Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 
 

 
 

Some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school (The Farmer in the Dell, etc. in case you forgot) and embedded in the back of your mind even fifty years later. Some reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in my case was the music that got my parents through my father’s slogging and mother anxiously waiting World War II. You know, Frank, The Andrew Sisters, Peggy Lee, etc.   Other music, the music of my generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what I wanted to hear when I had my transistor radio to my ear up in my bedroom. Yeah, Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Jerry Lee, etc. again. The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste.       

Acquired through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s when they would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music to play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, I don’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.

The real stuff having been around for while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll. So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden electric blues some time to filter through my brain. What did not take a long time once I got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when I saw him perform. Once I saw him practically eat that harmonica he was playing on How Many More Years . Yes, that is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

 

In Boston

The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/

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):

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. 

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 15^th 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 2^nd 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 15^th 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

by Erich Maria Remarque

The Road Back 4.29 of 5 stars 4.29  ·  rating details  ·  1,816 ratings  ·  47 reviews

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!

Wed, Feb 18, 2015 09:30 AM

Stop Bombing Syria & Iraq Now! Protest Rally & March Saturday, February 21, 2015, 1:00 pm Park Street Station • Park & Tremont • Boston Join us and make your voice heard against the new AUMF and war with ISIS! Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace Dear All, In the past week, President Obama sent language to Capitol Hill to authorize war for the next three years against ISIS. Officially, this action requires congress to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). So far, the U.S.'s military engagement against ISIS has been justified through the inappropriate application of the old AUMF's passed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Take a moment and write Congress demanding a vote against an ISIS AUMF and the support of alternative actions rather than war. During the last six months of this military action, many agree that little progress against ISIS has been made.  It’s about time that Congress fully debated the U.S. war being waged in the Middle East.  We agree with President Obama's past statements that there is no military solution -- and we oppose any AUMF.  That said, if one passes it should be much narrower than what President Obama proposes and include limitations such as: A one-year sunset clause Geographic limitations Definitively no combat troops on the ground  Repealing both former AUMFs -- not just one of them Robust reporting requirements including civilian deaths Act now by sending a brief letter to Congress asking for a full debate on war in the Middle East, and opposing a new AUMF in favor of long term solutions. Yours for peace and justice, Caitlin Forbes Co-Convener, Middle East Working Group P.S. Write Congress today! Join Massachusetts Peace Action - or renew your membership today!   Dues are $40/year for an individual, $65 for a family, or $10 for student/unemployed/low income.  Members vote for leadership and endorsements, receive newsletters and discounts on event admissions.  Donate now and you will be a member in good standing through December 2015! Your financial support makes this work possible! Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 617-354-2169  • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter Click here to unsubscribe

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.

 

Jack Matlock, US ambassador to Russia under Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush from 1987–91,

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.

 

The Black Liberation Struggle -Post-Ferguson- A View From The Left 

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.            

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Open Forum

Dock workers, shippers face off at the Port of Oakland

By Jack Heyman

February 18, 2015 Updated: February 18, 2015 9:32am

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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)