions, as she would slyly allude to when describing her latest tryst date with Jake.)
But at some point Jake, or maybe Marnie, it was never clear, discovered two things, one, that Jake was crazier about Marnie that she was about him, and, two, more importantly , Marnie was taking more than a few peeks at a new boy in town, Bernie Albert, who if one could believe this, had neither a car, hot or otherwise, nor had the least inclination to hang around Jimmy Jake’s Diner (I or II) because he was crazy for the sea, and crazy for writing stuff about the sea once he found the best spots over at Olde Saco Beach (naturally later including the exclusive lovers’lane hot spot at the Seal Rock end).
Bernie came in like a breath of fresh air and before long one did not see Marnie Capet riding, front seat riding, in any funny old ’55 Chevy. She was breathing the sea air down at the beach after walking there with Bernie. She had decided that she had one chance at getting out from under that secretarial job at the mill, getting out from under Jake-or-name-the-car-crazy-guy cruising Main Street, getting out from under hanging in front of Jimmy Jake’s (number and then, inevitably blue-haired number II like her mother and her weekly friends luncheon) with her girls discussing what to play next on that damn jukebox, getting out under from under about six kids and money enough to support only about two, and getting out, well, just getting out from under.
Now the tale turns back to Jake though, Jake of the thousand ‘chicken run’ victories(for the clueless that is two guys, two corner boys guys usually, and usually from different corners, going one on one in their respective automobiles at two in the morning, or thereabouts , down at that previously mentioned Seal Rock end of Olde Saco Beach to decide who was the max daddy of the boss car night, simple), Jake of the hard boy corner boy society in front of Jimmie Jake’s Diner I (who once chain- whipped a guy, a guy from the corner in front of Mama’s Pizza Parlor, just for being, no, breathing on his corner without permission), spurned Jake.
And before you wonder what chain-whip, slice and dice, run over with his car hell our boy Jake was going to rain down on one Bernie Albert for “stealing “his Marnie (a serious matter in po’ boy Olde Saco where your property girl meant something, especially twenty-something which meant marriage and those six kids Marnie was fretting over was your fate) you should know this. Not only did you not see Marnie riding in that Chevy, that boss Chevy as anyone in town, anyone that counted would have told you, meaning the habitués of Jimmy Jake’s I but you did not see Jake riding around either. If you can believe this, Jake was still carrying a big torch for Marnie and had taken to his room to write her a letter begging her to come back. And since he was not a scholar like Bernie, and since he wanted to note her upcoming birthday he played the Tune Weavers’Happy, Happy Birthday Baby to help him through task, and settle his uneasy breathing.
P.S. Marnie made good career choice, well eventually she did, in the short term she fell back to the Olde Saco F-C ethos and ten generations of same old, same old and let Jake’s birthday letter sway her. So for a few weeks you again saw Marnie Capet tight-ass against Jake in his Chevy. And Bernie walking solo down at Olde Saco Beach. Then mad Jake go the smart idea that Bernie, like that other unfortunate mentioned previously, needed a chain-whipping to restore order the universe. Bernie took his beating like a man everyone agreed, and Jake took his nickel’s worth up at Shawshank. Bernie and Marnie were married in 1960 after Bernie finished graduate school at Bowdoin. From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-When Bob Dylan Ruled The Folk Minute, Circa 1962
“Hey, Peter Paul, help me out tonight will you? Jenny’s cousin Joslyn is in town. Lynette promised her she could come with us to the Oleo Coffeehouse tonight for the start of the summer local talent concert series and she needs a date. She is supposed to be nice, she is from New York City, a senior at New York University, and she knows all about the folk scene there and about all the latest folk singers and poems and stuff,”Jeff Murphy quick- talked (the only way that he knew how to talk ever since that day one of Freshman year three years ago where they had met in the bookstore line and it turned out they were both going to be in same Western Civilization survey class whether it was trying to hard press Peter Paul into writing a term paper for him or, as now, a simple Lynette-inspired favor) over the phone to his friend Peter Paul Markin. Peter Paul was intrigued by this prospect both because she was an older woman , a senior, (as it turned out just a few months older given the vagaries of time and place when one started elementary school) and because he had over the previous several months gotten caught up in the emerging folk wave then splashing through young America in the year 1962 so he said sure.
Peter Paul, as was his way in those days around girls (and around his more intellectual friends) dug into his pile of folk music, folk records and folk newsletters in order to be able to carry on a civil conversation, or what he considered a civil conversation, with Joslyn that night. He was especially worried that he know every arcane fact in the folk world to impress a New York City girl who had actually been to Mecca, the Village, been to the clubs like the Gaslight, walked the nervous neon streets like McDougall, and had imbibed his idea of folk chic. Funny, he thought to himself, as he poured through a copy of Arise and Sing to make sure he knew the words to Tom Doulas (no, not that faux folk Tom Dooley that the vanilla Kingston Trio sang on televised hootenannies for the great unwashed , the real version out of the back roads of Tennessee about that murderous night, and his fate) a year or so before he used to laugh at what he called “beats,” guys with beards, bad hair, bad breathe, baggy pants and brown flannel shirts when he took his midnight swings through Harvard Square who had their guitars out singing serious protest songs, goof car car car songs, and some mountain hollows stuff , traditional they called it, long black guitar case in front in case anybody accidently drop some change in. And “beat” girls too, long hair, very long hair that looked like they had ironed it (they had) , colorful dresses (short) showing dimpled bare legs, some very well-turned , sandals, and , oh, angelic voices like in some stardust memory, although he never laughed at them, the girls, or thought of laughing at them, on the off chance that one might smile his way. He had been strictly a rock and roll man, digging that be-bopping sound like a lot of 1950s growing up kids, guys especially, after being forced fed on mother and father Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page and Perry Como vanilla stuff. Raw rockabilly Sun Record magic by hard luck blue suede shoes shod Carl Perkins, flaming piano man Jerry Lee Lewis flailing away on High School Confidential on the back of some off-hand truck and driving every girl within fifteen miles wild, and with wild thoughts too, bopping, bopping away the night before kissing his cousin, Roy the Boy going down the road running scare, scared as hell, and why shouldn’t he when some girlfriend’s ex came back to carry her away, Buddy Holly looking for Peggy Sue, Mary Lou, Betty Sue, or someone to while away the night with, Chuck Berry carrying on with every sweet little sixteen in sight, and getting away with it until he started messing with Mister’s women in that 1950s segregated night, and, of course, Elvis, the king, the king before he became the king and was hungry, girl hungry, money hungry, respect hungry just like every Peter Paul Markin who spent hours working on that snarl, that hip movement, that max daddy hiccup in his voice.
Or maybe, a little, be-bop blues as they filtered out of Mister Lee’s Blues Hour from Chicago caught on the radio on late Sunday nights when the wind was right and the station was amped up. Rolling right over Big Joe,yah, Big Joe Turner talking, talking kind of salaciously (but what knew he of salacious then, he just dug the beat, the big man’s negro streets beat) about some shaking smooth brown woman, and maybe having a little luck with that fresh talk, who knows, Muddy Waters, man-child, man-child in the promise land, the nineteen year old honey promise land, playing Hootchie Gootchie Man, for real, the howl, Howlin’ Wolf , sweating like a pig, a big old pig, harmonica half way up his throat asking how many more years, asking about some damn little red rooster getting all the hens wild, Elmore James, max daddy guitarist , crying to high heaven about the sky crying, and about his fantastic cover of old boy Robert Johnson’s Dust My Broom, and bad boy, tina-less Ike Turner jamming those keys on Rocket 88 as close to rock as you could get and not be white to make a young kid’s head whirl (and they did).
One Sunday Peter Paul was trying to get that Chicago station (always a fickle proposition on his transistor radio especially when sea winds were up) when he heard this gravelly-voiced guy singing something out of some old mountain hollows or something like that, a song called Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. The guy singing it, who he later found out was Dave Von Ronk from Brooklyn, sounded like some latter day Jehovah calling his flock home (sheep or people, or both). Peter Paul was hooked and listened to the rest of the show. He didn’t remember all the names of the songs or performers, maybe a little Tom Rush doing a cover of Bukka White ‘s Panama Limited, Eric Von Schmidt doing Joshua’s Gone Barbados, an Alice Stuart cover of the Carter Family’s Gold Watch And Chain, Josh White’s One Meatball , stuff like that, but the next day he went to Charlie’s Records over in Kenmore Square and picked up what that shop considered folk, some Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie stuff and he was double-hooked.
That date night he went with Jeff, Lynette and Joslyn over to the Oleo and had a good time, as they drank bitter (bitter to his plebeian taste) expresso coffee and some light pastries while listening to some local guy, a guy with a beard, bad hair, bad breathe, baggy pants and brown flannel shirt who had his guitars out(and mandolin) singing serious protest songs, goof car car car songs, and some mountain hollows stuff , traditional he called it, his long black guitar case in front of him, opened, in case anybody accidently drop some change in (in the coffeehouses the rule usually was you paid the cover, and for the eats and drinks, anything for the performer was discretionary, the guy that night was worth two bucks, and Joslyn threw in a buck of her own).
Although Joslyn was indeed as nice as advertised (long hair, very long hair that looked like she had ironed it (she had, as he later found out), peasant blouse with scarf around her neck, colorful dress (short) showing bare legs, very well-turned , de riguer sandals, and , oh, an angelic voice as she sang along with the performer (hence the sing-along folk tradition encouraged ) like in some Peter Paul stardust memory, she had a problem, a Peter Paul eyes problem. Or maybe better put Peter Paul had the problem. She was way too knowledgeable about the folk scene for Peter Paul. At one point he was sitting there in silence as she went on and on about the Village. Mostly what she said was that a new wave was coming, we, meaning them, the kids then, were ready to bust out and make a newer world and folk music would be the cement that united everything. Powerful stuff.
She said that a young guy, a young guy hanging around the bars and coffeehouses, places like Geddes Folk City, was writing up a storm, a storm to make a storm. She asked Peter Paul if he had heard Bob Dylan’s latest Blowin’ In The Windthat was becoming a national anthem for the youth who wanted to change the world and change it now. Peter Paul blushed, blushed crimson red or redder maybe. He had never heard of Bob Dylan. That night after the show asking off–handedly how long she was in town (the whole summer as it turned out since she was going to be working as a research assistant in some Harvard library system program) he decided against asking her out again (partially because he was sure that she would turn him down, after not knowing every arcane fact about folk music, and the faux pas on the Dylan thing) and let it go at that as the foursome parted company in front of the Oleo and he headed to catch the Red Line to Park Street. Next day though he was at Charlie’s Record Store. End of story, end of Joslyn story.
Well, not quite. As it turned out Joslyn didn’t understand why Peter Paul had been so quiet after the Dylan remarks and kind of cool when they had split up (not knowing then what a mad man know every fact in front of him, the arcaner the better, when he was “on” something and had been that way since junior high school over in North Adamsville when he hung around with Frankie Larkin who made that kind of knowledge trick into an art form, and had a girl hanging off every arm so it stuck). And she mentioned that mere fact to her cousin Jenny who mentioned it to Lynnette who you know damn well mentioned it to one Jeffrey Murphy, who to keep the peace, the Lynette peace, mentioned it to Peter Paul. Peter Paul just shrugged it off though informing Jeff (who knew of Peter Paul madnesses and had successfully used that knowledge to cadge more than one free written term paper when he had been hard pressed to submit one) that he didn’t think he and Joslyn were a fit. Jeff conveyed that information back down the pipeline.
A few days later Joslyn called Peter Paul on the telephone, and asked him pretty please (his version) if he could help her with a project that she was stymied on. She had heard (from Lynette via Jeff as he found out later) that he knew something about blues music, and about the rhythm and blues, and she wondered if Big Joe Turner’s version of Shake, Rattle and Roll was really the start of rock and roll or what. That started a two hour phone conversation about rock, about the blues, and about how Mr. Bob Dylan used the latter to work his talking blues magic. Of course it was a no-brainer that Mr. Big Joe Turner ‘s version was the max daddy foundation stone of rock and roll. And along the way during that conversation as the arcane facts piled up on each other Joslyn would keep saying “really, I didn’t know that.” Oh, and not so subtly kept asking if he had any time to help her further on her project. Yah, he said, yah, he had all summer. And he did, and they did .
P.S. Peter Paul and Joslyn would, after their summer tryst, meet again a number of times over the next several years, dated sometimes, lived together a couple of times, and each time she got the chance Joslyn would “remind” Peter Paul of that first Oleo coffeehouse date and his lack of knowledge of Bob Dylan then. And he would mention that “trick” telephone call she pulled (she, in fact, knew almost as much about the blues when she called as he did, as he found out later). Their meetings would many times coincide with one or the other’s being in New York or Boston together trying to fight that desperate fight for the “newer world,” that “the times they are a-changin’,”that “blowin’ in the wind” world that both had been touched by in those simpler 1962 folk and love times that were in serious danger of being burned up into bitter ashes, and bitter dreams.
Later in the decade when things got dicey with LBJ’s mad escalation of the war in Vietnam, murder in the streets, riots in the streets, assassinations, the spewing forth of every sort of degradation , and Peter Paul’s reluctant drafting in the American Army he lost contact with Joslyn after she went underground with the Weathermen in the late 1960s to try one last chance to create her version of that newer world she had talked about that first date night. That was the last he heard of her. Friday, December 07, 2012
Short Film Clips- Burt Lancaster’s Sweet Smell Of Success
Short Film Clips
Sweet Smell Of Success, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, 1957
Apparently 1950s Hollywood screenwriters when
characterizing Broadway theater critics refused to touch them with anything
less than a cattle prod, if that close (perhaps in the inevitable “real” theater –“bubblegum” movies
cultural clash this is where they got their revenge, so be it). At least that
has been my recent film review experience after watching – All About Eve and it’s
totally cynical critic Addison as he adds fuel to the fire of Anne Bancroft ‘s
Eve take-no-prisoners- rise against watch out Bette Davis played superbly by
George Saunders and the film under review .
In Sweet Smell
Of Success we are confronted with the weasely Broadway critic and man-
about- town J. J., played by Burt Lancaster, ably assisted by press flak Sydney
Falco played to a groveling tee by Tony Curtis. Now on Broadway and in Hollywood
, and we can add Washington politics and cable television mass media into the mix,
information is power. And J.J. has the
information to be used like some god for good or evil, and mainly for evil. Although
some wit, some long lost wit, once aired the thought that the only bad publicity
was no publicity for those reaching for the stars that ain’t necessarily so. As some minor characters, an errant younger sister ‘s boyfriend, and as Brother
Falco find out. J.J. is the past master
of the blind shot, the groin chop, the innuendo, the false fact that have today
become common staple of reporting life.
The story line here though is a little thin, mainly
concerning J.J.’s overweening concern that his very much younger sister does
not wind up with some ne’er- do- well. The tricks, manipulations, and downright
skullduggery seem all too real to a modern audience who know that fame is
fleeting and one better grab it by the neck, fast. The tricks(the old dope,
boy, stashed in the pocket routine, for example ) played in this film set in
1950s Broadway, however, seem almost like kid’s stuff compared to the vicious
action today. That, my friends, was something of a ‘golden age’ of gentile
skullduggery by comparison.
A note on Tony Curtis who on the face of it seems in
cinematic history to have been written of something of a ‘pretty’ boy, just
another lure for the girl moviegoers. But then you think about the fine performance
here against type and in Spartacus
and in Some Like It Hot and one,
including this reviewer, is compelled to start changing one’s opinion of the
depth of Mr. Curtis’s talent.
Video: Presentation by Bradley’s attorney David Coombs
event on CSPAN, or watch the Youtube version, and view photos below. A big thanks to David Coombs, and speakers Michael Ratner, Jesselyn Radack, Kevin Zeese, and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. The event was a huge success, bringing out media from CSPAN, Reuters, CNN, CBS, 60 Minutes, Fox 5, Arte (Germany), Al-Jazeera, Channel 5 DC, EFE (Spanish news agency), and the DPA (German news agency), among others.
By the Bradley Manning Support Network. December 4, 2012.
Last night, David Coombs, defense attorney in the WikiLeaks case, US. v. Bradley Manning, gave his first public presentation to an audience of over 100 at All Souls Church in Washington DC. In addition to being defense attorney in one of the most controversial and important ongoing cases today, Coombs was described as being a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserves having done 12 years of active duty, with 15 years experience practicing and teaching law. Additional speakers included Emma Cape and Kevin Zeese of the Bradley Manning Support Network, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo of the National Whistleblower Center.
CSPAN video:
Mr. Coombs spoke on Bradley’s mistreatment at Quantico, Bradley’s personality and future dreams, Mr. Coombs’ own opinion of the military, and how having supporters worldwide inspired him and gave him hope. Bradley Manning spent the first nine months of his pretrial incarceration in a 6×8 ft cell in solitary conditions described as “degrading and inhuman” by the UN Chief Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez. Regarding Mr. Coombs’ lengthy ongoing motion to have Bradley’s charges dismissed due to ‘unlawful pretrial punishment,’ he explained, “I’m enjoying my opportunity to cross-examine those who had Bradley Manning in those conditions for nine months”
The audience was particularly excited to hear Coombs talk about Bradley as a person. Coombs said that Brad is one of the smartest young men he’d ever met, who does things from the heart, and relayed a conversation he had about Bradley’s future goals: ”And he told me that his dream would be to go to college, go into public service, and perhaps one day, run for public office. And I asked Brad, why would he want to do that? And he said, ‘I want to make a difference. I want to make a difference in this world.’”
While Coombs acknowledged he has been intimidated facing off against a government prosecution with “unlimited resources and personnel,” he relayed that actions by supporters gave him hope. He also acknowledged the political significance of his case, “It is by far the most important military case, but it’s a case that is significant for all of us,” says Coombs. “We live in a country that is built on freedom of speech. We live in a country that is built on government accountability and informed citizens.” He said that Bradley is “excited” his case is finally going forward.
Photos:
Original announcement below:
December 3, 2012
Washington, DC
6pm doors/refreshments – 7pm event
All Souls Church Unitarian
1500 Harvard Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20009
(2 blocks from the Columbia Hts Metro Station, Yellow/Green lines; also near the S2, S4, H8 and 42 bus lines)
On December 3, 2012, Army PFC Bradley Manning’s civilian defense lawyer David Coombs will make his first ever public appearance to provide an overview of pending defense motions before the court and other facts regarding U.S. v. Manning. Mr. Coombs is expected to focus on the unlawful pretrial punishment that PFC Manning was subjected to for nine months while at the Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia – the subject of international outrage and a UN investigation. The government’s denial of Bradley Manning’s right to a speedy trial will also be before the military court. Accused military whistle-blower and Nobel Peace Prize nominee PFC Manning has been in prison for over 900 days. His court martial is currently scheduled to begin February 4, 2013.
Thanks to the release of the documents in question, American journalists and citizens have a far greater window into the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and secret corporate influence on foreign policy. While no specific harm resulted from the release of this information, PFC Manning faces life in military prison if convicted.
A $5 to $10 suggested donation at the door will be collected to cover event expenses. The event will also feature brief presentations from Bradley Manning Support Network spokespeople Emma Cape and whistle-blower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, and an appeal from David House in support of Bradley Manning’s defense fund.
Media are welcome to record Mr. Coombs’ presentation. This event will also be live-streamed at bradleymanning.org. We ask that you consider organizing a group viewing of the presentation. Go here to register, if you wish to host a public screening.
This handicap accessible event is hosted by the Bradley Manning Support Network, with the support of:
Center on Conscience & War
CODEPINK: Women for Peace
Courage to Resist
DC Metro Science for the People
Dorothy Day Catholic Worker – DC
Hiroshima Nagasaki Peace Committee
International CURE
National CURE
National Lawyers Guild
Peace Action Montgomery
Positive Force
Veterans for Peace – DC
Veterans for Peace – National
Washington Peace Center
Witness Against Torture
Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom – DC
World Can’t Wait
Update: Watch recorded footage of the By the Bradley Manning Support Network. December 4, 2012.
Last night, David Coombs, defense attorney in the WikiLeaks case, US. v. Bradley Manning, gave his first public presentation to an audience of over 100 at All Souls Church in Washington DC. In addition to being defense attorney in one of the most controversial and important ongoing cases today, Coombs was described as being a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserves having done 12 years of active duty, with 15 years experience practicing and teaching law. Additional speakers included Emma Cape and Kevin Zeese of the Bradley Manning Support Network, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo of the National Whistleblower Center.
CSPAN video:
The audience was particularly excited to hear Coombs talk about Bradley as a person. Coombs said that Brad is one of the smartest young men he’d ever met, who does things from the heart, and relayed a conversation he had about Bradley’s future goals: ”And he told me that his dream would be to go to college, go into public service, and perhaps one day, run for public office. And I asked Brad, why would he want to do that? And he said, ‘I want to make a difference. I want to make a difference in this world.’”
While Coombs acknowledged he has been intimidated facing off against a government prosecution with “unlimited resources and personnel,” he relayed that actions by supporters gave him hope. He also acknowledged the political significance of his case, “It is by far the most important military case, but it’s a case that is significant for all of us,” says Coombs. “We live in a country that is built on freedom of speech. We live in a country that is built on government accountability and informed citizens.” He said that Bradley is “excited” his case is finally going forward.
Photos:
December 3, 2012
Washington, DC
6pm doors/refreshments – 7pm event
All Souls Church Unitarian
1500 Harvard Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20009
(2 blocks from the Columbia Hts Metro Station, Yellow/Green lines; also near the S2, S4, H8 and 42 bus lines)
On December 3, 2012, Army PFC Bradley Manning’s civilian defense lawyer David Coombs will make his first ever public appearance to provide an overview of pending defense motions before the court and other facts regarding U.S. v. Manning. Mr. Coombs is expected to focus on the unlawful pretrial punishment that PFC Manning was subjected to for nine months while at the Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia – the subject of international outrage and a UN investigation. The government’s denial of Bradley Manning’s right to a speedy trial will also be before the military court. Accused military whistle-blower and Nobel Peace Prize nominee PFC Manning has been in prison for over 900 days. His court martial is currently scheduled to begin February 4, 2013.
Thanks to the release of the documents in question, American journalists and citizens have a far greater window into the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and secret corporate influence on foreign policy. While no specific harm resulted from the release of this information, PFC Manning faces life in military prison if convicted.
A $5 to $10 suggested donation at the door will be collected to cover event expenses. The event will also feature brief presentations from Bradley Manning Support Network spokespeople Emma Cape and whistle-blower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, and an appeal from David House in support of Bradley Manning’s defense fund.
Media are welcome to record Mr. Coombs’ presentation. This event will also be live-streamed at bradleymanning.org. We ask that you consider organizing a group viewing of the presentation. Go here to register, if you wish to host a public screening.
This handicap accessible event is hosted by the Bradley Manning Support Network, with the support of:
Center on Conscience & War
CODEPINK: Women for Peace
Courage to Resist
DC Metro Science for the People
Dorothy Day Catholic Worker – DC
Hiroshima Nagasaki Peace Committee
International CURE
National CURE
National Lawyers Guild
Peace Action Montgomery
Positive Force
Veterans for Peace – DC
Veterans for Peace – National
Washington Peace Center
Witness Against Torture
Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom – DC
World Can’t Wait
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