AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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

Thursday, June 11, 2015

In Honor Of The Weavers' Ronnie Gilbert Who Passed Away At 88-Making Joyful Music- The Weavers Are In The House

Yes, Goodnight Irene, Goodnight-The Weavers' Ronnie Gilbert Passes At 88

Making Joyful Music- The Weavers Are In The House

from the American Left History blog

CD Review

The Weavers Greatest Hits, The Weavers, Vanguard Records, 1986

This review has been used for other work by The Weavers, including review of the PBS production, The 25th Anniversary Reunion of The Weavers. That documentary gives greater detail to the points that I have made below and includes more on the genesis, early successes and the ultimate fates and health of the various members of the group.

Okay, let’s have a show of hands. Who first heard learned the classic Lead Belly song “Goodnight, Irene” from his rendition of the song? Who from the group under review, The Weavers? Another try. How about “If I Had A Hammer”? Or the old Underground Railroad song “Follow The Drinking Gourd”? I suspect that I would get the same answer. And that is to the good. Sure, we have heard all the songs in this collection before by various artist like Pete Seeger as an individual on “Guantanamera”, Bob Dylan on “House Of The Rising Sun” , Tennessee Ernie Ford On “Sixteen Tons” or Woody Guthrie on “This Land Is Your Land” but we HEAR this music through the four distinctive voices of The Weavers. Thus the title of this entry- Making Joyful Music.

That said, this group morphed in the 1940’s from a grouping, The Almanac Singers, led by Pete Seeger, with occasional assistance from Woody Guthrie that performed in New York City and other locales for the labor movement and other left-wing causes. The rise to eminence I believe, however, came with the addition of the lovely strong voice of Ronnie Gilbert that gives a very different feel to the music in contrast to the Almanac Singers. As a group The Weavers made their mark with a stirring, very popular rendition of the Lead Belly classic mentioned above, “Goodnight, Irene”. Then the roof fell in. Between personal differences within the group and the pressure, extreme pressure, of the 1950’s anti-communist witch hunt in America that looked for “reds under every bed” and that dragged Pete Seeger in its wake the group fell off the radar for a while (in Seeger’s case a long while). Nevertheless this basic American folk music lives on in their voices and in this recording that sounds pretty good even today.

A few other songs from this collection also deserve note. The beautifully harmonic (and wild) “Wimoweh”; a nice version of “On Top Of Old Smokey”; a well done version of the currently very apt and appropriate Yip Harburg song “Brother Can You Spare A Dime”; and, as a finale “So Long It’s Been Good To Know You”. In the folk pantheon this group has a place of honor. Listen to this CD to find out why.

Goodnight Irene

Traditional Lyrics

Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene
I'll see you in my dreams
Last saturday night I got married

Me and my love settled down
Now me and my love are parted
I'm gonna take another stroll downtown

Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in the town

Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump In the river and drown

Irene goodnight, Irene good night
Good night Irene, good night Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

Ramblin' stop your gamblin'
Stop stayin' out late at night
Go home to your wife and your family
Sit down by the fireside bright

Irene goodnight, Irene good night
Good night Irene, good night Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

Irene goodnight, Irene good night
Good night Irene, good night Irene
I'll see you in my dreams

IF I HAD A HAMMER (The Hammer Song)

words and music by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening
All over this land
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening
All over this land
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Well I've got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing
All over this land
It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?

Gorney, Harburg

They used to tell me
I was building a dream.
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow
Or guns to bear
I was always there
Right on the job.

They used to tell me
I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead.
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad
I made it run
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad
Now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime.
Once I built a tower,
Now it's done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits
Gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle dee dum.
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say don't you remember?
They called me Al.
It was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember?
I'm your pal.
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits,
Ah, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle dee dum!
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum!

Oh, say don't you remember?
They called me Al.
It was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember?
I'm your pal.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

©1958, 1962 (renewed), 1986 (renewed)
TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)

Yes, Goodnight Irene, Goodnight-The Weavers' Ronnie Gilbert Passes At 88

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues

Listen up. No, I am not black but here is what I know. Know because my grandfather, son of old Irish immigrants before the turn of the 20^th century, the ethnic immigrant group which provided a hard core of police officers in the City of Boston and surrounding towns back then, and now too for that matter, told me some stuff (and you can get a good sense of although fictionalized in Dennis Lehane’s novel, The Given Day. The “surrounding towns” part as they left the Irish ghettoes in South Boston and Dorchester, the latter now very heavily filled with all kinds of people of color, and moved first to Quincy and Weymouth then for some to the Irish Rivera further south in Marshfield and places like that). Those Irish also provided their fair share of “militants” in the “so-called” Boston Police Strike of 1919.

Here is what he said when I was a kid and has been etched in my brain since my youth. Cops are not workers, cops are around to protect property, not yours but that of the rich, cops are not your friends because when the deal goes down they will pull the hammer down on you no matter how “nice” they are, no matter how many old ladies and old gentlemen they have escorted across the street (and no matter how friendly they seem when they are cadging donuts and… at so coffee shop on their beat). And every time I forget that wisdom they, the police remind me, for example, when they raided the Occupy Boston encampment late one night in October 2011 arresting many, including a phalanx of Veterans for Peace defenders, for no other reason that the “authorities” did not want the campsite extended beyond the original grounds and then unceremoniously razed the place in December 2011 when the restraining order was lifted without batting an eye.

Now this is pretty damn familiar to the audience I am trying to address, those who are raising holy hell in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York (and as I write about North Charleston down in South Carolina) about police brutality, let’s get this right, about police murder under the color of law. And those who support the, well, let’s call a thing by its right name, rebellion.

Here is what my grandfather, or my father for that matter, did not have to tell me. They, and I ask that you refer to the graphic above, DID NOT need when I came of age for such discussions that I had to be careful of the cops as I walked down the street minding my own business(unless of course I was in a demonstration rasing holy hell about some war or other social injustice but I had that figured already). Did not need to tell me that I was very likely to be pulled over while “walking while Irish.” Did not suggest, as the graphic wisely points out, that I would need to have more identification than an NSA agent to walk down my neighborhood streets. Did not need to tell me that I would suffer all kinds of indignities for breathing.

He, they, did not have to tell me a lot of things that every black adult has to tell every black child about the ways on the world in the United States. But remember what that old man, my grandfather, did tell me, cops are not workers, cops are not friends, cops are working the other side of the street. That old man would also get a chuckle out of the slogan-“Fuck The Cops.” If more people, if more white people especially, would think that way maybe we could curb the bastards in a little.

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War- In Honor Of The Heroic Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment…. To Defend One’s Own

In the wake of the travesties of justice in the Michael Brown murder case where a grand jury refused to indict a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and the Eric Garner stranglehold murder case in New York City where the same thing happened (and which has happened repeatedly over the years these two cases being egregious and the cause of blacks and their supporters saying enough) during Black History Month (hell, all year) it is appropriate to talk about the right of black self-defense (and of necessity at times, it is no accident that there is now renewed interest in groups like the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams author of Negroes With Guns, and his left-wing NAACP chapter in North Carolina and a recent book describing heroic, and mostly unheralded due to the non-violence hype associated with the Martin Luther King-led segment of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s, armed self-defense actions in aid of Mississippi freedom fighters by local black militants). And when we talk about that issue the heroic struggles of the Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment easily come to mind.

While there is no obvious link between the cases today and the heroic actions of black volunteers to defend their own by enlisting in the battle to eradicate slavery during the Civil War that is a matter of failure of imagination. From the very beginning of slavery in America, which means from the very beginning of the settlements, whites have feared, feared beyond reason at times, blacks, black men armed, or posing any kind of physical threat. In the case of the 54^th the Southerners during the Civil War went crazy when confronted with the idea of armed black men fighting for their freedom and treated any black captives brutally as no more than chattel to be executed upon capture and not as prisoners of war from an organized opposing army. No better example of that blind hatred by South Carolina whites thinking there was no greater dishonor came after the battle before Fort Wagner when the rebels buried the white commander of the regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had fallen there with the dead black soldiers he commanded in a mass grave. (His high abolitionist parents, and many Northerners thought there was no greater honor when asked later whether they wanted to remove his body from that site.)

And so it has gone throughout the last one hundred plus years from black sharecroppers defending themselves during Jim Crow times, Robert F. Williams down in North Carolina calling for armed self-defense against the marauding white racists during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the Deacons for Justice down in Louisiana, and later the Black Panthers from Oakland to Boston. All standing for their right to defend their own by any means necessary. And all getting the eternal hatred of those whites who fear militantly political blacks who wish to defend the community. And that is where the current uprising being formed mostly by the young, young blacks and their allies, under the general name Black Lives Matter should think about history and about all the options.

[One hundred and fifty years later there is no more fitting memorial to those heroic defenders of the 54^th than the frieze on Beacon Street in Boston across from the State House commemorating their valor. Every time I go by the frieze, usually when we are demonstrating for or against some social policy of the day at the State House or at Park Street I stop and look at the determined faces of the soldiers as they march toward their destiny. Look particularly at the righteous grizzled old soldier by the head of Shaw’s horse marching with the “kids” to bring freedom and justice. Yeah, that was the place for old men to be during those hard tack Civil War time times. Today too, women too.]

The Latest From The Cindy Sheehan Blog

http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/

A link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.

Markin comment:

I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. And of late (2014) a fetish for running for office whatever seems to be worth looking at. This year it was the Governor's race in California. Other years it has been for President and for Congress. That Congressional race made sense because it was against Congresswoman and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who at one time was a darling of the liberals and maybe still is. But electioneering while necessary and maybe useful is not enough. So while her politics and strategy are not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times they do provide enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing.

One though should always remember, despite our political differences, Ms. Sheehan's heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush in 2005 when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2002-2003 after we had million in the streets for a few minutes. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.

*************

Additional Markin comment:

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.

***********
Another note from Frank Jackman

There are many ways in which people get “religion” about the issues of war and peace, about the struggle to oppose the imperial adventures of the American government. Learn that it is our duty to oppose those decisions as people who are “in the heart of the beast” as the late revolutionary Che Guevara who knew about the imperial menace both in life and death declared long ago. My own personal “getting religion” and those who I have worked with in such organizations as Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and later Veterans For Peace (VFP) came from a direct confrontation with the American military establishment either during or after our service. Those were hard confrontations with the reality of the beast back in those days and it is no accident that those who confronted the beasts then are still active today. Remain active as a whole new threat to world peace emanates from Washington into the Middle East highlighted by the air wars in Syria and Iraq and the now new lease on life in Afghanistan.

In a sense the military service confrontation form of “getting religion” on the issues of war and peace is easy to understand given the horrendous nature of modern warfare and its massive weapons overkill and disregard for “collateral damage.” Less easy to see is the radicalization of older women, mothers, mothers of soldiers like Cindy Sheehan in reaction to the senseless death of their loved ones. As pointed out above whatever political differences we have I will always hold Ms. Sheehan’s heroic actions in confronting on George W. Bush then President of the United States and the “yes man” for the war in Iraq started in 2003 (the various aspects of the Iraq saga have to be dated since otherwise confusion prevails) in high regard. She took him on down in red neck Texas asking a simple question-“if there were no weapons of mass destruction, not even close, why did my son die in vain?” Naturally no sufficient answer ever came from him to her. There she was a lonely symbol of the almost then non-existent anti-war movement. And then she started, as this blog of hers testifies to, to put the dots together, “got religion,” got to understand what Che meant long ago about that special duty radicals and revolutionaries have “in the heart of the beast.” And she too like those hoary military veterans I mentioned is still plugging away at the task.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

March for Our Children to Shut Down Pilgrim Nuclear Plant

June 13 - 16 Plymouth to Boston

Pilgrim Fukushima - Same Design Same Danger

Boston Downwinders will join Mass Downwinders on a walk from Plymouth to the State House to raise awareness about the terrible condition of Pilgrim Nuclear Plant, and to gather signatures on a petition to Governor Baker to SHUT IT DOWN.

Starts: Saturday, June 13 in Plymouth

Ends: Tuesday, June 16 in Boston

12:30 pm Rally at Dewey Square

1:00 pm Walk up Summer Street to the State House

2:00 pm Rally in the Gardner Auditorium at the State House

Join us! The walk will span 54 miles over 4 days - from the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth to the Boston State House. Good company, meals and accommodations will be provided. All belongings can be towed by van, so you will not have to carry any of your gear. You can join us all the way or for any part of our journey.

For more information, details on the route, or to sponsor a walker, please visit http://www.madownwinders.org/calendar/march-for-our-children/.

Boston Downwinders is a recently formed working group of Massachusetts Peace Action. Our immediate mission is to close Pilgrim Nuclear Plant, which has the same failed GE Mark II design as the Fukushima plant. Experts for the Massachusetts Attorney General said that the Pilgrim's overloaded spent fuel pool is vulnerable to a catastrophic fire that could contaminate over 100 miles downwind and cause up to 24,000 latent cancers and $488 billion in damages. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission placed Pilgrim among the 5 worst run reactors in the US. And a Pentagon-commissioned analysis listed it among the 8 US plants most vulnerable to catastrophic terror attack. As with every other nuclear plant, there is no safe place to put the waste. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will have to take care of it -- while receiving no benefits.

Boston Downwinders have been joining Cape Downwinders in lobbying our State Reps and Senators to sponsor bills improving Pilgrim's safety, health and evacuation procedures. And we are sharing our concerns with the Mass. Emergency Management Association (MEMA), which is responsible for evacuation in case of accident.

We need your energy, ideas and support. Please come to our next meeting on June 1, 7pm at the First Church in Cambridge, 11 Garden St., in Harvard Square.

And join us for all or part of the MARCH FOR OUR CHILDREN through Plymouth, Kingston, Weymouth, Cohasset, Hingham Braintree and on to Boston.

Activists played a key role in shutting down Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station and we can do the same for Massachusetts!

For more information about our Pilgrim Nuclear Plant and Boston Downwinders, see http://masspeaceaction.org/close-pilgrim-nuclear or contact us.

Yours for a clean and safe energy future,

Guntram Mueller and Paula Sharaga

Co Conveners, Boston Downwinders

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*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Anthony Jalil Bottom,

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Abdul Majid (Anthony Laborde)

News Flash For Immediate Release: A. F. Markin Will Not Run For President In 2016

From The American Left History Blog-June 2015

“Apparently the perennial third-party presidential candidate Mister Allan Frederick Markin, although he takes pains to make it clear to everybody that since childhood he has always gone by the moniker “A. F.,” is the only politician in America, or at least who is not inside the Democratic or Republican Party, who has not thrown his or her hat, or tried to throw his or her hat, into the ring this election cycle for a chance at the brass ring, or Hillary Rodham Clinton’s big target. He must be a rare bird.”-John Stewart, WDJA News

When asked by a reporter at the press conference held in New York City where he has always made such announcements about his political plans about the possibility of endorsing Hilary Rodham Clinton for President to keep that office out of the clutches of the bastard Republicans A.F. Markin who had just announced that he would not run for the office this cycle, quoted one of his favorite old time bluesman, Skip James, a man who had many problems with wine, women and song in his time -“I’d rather be the devil that to be that woman’s man.” When pressed further by a reporter from the Detroit Globe he simply stated “Enough said” as he left the microphones. Laura Perkins, The Chicago Patriot-Ledger

Routers 24/7 Media Flash: A. F. Markin, long time anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist activist and the evil genius behind the blog American Left History, has announced today that under no conditions will he be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. In prior election cycles he has run for the office as an Independent Social-Democrat (2000), the Rainbow Left Coalition (2004), and after a fierce nomination fight on the Green Wave Party ticket (2008, although in that case he waged an opportunistic low-level campaign because according to one disappointed campaign worker Markin did not want to ruin then Senator Barack Obama’s chances at the White House expecting some kind of job offer for doing so. To once again prove that opportunism does not pay, especially for so-called principled socialists like him and Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, he was never offered any position in that administration).

In 2012 Markin got what he called at the time “religion” and sat out the campaign although without any thoughts of not ruining the chances of that “miserable sell-out bastard Obama” (Markin’s harsh words not apparently due to the failure to get an appointed job but because Obama had hood-winked everybody with any sense in 2008 that he was another garden variety Democrat hustle wars and sacrifice to a jaded public). Rather because he had read an obscure document from the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 (Vladimir Lenin’s old-time operation to create world revolution established in 1919 and which went out of business in 1943) in an obscure left-wing socialist newspaper which stated that socialists should not seek, not even run for, the executive offices (President, Governor, sheriff) of what they called the “bourgeois capitalist state.” Chastised, thoroughly chastised by that obscure odd-ball reference he is again sitting the 2016 election cycle out.

At the press conference held in New York City’s Best Eastern Hotel making the announcement Markin, paraphrasing the great 19th century Northern Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman (hero of “Billy’s bummers” traipsing through Georgia and its environs and scourge of the rebels) stated that “if drafted I will not run and if elected I will not serve” in that post. He, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for some legislative office like the United States Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. –Josh Breslin, Portland Free Press

A.F. Markin commentary on the American Politics Today website expanding on his decision not to run (originally posted on the American Left History blog on June 6, 2015):

“I know that the long suffering readers of this blog have been waiting breathlessly for me to announce my intentions for the presidential campaign of 2016. Wait a minute! What kind of madness is this on my part to impose on readers who I am sure are still recovering from the shell-shock of that seemingly endless and mendacious 2012 presidential campaign. Well… Okay, as usual I want to, for good or ill, make a little point about running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state now that I have gotten ‘religion’ about the necessary of radicals and revolutionaries, even garden variety socialists like me who in the past has run for such offices to get out the socialist message and because during election cycles you at least have people half paying attention, NOT to do so. I think this point can really be driven home today now that we have a ‘progressive’ Democratic president, one Barack Obama, as a foil.

I have detailed elsewhere in a more scholarly journal (Political Affairs Today, June 2012) the controversial and checkered history of running for executive office of the bourgeois capitalist state in the international workers movement, and especially in the Communist International in its heroic days in the early 1920's, surrounding the question of whether radicals and revolutionaries, on principle, should run for these office. I need not repeat that argument here. (See also June 2008 Archives, "If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve-Revolutionaries and Running For Executive Offices," American Left History blog, dated June 15, 2010). I have also noted there the trajectory of my own conversion to the position of opposition to such runs.

Previously I had seen such electoral efforts as good propaganda tools and/or basically harmless attempts to intersect political reality at times when the electorate is tuned in. Always under the assumption made clear during the campaign that, of course, if elected one would not assume the office.

In any case, I admit to a previously rather cavalier attitude toward the whole question, even as I began to see the wisdom of opposition. But having gone through the recent presidential campaign and, more importantly, the inauguration and installation of a ‘progressive’ black man to the highest office attainable under the imperium I have begun to wipe that smirk off my face.

Why? I have hardly been unaware throughout my leftist political career that Social Democratic and Communist (Stalinist/Maoist varieties especially) Party politicians have, individually or in popular front alliances with capitalist parties, wreaked havoc on working people while administrating the bourgeois state. I have, in particular, spent a good part of my political career fighting against the notion of popular front strategies as they have been forged in the past, disastrously in places like Spain during the Civil War in the 1930s and Chile in 1973 or less disastrously in France in the 1980s. However this question of the realities of running the imperial state in America really hit home with the coming into office of Barack Obama.

Certainly, Obama did not have, and in the course of such things could not have had, any qualms about administering the bourgeois state, even if such toilsome work contradicted his most basic principles. Assuming, for the sake of argument here, that Obama is not the worst bourgeois politician, progressive or not, that has come down the pike. Already, after a few short weeks in office, he had escalated the troop levels in Afghanistan. He was from the get-go most earnestly committed to bailing out the financial heart of the imperial system, at the long term expense of working people. Where is the room for that vaunted ‘progressive’ designation in all of this? Oh yes he has said he is against torture and illegal torture centers but look at the still open Guantanamo and other evil deeds when a few documents about the nefarious doing of the CIA were rolled out by Congress. That, dear readers might have passed for progressive action- in the 17th century. Jesus, is there no end to this madness in taking grandstanding kudos for stuff that Voltaire would have dismissed out of hand. So the next time someone asks you to run for President of the United States (or governor of a state or mayor of a city) take the Markin pledge - Just say NO!

Join The Chelsea Manning Contingent In The Boston Pride Parade-Saturday June 13, 2015

Veterans For Peace In The Boston Pride Parade June 13^th Say Free Chelsea Manning Now!

Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea Manning, now having been held in prison for four years by the United States Government for the simple act of telling the truth, will be honored and remembered as the Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace, long time Manning supporters march through the ethnically diverse and multi-cultural streets of downtown Boston in the annual Pride Parade on June 13, 2015. We will have a full-length VFP banner calling for Chelsea’s pardon and freedom as part of our contingent. We will not leave our sister behind. We will not let President Obama hide behind his cowardly legal screen in this case and will continue to call on him at every opportunity to pardon Chelsea Manning now! Join Us.

Join The Chelsea Manning Contingent In The Boston Pride Parade-Saturday June 13, 2015

Veterans For Peace In The Boston Pride Parade June 13^th Say Free Chelsea Manning Now!

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

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