Tuesday, April 23, 2013

***From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

Boston's International Workers Day 2013


BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)

To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)

Other May Day events:

Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm

BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally

Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston
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All Out May Day 2012: A Day Without the 99% -General Strike Occupy Boston Working Group

Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.

http://www.bostonmayday.org

In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other issues such as political transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.

May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.

Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.

Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.

That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.

Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.

Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.

On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.

For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.

In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.

At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.

That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.

The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!

Ritchie Havens -RIP

Ritchie Havens -RIP
 


 
 

45th Anniversary of 1968 Columbia University Student Revolt: Revisiting 2011 Interview About 1968 Revolt and Columbia's NROTC Connection

On April 23, 1968 a student revolt of Columbia University and Barnard College students began on the campus of Columbia University in New York City that led to the non-violent occupation by anti-war and anti-racist students of five Columbia University buildings: Hamilton Hall, Low Library, Avery Hall, Fayerweather Hall and Mathematics Hall; and a subsequent invasion and occupation of Columbia's campus in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968 by around 1,000 New York City Tactical Patrol Force [TPF]cops (who arrested over 700 students and injured over 100 students and faculty members during the police riot that developed after the police began to make arrests and clear the university buildings of its protesting students).

To mark the 45th anniversary of the beginning of the 1968 Columbia University Student Revolt, following is the text of a 2011 e-mail interview with a Columbia student about both the 1968 student revolt at Columbia and the Columbia Administration's decision to begin training U.S. Navy military officers again on its campus for the endless U.S. wars abroad during the 21st-century in a Columbia University Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps [NROTC] department/unit:

What was the climate like on campus in the 1960s from your perspective?

BF: Although Columbia was on the border of Harlem, in the 1960s very few students, professors or administrators at Columbia or Barnard were African-American in the 1960s. So the climate on Columbia’s campus in the 1960s was felt by most Black students who attended either the then-all-male Columbia College or one of Columbia’s professional grad schools to be unfriendly and unwelcoming. Black students returning to their dorms on Columbia’s campus at night, for example, were often stopped by Columbia’s security guards on campus and asked to show their Columbia student identification card much more frequently than their white student counterparts—who were usually never stopped unless they were visibly drunk and rowdy.

Yet perhaps because of the impact of mass media coverage of the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement, by the Fall of 1965—when I arrived at Columbia—hundreds of mostly white liberal or white left Columbia College or Barnard College undergraduate students were involved, outside of the classroom, in various Harlem or Upper West Side community service or tutoring projects that the student-run Columbia Citizenship Council organized; or in student activist groups like Columbia and Barnard’s Congress on Racial Equality—C.O.R.E.—chapter.

But still, until April 1968 the majority of Columbia and Barnard undergraduates seemed much more into just hanging out in the Ferris Booth Hall student union building lounge and Lion’s Den cafeteria during the day, going to the West End Bar—you could legally drink at 18 years of age in Manhattan in the 1960s—and exploring Manhattan on weekends, their academic/career preparation work, or their personal relationships; than into getting involved in either Civil Rights Movement activism, Citizenship Council community service projects, or any anti-war activism which protested the Columbia University Administration’s collaboration with the Vietnam War Era Pentagon war machine in any sustained way, on a daily basis. And until April 1968, most of the Columbia grad students and professional school students seemed too busy working on their master’s thesis or PhD dissertations or academic work—or reading of law books-- to be involved much with anti-war student groups like Columbia-Barnard SDS, on a regular basis.

And aside from a Columbia Professor of Math named Serge Lang, a Columbia Professor at the School of Engineering named Seymour Melman, a Columbia Professor of Sociology named Vernon Dibble and the Episcopal Campus Ministry person at Columbia’s Earl Hall—Rev. Bill Starr—nearly all the members of the Columbia and Barnard faculty in the 1960s seemed more into their academic careers on a daily basis, than into speaking out much against Columbia University’s involvement, institutionally, with both the Institute for Defense Analyses—IDA—weapons research think tank of the Pentagon or the Pentagon’s Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps—NROTC—program that trained U.S. military officers for the U.S. military intervention in Indochina.

Another thing about the climate on Columbia’s campus in the 1960s was that since only men were then admitted to Columbia College, only men then lived inside the Columbia College dorms and there were some restrictions on allowing women to visit men inside Columbia College’s dorms even in the late 1960s. So the only anti-war canvassing and knocking on dormitory doors to discuss the war and the draft with dorm residents on each floor—and the slipping of anti-war flyers under dormitory room doors—that could be done inside Columbia’s dorms in the 1960s had to be done usually by Columbia College men alone.

Most of the students on Columbia’s campus seemed to be either politically apathetic or pro-war until the Fall of 1966—when the Columbia SDS chapter that the still-imprisoned U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert founded was re-organized and most of the 200 to 300 students who had attended the demos and meetings and rallies on a fairly regular basis of the Independent Committee on Vietnam—the ICV—at Columbia--which had been formed after the Pentagon began bombing North Vietnam regularly in early 1965—collectively decided that a multi-issue, anti-war student group like Columbia SDS—which also worked to democratize the decision-making process at Columbia by creating more student power at Columbia—was the way to go politically for Columbia and Barnard’s white student left.

Yet even though there had been a protest outside Low Library—where the NROTC ceremony at Columbia was being held—in May 1965-- which was broken up by the New York City cops that the Columbia Administration called in at that time--it’s important again to realize that anti-war students at Columbia and Barnard still represented a minority campus sentiment until the early months of 1967. And until April 1968, the majority of Columbia and Barnard students—although by then passively opposed to the Vietnam War and the draft that then threatened their lives after graduation once they lost their student deferments—were generally still pretty apathetic politically on a daily basis.

What did exist, though, before April 1968 at Columbia and Barnard that didn’t exist at most other U.S. universities—with the possible exception of UC-Berkeley and some of the other large state universities—was a hard-core of 30 to 50 anti-war New Left radical student activists, organizing under the Columbia SDS banner, whose steering committee met every Friday afternoon—usually in Earl Hall—to figure out different ways in which the apathetic anti-war liberal majority of Columbia and Barnard students could be politically radicalized in their political/philosophical consciousness and lifestyle aspirations; and eventually also mobilized to unite politically and end the Columbia Administration’s collaboration with the U.S. war machine and its institutional racism with regard to the historic way it related to Harlem residents and its African-American students.

What also existed at Columbia in the 1960s that didn’t exist at most other U.S. universities was a political revolutionary leadership of SAS—the Student Afro-American Society—which was willing to both align with a nearly all white anti-war left radical student group like Columbia SDS—once SDS showed it could mobilize nearly 500 people to non-violently confront the Columbia Administration around a set of anti-war and anti-racist demands; and which was willing to take a leadership role inside Hamilton Hall of the mass base of SDS during the initial period of the April 1968 student revolt at Columbia—that was sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, the failure of the Columbia Administration to both stop construction of its planned gymnasium in Morningside Park despite the protests of Harlem’s community groups and end Columbia’s institutional membership and sponsorship of the Pentagon’s IDA, and the attempt of the Columbia Administration to discipline anti-war student activists for staging an indoor demo against the Columbia-IDA connection inside Low Library in march 1968.

After Columbia’s buildings were occupied and the two police invasions/police riots of April and May 1968 on Columbia’s campus happened, of course, the climate on Columbia’s campus became much more politicized for the next few years than before April 1968; and the level of general student political apathy seemed to decline dramatically.

What objections, if any, do you have regarding the return of the ROTC today?

BF: The return of a ROTC program to Columbia’s campus would represent a decision by the Columbia Administration to, on an institutional level, contribute to the Pentagon’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011. If you think it’s moral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it probably would seem o.k. morally to you for Columbia University to start training U.S. military officers on its campus.

But what if, like me, you think that it’s immoral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Then wouldn’t it also be then immoral for Columbia University to contribute to prolonging this U.S. military intervention by training U.S. military officers who will be participating in this unjust and endless war?

In recent years, for example, 80 percent of all students who were trained on Cornell University’s campus by that Ivy League School’s ROTC program have served as U.S. military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, if you check out the Wikipedia entry for “Reserve Officers Training Corps,” it seems to indicate that in recent years U.S. university ROTC programs have been producing 39 percent of all active-duty officers for the Pentagon—20 percent of all active duty U.S. Navy officers, 41 percent of all officers for the U.S. Air Force which has dropped bombs that kill civilians on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and 56 percent of all active duty U.S. Army officers (many of whom have—after being trained by U.S. universities—been involved in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example).

Or to put my objections another way. Imagine that you were a German student at a German university in late 1940 and you were examining the ways that German universities were contributing to the German war effort and occupation in Poland and France, for example. One way might be that science professors at German universities were doing research for the German Ministry of Defense. And another way might be that German universities were training some of their students to serve as German military officers in the German war machine that bombed and occupied Poland, France and other countries.

And imagine that you had discovered in 1940 that thousands of civilians had been killed in Poland and elsewhere by the same German military that the science professors at the German university you attended were doing research for; and that the German university you attended was training some of its students to be military officers for the German military? Wouldn’t you then feel that you had an internationalist moral and humanitarian obligation to do all that you could to stop the German university that you attended from training officers for the German military on your campus?

In addition, even if you don’t object to what’s been done overseas to foreign civilians and to the foreign soldiers, foreign insurgents and U.S. soldiers who have been casualties of the endless Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan military intervention by the U.S. government, an objection to the return of ROTC can be made on the philosophical basis that U.S. universities should be in the business of the pursuit of knowledge and the promotion of humanism and pacifism; and not be involved in training its students in ROTC courses like “the art of war” and the killing of the people that the U.S. government decides is now “the enemy.”

Before the DADT law was in place, what were the guidelines barring ROTC from being a campus activity: in other words, what do you see was the reason for its absence in the 1970s and 1980s?

BF: The official grounds for barring ROTC from being a campus activity before the DADT by most of the Ivy League administrations and their faculty committees may sometimes have been that the ROTC courses may not have conformed to the academic course accreditation criteria required by some of these Ivy League schools. But I think the real reason for ROTC’s absence in the 1970s and 1980s from places like Columbia was because anti-militarist student and faculty sentiment was still high, due to the campus political consciousness that had developed during the Vietnam War Era. And administrators at places like Columbia probably felt it made no political sense to disturb the relative campus calm of the post-1973 era by provoking its by then generally politically passive anti-war student body and politically passive anti-war professors into a potential new wave of campus protest--comparable to what happened in the 1960s—by trying to push ROTC back onto their campuses.

What do you think would happen if the ROTC was allowed to return to campus—at Columbia and elsewhere?

BF: Both the Pentagon and the U.S. corporate media—including the New York Times—would probably highlight it as an historical reversal of one of the legacies of the Vietnam War Era and the 1968 Columbia Anti-War Student Strike fall-out and the Sixties Anti-War Movement. And it would probably be utilized by the U.S. government as evidence that—under the Democratic Obama Administration—the alienation of U.S. college students from the U.S. military has decreased and that current U.S. college students—even at a bastion of anti-war sentiment historically like Columbia and Barnard—now have less objection to the continued endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan than did U.S. college students during the Republican Bush Administration.

The folks on the U.S. right-wing who don’t see anything morally questionable about the militarism of U.S. foreign policy will probably also feel more emboldened about bringing their pro-militarist agenda onto Columbia’s campus and re-militarizing Columbia to the point where they would eventually demand that the ban on secret military research on Columbia’s campus also be lifted.

And I suspect that some more juicy, lucrative Department of Defense research contracts would tend to get thrown Columbia’s way much more, if ROTC were now allowed to return to Columbia’s campus. So Columbia might once again, eventually, become “The MIT of West Harlem”—in terms of the degree to which it once again started to become dependent on Pentagon contracts for nearly half its budget, like it was in the mid-1960s.

Of course, once students wearing ROTC uniforms started marching around on campus and holding military-oriented ceremonies again on Columbia’s campus, it’s also possible that eventually—if the endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan isn’t ended or if an additional U.S. military intervention in Iran, North Korea or Venezuela is eventually started over the next few years—some anti-war students at Barnard College and Columbia College might mobilize eventually in larger numbers to again demand that Columbia stop training U.S. military officers for the U.S. power elite’s endless wars abroad.

What is your perspective on the acceptance, with faculty, alumni and current students?

BF: If you check out the chapter, titled “The Military Ascendancy,” in former Columbia University Professor C. Wright Mills’ book The Power Elite, J.W. Fulbright’s The Pentagon Propaganda Machine book or the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon from the 1970s—and also Al Jazeera TV’s recent documentary on YouTube on the way the Pentagon uses Hollywood to promote support for U.S. military adventurism around the globe—you’ll see that since World War II there’s always been a big public relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. military-industrial-university-media complex to get people in the USA to feel that it’s “unpatriotic” to be opposed to the militarization of U.S. society and a U.S. foreign policy that is militaristic or to call for huge cuts in the Pentagon’s defense budget. And U.S. supporters of a pacifist U.S. foreign policy and the demilitarization of U.S. society and of U.S. universities like Columbia generally don’t get much mass media TV exposure—except when anti-war and anti-racist students non-violently occupy buildings in large numbers at places like Columbia in 1968 or when anti-war activists—like the Chicago 8—went on trial in Chicago during the 1969-1970 academic year.

So it wouldn’t be unexpected if current Barnard College , Columbia College students and faculty—as well as current Columbia Journalism School students and faculty—end up accepting passively the return of ROTC to places like Columbia in 2011. Especially if it’s marketed as “a way to influence the U.S. military in a more humanitarian direction”; or as something that only students and professors who are “soft on terrorism” or “stuck in a 1960s mentality,” or “politically naïve pacifists” would have moral objections about.

On the other hand it could be that the now-imprisoned Private Manning’s morally courageous de-classification of those Wikileaks cables and documents have revealed to enough people on campuses like Columbia that what the U.S. military is doing around the world contradicts the humanistic values and democratic moral values that most students and professors and workers at Columbia and Barnard have, historically, been brought up to adhere to. And that, therefore, the U.S. military still does not belong on Columbia University’s campus in 2011. (end of interview)

Lynne Steward's Life In Danger Now!



Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart and Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Below you will find new material related to the fight to win compassionate release for Lynne Stewart. A magnificent article by Chris Hedges is included. Please help us circulate it far and wide. Once again, please help circulate the petition, also below, to all your friends.


Lynne's life is at stake and every second counts.


In solidarity,


Jeff Mackler, Director, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense committee



AN UPDATE FROM MYA SHONE AND RALPH SCHOENMAN – CO-COORDINATORS WITH RALPH POYNTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PETITION CAMPAIGN TO SAVE THE LIFE OF LYNNE STEWART

As the campaign builds, Lynne Stewart’s condition has taken a concerning turn for the worse. Her white blood cell count has dropped sharply. Lynne is in isolation currently and will be sent to a Fort Worth hospital for tests.

This news has lent a dramatic urgency to The International Petition Campaign to Save the Life of Lynne Stewart, even as it has crossed a new threshold: Over 10,000 people have signed the petition as signatories pour in daily from across the world.

Noted associate of President Kwame Nkrumah, Ambassador Kojo Amoo-Gottfried, Ghana’s former ambassador to China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, has called upon all who fought for self-determination and freedom to raise their voices now for “our dear sister in struggle, Lynne Stewart, even as she has fought for us over a lifetime.”

The Socialist Forum of Ghana has launched a national campaign to save the life of Lynne Stewart.

We must intensify our efforts in this battle for her freedom and her life.

Ed Asner, Richard Falk, Daniel Ellsberg, Cornel West, David Ray Griffin, Bonnie Kerness, Zachary Sklar, Alice Walker, Katha Pollitt, Michael Ratner, Sara Kuntsler, Heidi Boghosian, Wallace Shawn, San Francisco Supervisor John Avelos, Peter Kinoy, Peter Dale Scott, Wilhemina Levy, Cynthia McKinney, Pam Africa, and Louis Wolf are among current signers.

We urge all to contact five people and ask each of them to contact five more, allowing each of us, thereby, in five stages to reach five thousand people.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist and Occupy Wall Street leader Chris Hedges has published today an evocative and compelling article entitled “The Persecution of Lynne Stewart” that captures Lynne’s stirring eloquence, abiding humanity and quiet courage. (See below)

The petition is at:
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2


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The Persecution of Lynne Stewart

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_persecution_of_lynne_stewart_20130421/

Posted on Apr 21, 2013

By Chris Hedges

Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence. Stewart’s family is pleading with the state for “compassionate release” and numerous international human rights campaigners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have signed a petition calling for her to be freed on medical grounds. It is not only a crime in the U.S. to be poor, to be a Muslim, to openly condemn the crimes committed in our name in the Muslim world, but to defend those who do. And the near total collapse of our judicial system, wrecked in the name of national security and “the war on terror,” is encapsulated in the saga of this courageous attorney—now disbarred because of her conviction.

“I hope that my imprisonment sends the wake up call that the government is prepared to imprison lawyers who do not conduct legal representation in a manner the government has ordained,” she told me when I reached her through email in prison. “My career of 30 plus years has always been client centered. My clients and I decided on the best legal course, without the interference of the government. Ethics require that the defense lawyer DEFEND, get the client off. We have no obligation to obey [the] ‘rules’ government lays down.

“I believe that since 9/11 the government has pursued Muslims with an ever heavier hand,” she wrote, all messages to her and from her being vetted by prison authorities. “However, cases such as the Sheikh’s in 1995 amply demonstrate that Muslims had been targeted even earlier as the new ENEMY—always suspect, always guilty. After 9/11, we discovered that the government prosecutors were ordered to try and get Osama Bin Laden into EVERY Muslim prosecution inducing in American Juries a Pavlovian response. Is it as bad as lynching and the Scottsboro Boys and the Pursuit of Black Panthers? Not as of yet, but getting close and of course the incipient racism that that colors—pun?—every action in the U.S. is ever present in these prosecutions.”

Stewart, as a young librarian in Harlem, got an early taste of the insidious forms of overt and covert racism that work to keep most people of color impoverished and trapped in their internal colonies or our prison complex. She went on to get her law degree and begin battling in the courts on behalf of those around her for whom justice was usually denied. By 1995, along with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara, she was the lead trial counsel for the sheik, who was convicted in September of that year. He received life in prison plus 65 years, a sentence Stewart called “outlandish.” The cleric, in poor health, is serving a life sentence in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. Stewart continued to see the sheik in jail after the sentence. Three years later the government severely curtailed his ability to communicate with the outside world, even through his lawyers, under special administrative measures or SAMs.

In 2000, during a visit with the sheik, he asked Stewart to release a statement from him to the press. The Clinton administration did not prosecute her for the press release, but the Bush administration in April 2002, the mood of the country altered by the attacks of 9/11, decided to go after her. Attorney General John Ashcroft came to New York in April 2002 to announce that the Justice Department had indicted Stewart, a paralegal and the interpreter on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization. That night he went on “Late Show with David Letterman” to tell the nation of the indictment and the Bush administration’s vaunted “war on terror.”

“Rev up the military industrial complex,” Stewart wrote when I asked her what purpose the “war on terror” served. “Keep the populace terrorized so that they look to Big Brother Government for protection. Cannon Fodder for the ‘throwaways’ in our society—young, poor, uneducated, persons of color.”

Stewart’s 2005 trial was a Punch-and-Judy show. The state demanded an outrageous 30-year prison sentence. It showed the jurors lurid videos of Osama bin Laden and images of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, and spun a fantastic web of Islamic, terrorist intrigue. To those of us who covered groups such as al-Qaida and the armed Islamic groups in Egypt—I was based in Cairo at the time as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times—the government scenarios were utterly devoid of fact or credibility. The government prosecutors, for example, blamed numerous terrorist attacks, including the killing of 62 people in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, on the sheik, although he publicly denounced the attack and had no connection with the radical Islamic group in Egypt that carried it out. And even Manhattan District Judge John Koeltl instructed the jury more than 750 times that the photos of Osama bin Laden and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks were not relevant to the case. Stewart was sentenced to 28 months. The Obama administration appealed the ruling. The appeals court ruled that the sentence was too light. Koeltl gave her 10 years. She has served three.

Her family’s appeal for a “compassionate release” must defy the odds. Human Rights Watch and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) noted in a 2012 report, “The Answer is No: Too Little Compassionate Release in US Federal Prisons,” that the Federal Bureau of Prisons rarely even bothers to submit compassionate release requests to the courts. Since 1992, the bureau has averaged two dozen motions a year to the courts for compassionate release. The bureau does not provide figures for the number of prisoners who seek compassionate release.

“No messy side effects—vomiting, diarrhea—thank goodness,” Stewart wrote to me about her cancer care. “I have one more treatment and then they have used all the poison it’s safe to use. I am bald but the hardest for me to endure, who has always relied on her memory and quick wit, is the chemo brain that slows and sometimes stops me.

“I am up at 4:30 [a.m.] and wait till the ‘Count’ is over and have a shower etc.,” she noted of her daily routine. “I get dressed and take a short rest (feet up) until breakfast at 6 am. I am in a room with 6 other women—the unusual mix of inmates and I rely on them to help me with just about everything—getting to the clinics, picking up meds, filling my ice bucket, helping with my laundry, etc. At 9:00 every day, they laughingly say, I go to the ‘office.’ That means email or the law library where I correspond and meet with women who need my help. I go back up by 10:30 and take a short nap till lunch. Meals here are meager and not well prepared. Of course, I have favorites—the hamburgers (beef THIN patty) served every Wednesday in every federal prison for lunch. Some of the women count their time in terms of how many hamburger days they have left! We are served cut up iceberg lettuce with a little red cabbage and carrots with meals and I have used my commissary purchases to concoct some more exotic dressings than those offered here.

“After lunch I go back to bed for a longer nap and then up for mail call—lots of letters, newspapers, magazines etc.” she wrote, “a time of the day I sometimes shed a few tears at the love and intensity of those who have written to state their support. Then supper and back to bed and reading—pure pleasure—much fiction (mysteries, Scottish etc. and authors I love Morrison, Sarmargo). [There is] some conversing with my roommates and then after the 9:00 pm count I am off to sleep. I have a hospital bed that is next to large windows—no bars. I can see the Trinity River, barely. Trees. This view of nature is responsible for keeping me alive in the real sense.

“I hoped that there would be common cause among the women here because we are all confronted by totally arbitrary authority every minute of every day,” she went on. “Prison is a perverse place of selfishness and sometimes generosity but not much unity. There are a few and we recognize each other but by and large the harsh realities of people’s origins and the system have ruined most of us. It is particularly horrendous to realize the number of children that the prison system rips from their mothers’ arms, thus creating yet another generation to feed the beast of prison industrial complex.

“I fear we are headed into a period of ever increasing cruelty to those who can least stand it,” she wrote. “As corporate agendas become national agendas there is a profound disrespect for all those who are not able to even get to the starting line. We do not love the children except when they are massacred—the daily mental, emotional deaths in the public schools are ignored. We are now a nation of Us and Them. I would HOPE that the people would recognize what is happening and make a move. After all, who in the fifties could have predicted the uprisings of the sixties? There must be a distaste and willful opposition to what is happening and a push to take it back—local movements scaring the HELL out of the Haves.”

In a 2003 speech at a National Lawyers Guild convention in Minneapolis, Stewart eloquently laid out her mission as an advocate, and more important as a mother and a member of the human race.

“For we have formidable enemies not unlike those in the tales of ancient days,” she told the gathering. “There is a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless; an enemy motivated only by insatiable greed - The Miller’s daughter made to spin gold - the fisherman’s wife: Midas, all with no thought of consequences. In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money boxes.

“We now resume our everyday lives but we have been charged once again, with, and for, our quests, and like Hippolyta and her Amazons; like David going forth to meet Goliath, like Beowulf the dragon slayer, like Queen Zenobia, who made war on the Romans, like Sir Galahad seeking the holy grail,” she said. “And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.’?Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.
“We go out to stop police brutality -?To rescue the imprisoned -?To change the rules for those who have never ever been able to get to the starting line much less run the race, because of color, physical condition, gender, mental impairment,” she said. “We go forth to preserve the air and land and water and sky and all the beasts that crawl and fly. We go forth to safeguard the right to speak and write, to join; to learn, to rest safe at home, to be secure, fed, healthy, sheltered, loved and loving, to be at peace with ones identity.”

From prison Stewart wrote to me in closing, “I have been fortunate to live a charmed life—parents who loved me without qualification (yes, we fought about Vietnam and my African American husband but I never doubted that they would always be there for me). I had children when I was young enough to grow with them. Today they are the backbone of my support and love. I came to politics in the early sixties and was part of a vibrant movement that tried to empower local control of public schools to make the ultimate changes for children and break the back of racism in minority communities. My partner/husband Ralph Poynter was always—60 years and counting—in my corner and when at a less than opportune moment I announced my desire to go to law school, he made sure it happened. I had a fabulous legal career in a fabulous city—championing the political rights of the comrades of the 60’s and 70’s and also representing many who had no hope of a lawyer who would fight for them against the system. I have enjoyed good friends, loved cooking, had poetry and theater for a joy. I could go on and on BUT all of this good fortune has always meant only one thing to me—that I have to fight, struggle to make sure EVERYONE can have a life like mine. That belief is what will always sustain me.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Free Lynne Stewart: A Call to Action from Ed Asner

"Given the enormous good that Lynne Stewart has done for humanity throughout her life as a courageous lawyer for the poor, the oppressed and the unjustly accused, I am shocked by the cynical perversity of a government that has pursued her savagely and vengefully.

Lynne Stewart's treatment by the government has been demonic. Prevented from scheduled surgery, her breast cancer spread to her lymph nodes, bones and lungs. Denied proper medical treatment, she has been bound with 10 pounds of shackles and chains, even when in a hospital bed.

In tormenting Lynne Stewart the government seeks to terrorize all lawyers who would defend those targeted by State repression. The treatment of Lynne Stewart is a threat to due process, an assault on fundamental rights that date to Magna Carta.

Lynne Stewart must be free. The law requires her compassionate release and the medical care that can save her life. We must deny the State a death sentence aimed at the freedom of us all.

The State power that torments Lynne Stewart invades countries at will, murders hundreds of thousands with impunity and creates a climate of fear and repression to prevent the people of this country from calling those in power to account.

The fight to free Lynne Stewart is a front-line battle for basic rights secured through the American Revolution and is a measure of our will to reclaim a land of the free in the home of the brave."


***

"The government's treatment of Lynne Stewart during her trial was arbitrary, politically motivated and made a mockery of our justice system. Its treatment of her now while she is imprisoned and seriously ill, is shameful, heartless and inhuman. I join with many thousands around the world to urge her immediate release so that she can get proper medical attention."

Zachary Sklar

***



AP/Stephen Chernin

Lynne Stewart at a news conference in New York City in 2002.


A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_persecution_of_lynne_stewart_20130421/





***On The Anniversary Of Irish Easter Uprising 1916- A Word




A word on the Easter Uprising.

The easy part of analyzing the Uprising is the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland and militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it and therefore doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the strategy and tactics of the action and of the various actors, particularly in underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. Although, I think that would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s (or fill in the blank) woes were Ireland’s (or fill in the blank) opportunities.

The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were entirely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then- All British Troops Out of Ireland.

In various readings I have come across a theory that the Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (Let poets rule the land).

As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. Some formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Soviet Commune of 1917 did not figure in the political calculations at that time.
As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.

That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter Rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own revolutionary experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord as a way to open the road to the class, struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.

Monday, April 22, 2013


***Out In The Be-Bop Doo Wop Night- The Night Red Rock Doo Wopped

 

Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.

Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.

Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.

“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van.

And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. “I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running- Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepherd turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.

Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.

Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penguins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.

But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.

Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they were all in one circle, even Benjy was in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz started out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse  

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2009 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.
************
IT AIN’T GOING TO BE POPULAR BUT-HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA!

COMMENTARY

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM- WHEN YOU LET THE GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE –WATCH OUT-AND DON’T CRY

In a recent blog commenting on Massachusetts Senator John Forbes Kerry’s emerging presidential campaign for the elections of 2008 (see October 2006 archives, dated October 13th) this writer commented on Mr. Kerry’s hue and cry over the fact that North Korea had recently detonated some small nuclear devise and the need to take ‘appropriate action’ including, presumably a preemptive first strike against that country. That position has also been echoed by others in the liberal establishment. At that time I wrote that I would have further comments later. Here goes.

The hard realities of international politics in the year 2006 is that any “third world” countries that are  in the crosshairs of the American imperialists( or other imperialists) need nuclear weapons in order to survive. I said this would not be pretty. The two destructive wars in Iraq over the past 15 years when a marginally harmful figure to imperialists interests (whatever they might be) like Saddam Hussein was dealt severe conventional military blows when the West thought he even had the potential in some distant future to produce such weaponry dramatically brings that point home. In the current one superpower world dominated overwhelmingly by a far-flung American military presence this fact cannot have been lost on any leader of a small nation-least of all Kim il Jung of North Korea. Western imperialism’s hypocrisy over the occurrence of the blast and its and the media’s treatment of it, replete with vintage film footage reminiscent of old May Day parades,  like some central event of the presumably long past Cold War seems strikingly irrational in the context of American military strategy. 

Let me cite the standard leftist comments on such hypocrisy. While such comments might seem tired and reflect an old Cold War reality they nevertheless should underline any leftist response to the international situation.  America, after all, let the genie out of the bottle when it first developed the atomic bomb for use in the waning days of World War II. Those who let the genie out of the bottle should not cry- over 60 years later- when some upstarts come along, use the simplification of that technology to develop their own weaponry and want to play in the same sandbox. Commentators in defending American leadership of an exclusive  nuclear club have placed great emphasis on the deterrent effect, based on mutually assured destruction, of the then escalating nuclear arms race during most parts of the Cold War which ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Two comments should disabuse the reader of that notion of firm stewardship by American imperialism over that time. One, the Americans ruling class did in fact use nuclear weapons on essentially defenseless and defeated people in Japan. And has been the only power in history to do so. Two, the American imperialists today have several thousand serious nuclear weapons with the capacity to launch them anytime, anywhere and if history is any judge with little compunction to use them. “Third World” tin pot dictators, quasi-socialist bureaucrats and other assorted rulers are not the only ones that should be worried by such facts. Damn, I am worried.        

Among the first political activities that I engaged in as a youth was the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I admired the struggles of the British Labor Party to make Great Britain a nuclear-free zone during the height of the Cold War. As an advocate for a socialism that youthful dream still holds sway- but with a much better understanding of the nature of world politics, and far less naiveté about the nature and intentions of the American capitalist system. Iraq today is only the most graphic example of such ruthless- ness. Unlike such groups as the hard-line Stalinist Workers World Party which apparently wants the North Korean U.S. political franchise (for what it is worth) much as American Maoists of my generation fought for the Chinese franchise when China was a popular icon in the revolutionary pantheon I do not see Kim as one of nature’s noblemen. Nor is North Korea a “workers paradise” by any stretch of the imagination. But make no mistake I join them and others in demanding- HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA!          

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse  

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2009 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.
************
NEWS FLASH: OUT OF THE LOOP MILITANT LEFTIST CALLS THE SITUATION IN IRAQ A FULL-BLOWN CIVIL WAR

COMMENTARY

A BASIC RULE OF POLITICS- DO NOT BE AFRAID TO CALL A THING BY ITS RIGHT NAME

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY

I am privy to no special insider information on the trials and tribulations of the internal situation in Iraq. I get my information from the mass media just like most citizens. However, as a politico I pay very close attention to the writings of political journalists, especially those who have been to Iraq and have eye-witness observations about the situation. What is amazing in the fall of 2006 is their near unanimous agreement, regardless of political persuasion, that Iraq is in the midst of a sectarian civil war. Yet, virtually none will call the situation there by that name. They are in a classic position of hedging their bets. Why? This writer has not and does not support American foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular. On the other hand the political writers I have read have some kind of fundamental belief in the rightness of general American foreign policy. In short, those writers exhibit in a different way that same hubris that animated the Bush Administration to go into Iraq in the first place. That is, it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time and although it did not turn out to be the right thing to do nevertheless we must stay to correct the errors. This the arrogance of power-once removed. Sweet Jesus, under that theory our grandchildren will be fighting in Iraq.

The daily news out of Iraq is uniformly grim. X number of Shia, Sunni or others are daily found handcuffed, shot and dumped on the outskirts of town. Or in a river. The recently augmented American forces sent into Baghdad have seemingly kicked every door in the city down to no real effect, except to recruit for the insurgents or some sectarian militia.  There are not enough morgues in Iraq (and maybe the whole Middle East) to hold the victims. Additionally, this week, the week of October 1, 2006 a whole brigade of American trained and financed Iraqi police had to be disbanded for complicity with militias and general ugliness. Dear readers this is civil war pure and simple. Not the prelude to, not a low-level about to be, but a full blown civil war. A year or so ago the situation was not nearly as clear. However, now why are even thoughtful bourgeois journalists and commentators being so coquettish about calling a thing by its right name? Does it have to look like the first skirmishes of the American Civil War at Bull Run before the situation in Iraq is recognized as such? Well, this out-of-the-loop leftist is not going out on any political limb whatever-Iraq is in a full-blown civil war. End of story.

What to do about it. This writer has long called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. That position is a no-brainer now.  However, for the slow-witted Bush Administration here is a quick and short term solution. And it has the virtue of coming from a late revered member of the Republican Party. Call Iraq a victory and withdraw now. During the Vietnam War Vermont Republican United States Senator George Aikens (I believe) made that comment. For those enthralled by parliamentary solutions this seems reasonable. Let future historians argue and fuss over the truth of that assertion of victory. In the meantime-GET THE HELL OUT OF IRAQ NOW!     
From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse  

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2009 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.
************
THESE ARE NOT SALAD DAYS FOR LIBERAL HAWKS

BOOK REVIEW

THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006

In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among Democratic propagandists are of no direct concern to working on those tasks. However, every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?

With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20th century. In short, he is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party.  Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.

The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain at Munch in regard to the war on terror. The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on?  If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activist take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.

Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Without giving an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond? Fair enough. The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though the final aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage. It would know who to go after and it would not be against Saddam on this issue although it would be on socialist grounds. However, let me suggest this. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually half-heartedly, in retrospect was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition?  One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state.  That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. In the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.               
FROM THE PEN OF LEON TROTSKY-PRACTICAL PROBLEMS IN BUILDING A SOCIALIST SOCIETY


BOOK REVIEW

PROBLEMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE, LEON TROTSKY, MONAD PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

Sometimes those of us embattled socialists still trying to propagandize for the socialist worldview get so totally caught up in that fight that we at times neglect the goals of our efforts. No so Leon Trotsky who despite being in a continual fight inside the Russian Communist Party in the 1920’s to save and extend the Russian Revolution from time to time put out essays and gave speeches on behalf of that goal. The book under review contains a wide ranging selection of some of the everyday issues and examples of the aspirational messages given that concerned him at the time. Although some of those issues are particular to the Russian situation due to the underdevelopment of Russian society at that time (and unfortunately now as well) some of the aspirational essays should be taken to heart by socialists working today.

Generally when educated people speak of culture they are referring to “high culture”, the arts and the like. Trotsky was not unaware of that distinction and wrote many enduring essays elsewhere on the subjects of literature and the arts. Here Trotsky looks at the deeper meaning of culture for the mass of society. That is, those characteristics and manners of behavior that would lead to a more educated workforce, a more enlightened population and that would give the fight for a socialist society a gigantic push forward. Thus, he writes about the problems of endemic alcoholism, illiteracy, swearing, the fight against religious superstition, the fight for cleanliness and promptness and the like. Except in a mocking manner most cultural writers do not take such issues seriously except to distance themselves from the habits of the under classes. Yet here was a big time intellectual, revolutionary leader and in this reviewer’s opinion an exemplar of communist man harping on the necessity of acquiring just such virtues.

Part of the compilation in this book is taken up with Trotsky’s daydreaming in print about how a future socialist and then communist classless society might look. He did not neglect the importance of using the preexisting industrial apparatus left from capitalism as the starting point. He also presents many interesting predictions about the use of technology, including nuclear technology, and mass communications to make the transition easier. However, Trotsky’s dreams certainly do not include a theory of “barrack communism”, that is, the equality of all citizens based on scarcity or return to a more primitive form of society. On the contrary, Trotsky’s communist future is explicitly based on abundance so that the question of daily survival is taken off the agenda for the mass of humankind. Then society, will as a matter of course, develop many great political thinkers, literary writer and other types of geniuses and put the geniuses of past societies in the shade. Yes, I can get behind goals like that. Yes, those are what the goals of socialism are all about.


A SLICE OF REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY- THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

 

BOOK REVIEW

THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION: CENTRAL COMMITTEE MINUTES OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY, AUGUST 1917-FEBRUARY 1918, PLUTO PRESS, LONDON, 1974

Those readers who have understood the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the prism of Stalinism will be surprised to find in this book of the minutes of the leading body of the Bolshevik Party not the monolithic party of Western thought but a lively and contentious party even at the height of the struggle for revolutionary power. And if one really thinks about it all the great revolutions of history display that same dynamic. I would argue that revolutions can not succeed otherwise. That said, this is not a book for beginners but for those who know something about the Russian Revolution. For those who do not Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution- Volume Two can help up until the October Revolution itself. For the period from October 1917 to February 1918 E. H. Carr’s three volume set titled The Bolshevik Revolution is invaluable.

As background, the beginning of the period under review is a time when the Bolshevik’s were just coming out of a period, known in history as the “July Days”, when the major leaders, including Lenin, were in hiding, laying low, or in jail and Bolshevik publications had been suppressed. The period continues through the abortive coup attempt by General Kornilov, the various attempts by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to crib some non-Soviet democratic institutions together in order to put off the convening of a Constituent Assembly, the fight for the Bolshevik seizure of power, and in the aftermath the fight to end Russian participation in World War I and make peace with the Germans.

As is to be expected not one of the above-mentioned events was without its effect on Bolshevik policy and led to the creation of different factions and tendencies reflecting different moods, constituencies and personalities within the party. The most famous, and for today’s militant’s the most important, are the fight within the party over the question of the seizure of power and the more intense fight over how to and on what terms to end Russia’s participation in the war. To a great extend these various tendencies in one form or another existed for the next ten years after the revolution until the final Stalinist clampdown. Of course, many of the leading personalities did not have long-term consistent policies. For example, Bukharin a leader of the self-styled Left- Communists in the fight over capitulation to German peace demands argued for revolutionary war but later proved to be a key ally of Stalin on the question on the rightist policy of  ‘socialism in one country’. If one wants to get a glance at the way revolutionary policy in the heat of revolution is made here’s a good place to start.