This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left
Click below to link to The Rag Blog
Peter Paul Markin comment:
When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics.(1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the American bourgeois political upheavals that led to Chicago hell in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits that a student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought.)
Those scorned old leftists, mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who survived the 1950s red scare or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare and the Stalinists had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face- rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress.
Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.
Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.
***************
A Frank Jackman comment (2014):
Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.
Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.
***************
A Frank Jackman comment (2014):
Recently I wrote a short piece in a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active 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 few years back, the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to 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.
I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that 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 which I mentioned in the article still holds 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.
That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days, now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s, made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.
A Markin disclaimer:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
All Out In Boston For The Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade On March 15th 2015
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin
Not all political wisdom, left-wing political wisdom anyway, comes from the masters of such thought like Plato, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and their ilk. I once picked up a piece of such wisdom, at least indirectly, from the leader of the Devil’s Disciplines outlaw motorcycle gang in North Adamsville, Red Riley, in the days when I was a corner boy and enamored (from a distance) of such things. He said every once in a while you have to show the “colors” to let people know you are around and ready for action (and here he probably meant any other outlaw motorcycle gang that wanted to “infringe” on Discipline turf). And that piece of wisdom is a roundabout way of calling one and all to attend the upcoming Veterans for Peace (VFP)-led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, the only one in the country, now scheduled to go off at noon on Sunday March 15th in South Boston. (This noon start time is subject to change since VFP is now in federal court in Boston seeking declaratory action on its application to the City of Boston to start at noon which will be decided on March 2nd by the judge hearing the case according to my sources.)
In thinking about writing this little introduction to the accompanying flyer for the event (see below) I was startled by the fact that it has been a very long time since there has been a massive anti-war outpouring in Boston, New York, Washington, anywhere in the United States probably since back in about 2006. Not that there have not been many occasions to do so with the various Bush/Obama escalations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intervention in Libya, the myriad drone attacks, the intervention into Syria and the build-up to the fight against ISIS but a by all accounts war-weary, war-wary people have not taken their righteous anger to the streets. Sure there have been many small-scale one hundred, two hundred participant marches of the greying anti-war faithful (the little old ladies and gentlemen in tennis sneakers as we used to call them in the old days before we got “religion” on the war question), and I have participated in a number of them in various locations around the country. Over the last five years the biggest and best anti-war event in the Boston area, maybe anywhere, is the VFP-led Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade which is directly counter-posed to the official parade which tips its hat to the military in every way. So if you or your friends are anti-war, are against this massive military budget which sucks up precious resources, are tired of the endless wars that have no apparent purpose and certainly do not make us one whit safer then come out with the mass of the anti-war community in Boston on March 15th to “show the colors.”
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 ….
The Road Back
The Road Back
After surviving several horrifying years in the inferno of the Western Front, a young German soldier and his cohorts return home at the end of WW1. Their road back to life in civilian world is made arduous by their bitterness about what they find in post-war society. A captivating story, one of Remarque's best.
Stop Bombing Syria & Iraq Now!
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WHO
WANTS A (COLD?) WAR WITH RUSSIA?
Investigative
reporter Robert Parry has written a series of articles noting the relentless
“Group-Think” (here and here) among Washington policy elites toward a confrontation
with Russia over Ukraine. Among other things, the conventional wisdom erases
completely the events following the (first) Cold War which laid the groundwork
for the present crisis.
In 1989, Mikhail
Gorbachev called on European leaders to ‘learn how to make peace together’ with
a cooperative approach to European security that would lay the foundations of a
‘common European home.’ It was not just rhetoric. Gorbachev unilaterally
withdrew Soviet troops from East Germany and Eastern Europe, allowing the former
Warsaw Pact to dissolve. Perhaps he naively expected NATO, founded in 1949
ostensibly to deter Soviet aggression, to reciprocally disband (the Warsaw Pact
was created later, in 1954, as a response to German rearmament). He was
very much mistaken. Instead, NATO began a relentless expansion eastward, to the
borders of a much reduced Russia, violating the explicit understanding that had
been put in place to allow peaceful German reunification; NATO would later
intervene unilaterally to dismember Yugoslavia and later the rump Serbian
Republic; then it participated in the US the wars against Iraq, the occupation
of Afghanistan and the bombing of Libya – all without prior UN sanction and in
violation of international law.
was
present at some of the most pivotal discussions between President Reagan and
General Secretary Gorbachev during the Cold War’s denouement, the taproot of the
current crisis is NATO expansion. Beginning with NATO’s Madrid Summit (1994) at
which NATO announced it would begin the process of bringing in new member
states, through NATO’s Bucharest Summit (2008), at which the alliance declared
that “Georgia and Ukraine shall become members of NATO,” the United States has
reneged on the promise President George H.W. Bush made to Gorbachev at the Malta
Summit (1989) not to expand NATO eastward. Bush’s promise not to expand the
alliance eastward in exchange for the peaceful and orderly withdrawal of Soviet
occupying troops in Eastern Europe was, according to Matlock, repeated by nearly
all of the alliance members at the time. According to the ambassador, what
today’s Western leaders seem not to understand is that a Europe that is “whole
and free” will not and cannot exist unless “Russia is part of the system.” And
yet, the United States has pursued policies toward Russia over the past two
decades that can only be seen as exclusionary. More
NATO expansion did
not happen in a vacuum, but was promoted by very powerful interests, especially
ones connected to the US armaments industry.
Meet
The People Who Pushed Towards A New Cold War
Following
the end of the Cold War, defense cuts had presented bottom-line problems for
American businesses that relied exclusively on Pentagon contracts… [Lockheed
CEO Norm Augustine, a former undersecretary of the Army] was already thinking of
future export markets for his company’s goods. In his capacity as the chairman
of a Pentagon advisory council on arms-export policy, he was able to secure yet more subsidy guarantees for weapons sales to former
Warsaw Pact countries. But in order to buy the types of expensive weapons
that would stabilize the industry’s books, those countries had to enter into an
alliance with the U.S… Enter the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO... Its founder
and chairman, Bruce Jackson, was so principled in his desire to see freedom in
Central and Eastern Europe that he didn’t even take a salary. He didn’t have to.
Jackson was a vice president at Lockheed Martin… Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic were all in NATO come 1999. The Baltic States would soon follow. By
2003, those initial inductees had arranged deals to buy just short of $5 billion
in fighter jets from Lockheed… As for freedom-purveyor Bruce Jackson, he began
running a new outfit in 2002. It was called the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq.
More
Economic interests
are still important drivers of US policy toward Ukraine and
Russia.
On the same day
last January when a reported 50,000 “pro-Western” Ukrainians descended upon Kiev’s
Independence Square to protest against the government of President Viktor
Yanukovych the Financial Times reported a major deal for U.S. agribusiness
titan Cargill.
Corporate
Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch
Mr.
Yuetter [Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Cargill] serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S.-Ukraine Business
Council… it’s a veritable who’s who of Big Ag. Among the luminaries working
tirelessly and no doubt selflessly for a better, freer Ukraine are: Melissa
Agustin, Director, International Government Affairs & Trade for Monsanto;
Brigitte Dias Ferreira, Counsel, International Affairs for John Deere; Steven
Nadherny, Director, Institutional Relations for agriculture equipment-maker CNH
Industrial; Jeff Rowe, Regional Director for DuPont Pioneer; John F. Steele,
Director, International Affairs for Eli Lilly & Company… Nuland
also told the group that the United States had invested more than $5 billion in
support of Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” meaning pulling Ukraine away from
Russia. She made her remarks on a dais featuring a backdrop emblazoned with a Chevron
logo. Also, her colleague and phone call buddy U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt helped Chevron cook up
their 50-year shale gas deal. More
Not surprisingly,
the near unanimous outcry among our Washington elites for a more belligerent
policy toward Russia is having an effect on US public opinion.
Americans
Increasingly See Russia as Threat, Top U.S. Enemy
Russia
now edges out North Korea as the country Americans consider the United States'
greatest enemy. Two years ago, only 2% of Americans named Russia, but that
increased to 9% in 2014 as tensions between Russia and the U.S. increased, and
now sits at 18%.... Americans have also become significantly more likely to view
Russia's military power as a critical threat to the U.S. -- 49% now hold this
view, compared with 32% a year ago.
More
WHO YOU
GONNA BELIEVE? (cont’d)
Anne
Applebaum
is
among the prominent opinion-leaders pressing for more confrontation with Russia.
She has made a career in rehashing and reviving the Cold War, also writing a
regular column for the increasingly Neo-Con Washington Post and
contributing to the otherwise Liberal New York Review of Books. Last week Applebaum wrote that “It will take much more
than weapons to save Ukraine—and keep Russia at bay” and
suggested we should “build a Berlin Wall around Donetsk in the form of
a demilitarized zone and treat the rest of Ukraine like West Germany.”
Last summer she suggested people should drop everything and
prepare “for total war.”
Readers might be
interested to know that Applebaum (now a Polish citizen) is married to former
Polish Foreign Minister and Minister of Defense Radosław Sikorski, who was once chief foreign
correspondent for the rightwing US National
Review and a fellow of the rightwing American Enterprise Institute (as was
Applebaum); Sikorsky was closely aligned with the Maidan
protests.
Nicholas
Burns
is
closer to home. His regular Boston Globe column this week argued that “The United
States is locked into another generational struggle with Russia for power in
Europe.” Burns suggested that “Obama should also up the ante by
delivering powerful defensive weapons to the embattled Ukrainian government.
That will drive up the costs to Putin, who respects power above all
else.”
The Globe
identifies Burns is a “professor of the
practice of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government.” His faculty profile notes that the Sultan of Oman Professor of
International Relations has some interesting outside
connections.
Burns is Director
of the Aspen Strategy Group, whose members include a who’s
who of neocons and liberal interventionists; he is a “Senior Counselor” at the
Cohen Group (whose
founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer William S. Cohen, Secretary
of Defense (1997-2001), providing “global business consulting services and
advice on tactical and strategic opportunities in virtually every market” and
has a strong strategic partnership with DLA Piper, an international law firm which offers
“client-driven legal services to leading local, international and multinational
companies operating in Ukraine. We are well-positioned to guide clients through
this risky yet highly prospective market;” and Burns serves on the Board of
Directors of Entegris,
Inc., a diversified transnational corporation with substantial assets in
military-related industries.
In New York City-Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right 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. There is bound to be more to come. Check out what this organization's take on the struggle if you are around New York City that day.
One More Time Down 1950s Record
Memory Lane
I have spilled plenty of cyber-ink in
this space going back to the now classic age of rock and roll (Elvis, Bo,
Chuck, Bo, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Wanda, et. al for shorthand) that formed my
musical tastes back in the 1950s when I came of age, musical age anyway. Came
of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation. Lately though I have
going back to various commercially-produced
compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies to cull
out the better songs, some which I have had on the tip of my tongue almost
continuously since then (the Dubs Could
This Be Magic and the Teen Queens Eddie
My Love are two examples that quickly come to mind). Others like Johnny
Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee I needed some coaxing by the
compilations to remember.
But I have now found a sure-fire
method to aid in that coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes
from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not
confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play).
But even there I am cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When
you look at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations you will
find excellent artwork that highlights various institutions back then. You know
the infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully
three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the
back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when
we gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn,
or fizzled out sods, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing
was in play, and that scene is always associated in my mind with Frankie Lyman
and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In
Love.
So that is how the game is played. Two
(or more) can play so I will just set the scenes and you can fill in your own
musical selection. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite
sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in
restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours or father borrowed for an end
of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and
diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands
all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition
for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been
eyeing all evening to dance that slow one
all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer
checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals
who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or
she said they would be, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your
bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult
eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in
the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no
more explanation needed right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls
looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss”
Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at
the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when younger and at night when older.
Okay, I have given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.
Victory
To The West Coast Dockworkers (ILWU)- All Labor Must Stand In Solidarity Now!
Peter Paul Markin comment:
As the author below notes, a long-time longshoreman himself, this West Coast fight by a last remaining union bastion from heroic struggles to form unions in this country back in the 1930s is a last ditch test to try to revitalize the organized labor movement or essentially crush militant unionism for a long time. The ILWU itself only became a powerful labor union after it won the union hiring hall in the famous San Francisco General Strike of 1934. Plenty has been written of late about how the working class (and apparently a good section of middle class too) has fallen behind in the great gap that has been created by the rich to keep working people in their place. No small part of that gap has been as a result of the demise of the organized labor movement which used to set the standard for all labor, organized and unorganized. Now is the time for all labor, organized and unorganized, to stand in solidarity with the West Coast dockers. Then the rest of us should do like the old labor organizer Joe Hill said- organize, organize like hell. We made the wealth let's take it back.
Open
Forum
Dock workers,
shippers face off at the Port of Oakland
By
Jack Heyman
February
18, 2015 Updated: February 18, 2015 9:32am
- google_share|article-6086072|article-share-premium|6
West
Coast ports are badly congested. Ships are backed up, unable to find a berth to
unload their cargo. Longshore contract negotiations are deadlocked between the
shipowners and terminal operators of the Pacific Maritime Association and
dockworkers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
With big retailers and agribusiness screaming, President Obama has sent in
Labor Secretary Tom Perez.
The
PMA’s tough negotiating ploy has intentionally created a port crisis. The PMA,
echoed by the business press, claims greedy workers engaging in work slowdowns
are to blame. Yet the employers, after dragging out negotiations for nine
months, have closed ports this past holiday weekend. They previously had ended
night work to stop paying overtime and shift premiums, thus employers have
slashed available work time in one week by 75 percent. In 2002, when PMA locked
out longshore workers and shut down West Coast ports, the media conflated it
with a workers’ strike. Is this a bad media rerun?
What’s really brewing here is an assault on one of
the last bastions of union power left in the United States, the ILWU. In the
last five years, the ILWU has faced union-busting attacks by mining titan Rio
Tinto and the ABCD grain monopolies (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge Limited,
Cargill Inc. and Louis Dreyfus Commodities), which control 90 percent of the
world’s grain distribution. In both cases, the union conceded key contract
provisions, and now maritime monopolies are smelling blood.
Two of the biggest global port employers, Ports
America Inc. and Stevedoring Services of America were until recently owned in
large part by the insurance monolith AIG and Goldman Sachs, respectively. This
is “Wall Street on the waterfront,” and they’re out to gut the power of the
ILWU, the union hiring hall, and curtail union action by using arbitrators.
Yet when longshore workers stop work, it’s often
because of safety issues in a dangerous industry whose rate of work-related
fatalities exceeds that of firefighters.
When Bay Area longshore workers shut down ports to
protest Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting activities, that state’s
AFL-CIO called the ILWU “the moral compass of the labor movement.” And when
Oakland police nearly killed Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen during an Occupy
movement protest, 30,000 outraged demonstrators marched into the port, closing
it in protest and in solidarity with longshore workers battling the nonunion
Export Grain Terminal in Longview, Wash. Shades of the 1934 San Francisco
General Strike frightened West Coast port employers.
ILWU longshore jobs pay decent wages and benefits,
but far less than employers claim. If a rising tide can lift all boats, then
these jobs and benefits will continue to set standards for other workers. But,
if Wall Street on the waterfront breaks the ILWU, wages and living standards
will be driven down for all.
Don’t forget the lesson of PATCO, the air traffic
controllers union destroyed by Ronald Reagan, while other unions sat idly by.
The consequences devastated the entire labor movement. And, in 2012, President
Obama sent Coast Guard vessels against the ILWU protesting a scab ship at the
Export Grain Terminal. Longshore workers need to use their power to stop
concessionary contracts, and all working people should have their back.
Jack Heyman, a retired ILWU member, has worked in the
San Francisco Bay Area as a longshoreman and boatman for over 30 years. He
chairs the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee. (www.transportworkers.org)
Out
In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The
Ten-Point Program -Five - A History Of One's Own
What James “Big Daddy” Dixon did not know about history
would fill a book said his boyhood friend Anthony Hilton. What Anthony meant by
that, or what James thought he meant by that was the saga of the American
experience was a book sealed with seven seals for him. James, not usually one
to suffer a slight with a shrug of the shoulders, and he took the remark as a
slight, a kidding slight, not to be avenged but a slight nevertheless, wanted
to know more about what was on Anthony’s mind that cold February 1964 morning.
Normally, James would not give a rat’s ass (a popular expression picked up by
the kids, James and Anthony included, in the rat-filled tenement house on the
corner of Washington Street in the high Roxbury ghetto where James and Anthony
had grown up, and had come of age together before they parted company to go
their separate ways in in this wicked old world) about what Mister George
Washington did, or did not do, at Valley Forge. Or what madness Mister Andrew
Jackson brought down on the English in front of New Orleans or whether Mister
Davey Crockett was ill-advised to make that terrible, fateful last stand down
in the Podunk Alamo or whether Mister Abraham Lincoln (Father Abraham in his
grandmother’s home, a place where he was dumped more often than not when his
late mother had her wanting habits on, wanting men habits on) meant to free the
slaves or whether Mister Woodrow Wilson sincerely, hah, wanted to “make the world safe for democracy”
when he send American boys (including a grand uncle) over to Europe to do some
hellish fighting in a war that lasted forever some years back or whether Mister
Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, or did not, sell out to Mister Joseph Stalin at
Yalta in the last big war or wherever it was that he was supposed to have done
the deed.
James relationship to history was more up to date, more
existential if he had known the word, or had asked Anthony what it meant (and
if he had known the word then six-two-and even that Anthony would have known
what it meant, Anthony always knew what the words meant, always). His world
history was based on how much liquor had been served at his High Hat Club the
night before (and how much he had been clipped for by those thieving negro
brothers he had running the place), how his numbers runners were doing and
whether the latest shipment from Mexico with that grade A reefer, that Acapulco
Gold, would get here this month. And he expressed those world historic concerns
to Mister Anthony Hilton (as he had done on other occasions) in no uncertain
terms. What concerned him just that moment was whether Mister Honky (and he
used that name freely in front of, and behind the backs of, his white
associates) was going to continue to protect his operations in the neighborhood
or not. And as he began to explain to Anthony (as he had also done many times
before) the historical facts of his place in the sun in the Roxbury world
Anthony stopped him short with this.
“James, doesn’t it matter to you that you could be descended
from kings, from great warrior -kings back in Mother Africa, back before
bondage times and that our people could erect great works before the bloody
honkys could figure out how to use a spoon to eat with(Anthony too , although
college educated and ready to become a professor within a few years if things
worked out right, maybe at Howard, could
speak the language of private black rage when he was among kindred, and James
was kindred), doesn’t it matter that our history has been denied us. Not only
that we were warrior- kings, but that we more than paid our dues when we came
to this land all shackled up and bedraggled, that we built this country as sure
as hell. That we fought our share, our freedom share with old Nat Turner, and a
thousand other slave revolts, that our brothers stood with that old prophet
angel John Brown at Harpers Ferry fight to make Mister Whitey red with rage,
that our proud forbears right in this city formed a regiment, the Massachusetts
54th, to avenge our shackles in Civil War fight, and that we have
put our brand on American culture from ….”
With that James, who also knew, knew from deep in his
brethren soul, that Anthony was prepared to give him the whole entire panorama
of the black experience on these damn shores if he didn’t stop him right then
and there did so. Did it as he always did with his right arm extended out hand
palm up- stop. And Anthony knowing the sign, ever since that one time fight to
determine who was the king hell king of the tenement night, knew to stop. As he
prepared to go James stopped him, handed him ten one hundred dollar bills from
inside his suit pocket and said, “Use that for that damn Negro History project
you are working on over a Boston University.”
After their good-byes and had Anthony left, and after James
had figured up the previous night’s receipts and determined that those thieving
negro brothers had only nicked him a little, he, in the quiet of his office,
thought about what Anthony had said, about the warrior- king part of it, for in
truth that was the only part he remembered. And the next time Anthony came by
he was going to ask him more about that, a lot more and for just that minute
James “Big Daddy” Dixon wished he had a known history, a history of his own…
The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[39][40]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
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