Veterans for Peace sues City of Boston for St. Patrick's Peace Parade permit

Suit challenges City's eleven month delay in acting on permit application and charges favoritism for South Boston parade organizers who continue to exclude most LGBT groups.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  February 12, 2015

CONTACT:
Christopher Ott, communications director, 617-482-3170 x322, cott@aclum.org Patrick Scanlon, Veterans for Peace, 978-590-4248, Vets4PeaceChapter9@gmail.com

BOSTON -- The local Veterans for Peace Chapter 9, Smedley D. Butler Brigade (VFP) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court today against the City of Boston because the city has refused to act in a timely way on VFP's application for a permit to hold its annual St. Patrick's Peace Parade beginning at noon in Boston on March 15. The delay prevents VFP from being able to effectively organize for its parade and impedes its message.

Since 2011, VFP has organized its inclusive, non-discriminatory parade along the same route used by the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council (AWVC), a group that has refused for many years to allow gay rights groups and others, including VFP, to march with identifying signs. According to Patrick Scanlon, the coordinator of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of VFP, the AWVC parade has begun at 1:00 p.m. in the past, and the city has relegated the VFP's parade to commencing various distances behind the AWVC parade, forcing it to begin late in the afternoon.

Scanlon said that despite a recent deal touted by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, in which the AWVC will allow one gay group, "OutVets," to march in the next AWVC parade, the AWVC continues to bar most gay rights, peace and environmental groups. It is not an inclusive parade like VFP's.

"Veterans for Peace applied on March 25, 2014 for a permit to march at noon this coming March 15 to celebrate St. Patrick's Day," said Scanlon,. "We asked the City three times, in June, September and October what was happening with our application, and no one from the City ever responded." The City's refusal to act on the VFP parade application makes it very difficult for VFP to do all the organizing needed to hold a parade, he said.

"Unbelievably, the AWVC has told us in the past that they did not want us in their parade because they did not want the word 'peace' associated with the word 'veteran,'" Scanlon said. "St. Patrick was a man of peace, so the celebration of St. Patrick—the patron saint of Ireland—should be a day to reflect on and celebrate this great saint's deeds and words. Veterans for Peace celebrates the life of Saint Patrick and the proud Irish traditions without militarism. Our Peace Parade celebrating St. Patrick's Day is inclusive and open to anyone who would like to walk for peace. As far as we know, this is the only annual peace

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parade anywhere in the entire country." VFP uses the phrase "The People's Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Environmental Stewardship, Social and Economic Justice" to describe the event.

John Reinstein, a cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, which is bringing the case, explained that the City has violated VFP's First Amendment rights by refusing to act in a timely way on the early VFP request for a permit and by favoring later applications from the AWVC and a road race group, even though those events do not conflict with the VFP parade. He noted that the parade route is already set up and ready by noon when VFP wishes to begin its parade.

"The City acts as if it can just ignore permit applications or hand out or deny permits willy-nilly," said Reinstein. "It doesn't use any clear standards and hasn't even followed its own regulation on parade permits. These permit systems are supposed to be neutrally and fairly enforced. This was anything but that." Attorneys on the case will be asking the federal court to issue an injunction ordering the City to grant a parade permit to VFP for March 15, starting at noon.

Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, acknowledged that the Supreme Court has held that the Allied War Veterans Council of South Boston had its own First Amendment right to exclude groups from its privately run parade. "But," she explained, "the Supreme Court ruling doesn't mean the City can ignore the application by Vets for Peace to parade earlier in the day or can force them to parade after the AWVC parade."

VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade is a chapter of the national VFP. Founded in 1985, Veterans for Peace is a national organization of men and women of all eras and duty stations, including from World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, as well as other conflicts. Veterans for Peace works to expose the true costs of war and to support veterans and civilian victims. For more information, go to www.smedleyvfp.org

For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts, go to:

http://www.aclum.org

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ACLU of Massachusetts :: 211 Congress St. Boston MA 02110 :: 617.482.3170 :: 617.451.0009 (f) :: ACLU of Massachusetts 

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As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around  since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….    


 
 1914, and Other Poems

by Rupert Brooke

1914, and Other Poems 3.81 of 5 stars 3.81  ·  rating details  ·  78 ratings  ·  5 reviews

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into pri This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ...more

Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange! Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review

 

By A. Stevens

 

What compels a person to take action on his own and at great personal risk against the most deadly government on earth? Why does a so-called democracy spy on its own citizens, foreign nationals and even allied heads of state? Citizenfour is the story of Edward Snowden, a former private contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA who disclosed details of how the U.S. government, in cahoots with the largest telecommunications and internet service companies, spies on virtually everyone, everywhere. Those disclosures revealed Big Brother’s spy apparatus to be far greater than previously known.

Snowden used the alias “Citizenfour” to make contact with Laura Poitras, a writer and filmmaker who for years has tenaciously exposed U.S. surveillance activities. For her courageous truth-telling, Poitras earned a spot on a government watch list. Citizenfour is the third part of her trilogy about how the world has changed since September 11, 2001 under the endless U.S. “war on terror.”

Snowden’s story, which captured the front pages of newspapers across the globe in 2013, is well known. Yet it is riveting to watch it unfold in real time, with Poitras behind the camera as Snowden gives his account to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill in a Hong Kong hotel room. The film also provokes the disturbing recognition that people feel so powerless in the face of relentless government overreach that Snowden’s exposure of the NSA, which caused a tremendous stir just over a year ago, is now met with little more than a collective shrug of resignation. Worse yet is the acquiescence, expressed in the often-heard line: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Tell that to the legions of fighters against class and race inequality in this country whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out through government surveillance and repression.

Surveillance is a weapon in the arsenal of state repression. Citizenfour reveals that there are 1.2 million people on U.S. watch lists. The small city of Dearborn, Michigan, (population 96,000) has the largest percentage of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans per capita and has thus been racially profiled by law enforcement as the number two place in the country where suspected terrorists reside.

In the aftermath of the cold-blooded killing of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where another white cop walked away with a pat on the back, it’s important to recognize the connection between surveillance and racial and political profiling. Protesters against racist American injustice need to be aware that fighters for social change in this country are put on one or another government watch list. And in a nation founded on black chattel slavery, a special place is reserved for fighters for racial equality and opponents of capitalist class rule. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1962): “People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

Capitalist Decay and Attacks on the Right to Privacy

The “war on terror” has been a pretext for unfettered force and violence by the American ruling class abroad and at home, from the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the shredding of the civil liberties of the U.S. population. In Washington’s “anti-terror” crusade, national security is the trump card to quash democratic rights. First the Republican Bush administration and then the Democrat Barack Obama seized on the September 11, 2001 attacks to institutionalize extraordinary government powers and snooping through such measures as the USA Patriot Act. These are merely the top shelf of an entire arsenal of repressive legislation that includes the 1917 Espionage Act, which has always been used to criminalize dissent and repress labor and leftist opposition to the U.S. government during wartime. Among its first and most prominent victims was Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, jailed for his political speech and agitation against the capitalist slaughter of World War I.

Snowden is threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act if he were to return to the U.S. from temporary asylum in Russia. Chelsea Manning, who was tortured and now languishes in Leavenworth Prison, was sentenced to 35 years under the Espionage Act. Manning was gone after for letting the world see irrefutable government evidence, documented in its own military logs and diplomatic cables, of heinous U.S. war crimes as well as the everyday depredations of imperialist domination. Snowden was inspired by Manning’s outstanding courage to step forward with his own gigantic trove of information. Curiously, Manning is not mentioned in Poitras’s film, yet it is crucial to link all current struggles for justice with the fight to free victims of government repression. Julian Assange, who published Manning’s material on WikiLeaks, is threatened with U.S. prosecution and remains ensconced in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. We demand: Free Chelsea Manning! Hands off Edward Snowden! Hands off Julian Assange!

The film does show tantalizing evidence of yet another insider with a conscience, who was inspired by Snowden to leak new evidence of U.S. government dirty tricks to Glenn Greenwald. The U.S. government has created its own security nightmare, as disillusioned idealistic servants bite back like the multiheaded Hydra and lift the veil on government secrecy.

In the salad days of its struggle against the yoke of the British monarchy’s colonial rule, the American bourgeoisie fought for the right to privacy and enshrined it as the Fourth Amendment in the original 1791 Bill of Rights. This legal protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government grew out of English common law, which enjoined the police or other forces of the Crown from entering a private home without an official writ. This protection was effectively nullified in the American colonies, where royal magistrates and judges routinely issued writs and warrants to allow British soldiers to ransack private homes and seize property without so much as a suspicion of crime.

The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the U.S. Constitution bespeaks the limited, conservative goals of the bourgeois-democratic American Revolution. Nonetheless, the so-called “founding fathers,” leaders from a period when the bourgeoisie was historically progressive, would be outlaws today in the period of advanced capitalist decay. America’s rulers would appear to them as King George loyalists and traitors to their own revolution and citizenry. The U.S. government has long served as the gendarme for reaction worldwide and backed the bloodiest regimes on the planet. The silver-tongued Obama intones “freedom” while shredding democratic rights at home, prosecuting more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined and directly authorizing assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad.

It’s Gonna Take a Revolution

Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), is a good read in conjunction with viewing Poitras’s Citizenfour. The same conversations with Snowden that Poitras captured on film are related in greater detail in Greenwald’s book. Poitras and Greenwald have both moved to other countries to continue their work at greater distance from vindictive and threatening American authorities. Poitras has been detained and had her notes and electronics seized more than 40 times at U.S. airports. Some of Greenwald’s colleagues in the capitalist media howled for him to be prosecuted because he dared print what the government sought to keep under wraps. In a gratuitously vicious move to torment Greenwald, the British authorities, in league with the U.S., detained and terrorized his partner and political collaborator, David Miranda, when he ferried documents from Poitras to Greenwald through London’s Heathrow airport.

Edward Snowden was compelled by his conscience to risk everything he had in life by taking a stand against omnipresent U.S. government surveillance because he thinks people have a right to know what the government is doing and a right to debate and change policy. In this, Snowden shares a moral and political compass with Chelsea Manning. We hail their courageous acts. Despite Manning’s and Snowden’s self-identification as U.S. patriots, their disclosures provide a factual basis for Marxists like us to help working people see through the stupefying fog of patriotism and democracy that is peddled by the bourgeoisie to dull the wits of those they exploit. It is going to take more than leaks and whistles to fundamentally change society. An essential precondition is the understanding that the government is not “ours,” nor can it be made into a neutral arbiter. Rather, it is part of the machine to maintain capitalist class rule, suitably disguised as an expression and tool of “the people.”

Glenn Greenwald expresses the views held by many libertarians, liberals and reformist leftists that the problem with the encroaching police state is simply that it is wildly out of control. Greenwald argues, “The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing.” Asking capitalism’s secret police to play nice is like asking a great white shark to chew softly.

In capitalist society, where a tiny minority of the population lives off the labor of the working class, the rulers will always resort to spying, lying and violence to keep the vast majority down. Anything that challenges property rights and the racial, ethnic, religious and moral prejudices that prop up this whole capitalist system of exploitation and injustice constitutes “wrongdoing.” The liberals are blinded by lofty words like “freedom” and “democracy”—classless terms that snooker working people into believing they have equal rights in an increasingly unequal society. Any talk of achieving freedom that does not involve a struggle for the abolition of classes is simply a lie.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained the fundamental difference in purpose between petty-bourgeois democrats and communists in their 1850 “Address of the Central Authority to the [Communist] League.” Against a backdrop of the failed German bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848, in which the bourgeoisie had gone over to the side of the old reactionary classes against the revolutionary proletariat, Marx and Engels observed:

“Far from desiring to transform the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which the existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them....

“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible…it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.”

This is now but that was then...same struggle, same fight



All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers

Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.        

Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).

Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience on the streets trying to shut down the government's war machine, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action.  The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.    
*************

The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI

                         

John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)

Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.
They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s  Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.

“When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”

– John Raines

In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.
But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.
“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.
“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”
Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.
When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”
The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.
Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.

“A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”

– John Adams

Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.
While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.
“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”

Watch the trailer for '1971':

Guests

• John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn. 

All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers-The Documentary 1971 

Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.        

Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).

Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience trying to shut down the government's war machine on the streets, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action.

The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.    

******

The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI

John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)

Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.

They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s  Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.

 “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”

– John Raines

In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.

But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.

“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.

“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”

Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.

When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”

The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.

Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.

 “A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”

– John Adams

Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.

While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.

“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”

Watch the trailer for '1971':

Guests

• John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes In Boston- No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Young Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority youth, mainly black and latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six months have given us that. But below is an example, a beautiful graphic example, of just how deep the hurts go, and how deep into society these injustices are felt. Read on.

 

        

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes - Lincoln Memorial: Washington

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 

Lincoln Memorial: Washington

Let's go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet-

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time-
Old Abe.

 

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that right to further furrow his brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and abolition). He, furrowed and pug-ugly, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters, or so it seemed, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, Jesus.). He meant to keep all the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not American union place but keep them out of Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much as a lining up of his beliefs with his “walk the walk” talk.

So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution, or some reformed wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harpers Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about three years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery. In short, those who would come by on Sunday and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines but held back. Now in 2014 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially the banks who led the way downhill) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama with might and main is still intact. The needs of working people although now widely discussed (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations) have not been ameliorated. All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          

*******

No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.

It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

***********

 

 

Bogie Single-Handedly Fights The Axis- Humphrey Bogart’s All Through The Night

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

All Through The Night, starring Humphrey Bogart, 1942

Let’s run through a few home truths. Rick, Rick of Rick’s American Café out in the North African night in the time of the “night of the long knives” in the world during the 1940s gave up his hot true love, his very hot true love met in some Paris bistro and then whereabouts unknown, got friendly with the Free French forces working underground in Vichy-controlled Morocco, took out the local German commander Major Strasser when he got in the good guys way and put Victor Lazlo, the leader of the freedom struggle against the “night of the long knives” on his way to lead the liberation forces in exile (along with that Rick’s hot true love, very hot true love met in Paris and whereabouts now known) during World War II in Casablanca. Old Captain Morgan, well, maybe not so old since the screen-writers tool many liberties when adapting the book for the screen, working his one man fishing operation out of Vichy-controlled Martinique during the Caribbean version of the “night of the long knives,” working the sports fishing expeditions racket although with not much apparent success, who does not give up his hot true love, very hot true, got himself friendly with the Free French forces working underground against those Vichy guys, spirited an important Resistance leader out to do liberation work another day with that hot true love in tow during World War II in To Have And Have Not. Disgraced Captain Rick Leland who also did not give up his hot true love, took a Japanese freighter looking for work in Asia doing mercenary work for whoever would pay the freight, who when the deal went down had actually been working the counter-espionage racket down in the Panama Canal against the Asian version of the “night of the long knives”, foiling the best laid plans of the Japanese and their agents and who in the end walked arm and arm with that hot true love onto further derring-do against America’s enemies during World War II in Across The Pacific. And what do they all have in common including with other items of World War II significance? Well, they all have one Humphrey Bogart who won his spurs as a tough guy gangster as Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest and as hard-boiled PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon  as a leading man in the films and in Hollywood. No, more than a leading man, more like the white knight single-armed fighter against the scourges of the earth back in that war. Well Bogie is on a roll because here he is again as the leading man, Gloves, in the fight against German Axis fifth columnists in America in the film under review, All Through The Night (nice song title by the way).         

Here is the funny thing about Gloves though he is nothing but a stay at home, ah, sportsman (read: gambler and man about town and maybe draft-dodger if it came to that) not the usual suspect for the leader of the grand coalition against the bad guys. No Rick, not Steve, not the good Army captain who one would expect to lead such activities. But I have to admit that he does pretty well for a civilian. See this nest of German fifth columnists are up to their eyeballs in espionage activity all toward some nefarious end to demoralize American as war rages in Europe. They have co-opted some others through threats and bribes to help him do the dirty deed. The dirty deed in this case being blowing up a battleship anchored at the Brooklyn Naval Base. And they almost succeed. 

Here is where they came undone though. Beyond the obvious bravery exhibited by Gloves and his, ah, sports associates, in nabbing the dastardly crew before they can carry out the act the whole plot is done in a rather tongue and cheek manner. Clearly Gloves had taken, once he figured out what was afoot, the measure of his opponents and figured that against Uncle Sam’s goodwill the fifth columnists were putty in his hands. And they were putty once the collective strong-arm corner boys of New York got word that somebody like Hitler, the guy with the funny mustache, fully intended to cut their action. Cut their gambling, loan shark, casino cut operations. Those were fighting words, no question. Oh yeah, on the hot true love question everybody I am sure is holding their breath about. Yes, old Gloves got what all white knights got, got the hot true love, a daughter of an important father that the bad guys were holding in a concentration camp in Europe and who had been forced to co-operate to keep him alive until bravo Gloves got on the case. No question Bogie was quite a guy but why did he let Ilsa get away?