WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME-Build The Resistance

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Stand Up to Wall Street and Global Corporations

If Democrats want to retake government, they will need to do more than be the party that isn’t as bad as Trump, starting with closing the wealth gap…  For years, the Democratic Party chose to overlook these tough realities: Wages are low and stagnant. Jobs are outsourced. Drug prices and insurance premiums rise, and students take on a lifetime of debt just to have a shot at a decent job. Wall Street banks get bailed out when risky bets fail, and millions of ordinary Americans are punished with job losses and foreclosures for a financial crisis they didn’t cause. Meanwhile, virtually all the wealth generated by a recovering economy goes to the top 1 percent. The severe inequality that results from these lopsided policies fuels frustration and the nihilism that led to the election of Donald Trump.  The Democratic Party has fallen short by not taking on the structural causes of this crisis: an economy that favors big corporations and global capitalism. The party also has failed to step up to the climate crisis, which requires a radically different sort of economic recovery, and to the crisis of racial exclusion.  More

WILL KEITH ELLISON MOVE THE DEMOCRATS LEFT?

Ellison is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the putative left-wing answer to the brinksmen of the Freedom Caucus on the right, and he was an early and fervent supporter of Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Like Sanders, he consistently opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal sought by the Obama White House in its final two years which was attacked by populists in both parties. (President Donald Trump recently withdrew the U.S. from the T.P.P.) Ellison announced his candidacy for the D.N.C. chairmanship six days after the Presidential election. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, predictably endorsed him—but so did establishment figures, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and his predecessor, Harry Reid…   Meanwhile, the turmoil of Trump’s first month as President has alternately panicked and emboldened the Democratic base. The activist surge on the left, most spectacularly demonstrated at the Women’s March, in Washington, D.C., and in other major cities, and during protests at nearly a dozen airports after the executive order to temporarily ban people from seven majority-Muslim countries, has stoked a conviction that the Party must be more forceful in combatting Trump. Democrats in the Senate have been conspicuously more strident in their opposition to his Cabinet nominees in the days since the airport protests.   More  

In Trump’s White House, It’s the Billionaires vs. the Bombardiers

How do we make sense of the apparent chaos in the Trump White House, with the president saying something one day and his top officials insisting otherwise the very next? There is, of course, the unstable personality of the president himself, and the fact that he has yet to install a complete cadre of senior policy-makers. But I believe there’s a deeper, more structural explanation for the chaos. Swirling around Trump and fighting 
for supremacy are two powerful factions: the billionaires, who seek maximum opportunity for elite enrichment, and the bombardiers—political ideologues who seek to bring down the existing world order and establish a new one in their preferred image. So long as these two competing factions continue to enjoy Trump’s patronage, we can expect continuing reversals in the weeks and months to come… The bombardiers may share some illiberal values with the billionaire class, but they have a fundamentally different worldview. For them, economic enrichment is less important than prevailing in what they view as an epic struggle between the “Judeo-Christian West” and the non-Western (especially Islamic) world—a “clash of civilizations,” as the late political scientist Samuel Huntington put it. This group includes senior White House strategist Steve Bannon, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, and immigration and security adviser Sebastian Gorka. For the bombardiers, capitalism has been corrupted by global elites who put multinationalism and free trade above national sovereignty and the struggle against Islam.   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

The Misuse of American Military Power and The Middle East in Chaos

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism.  It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace.  Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor.  Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us?  Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf.  It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have?  Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.  What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East.  More

Poll: Majority Of Americans Are Worried About War

Thirty-six percent of Americans, according to the poll, would say they are “very worried” that the United States will become engaged in a major war in the next four years. Thirty percent were somewhat worried, 25 percent were not too worried, 8 percent were not at all worried and 2 percent had no answer… NBC News noted, in a write-up of poll results, some interesting splits in friendliness toward Russia: Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents were split on their stance (50 percent call it an ally/friendly, 49 percent say unfriendly/enemy) while their Democratic and Democratic-leaning counterparts thought overwhelmingly – 75 percent – that it was unfriendly/enemy. Finally, Americans are split on the military’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism: 47 percent of respondents said “using overwhelming military force is the best way to defeat terrorism.” Forty-nine percent said “relying too much on military force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism.” Four percent had no answer.  More

SIGN PETITION SUPPORTING

'Stop Arming Terrorists Act' H.R. 608

United for Peace and Justice has joined with the U.S. Peace Council, Veterans for Peace and several other national peace organizations to initiate a public campaign in support of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-Hawaii) STOP ARMING TERRORISTS ACT (H.R. 608), which she originally introduced to the Congress on December 8, 2016.

Please sign the petition urging support for the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.

H.R. 608 is a bipartisan bill, which has been co-sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vermont), Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-North Carolina), and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida).

The Stop Arming Terrorists Act (H.R.6504) has only 5 co-sponsors, none from Massachusetts

The West’s Moral Hypocrisy on Yemen

Only a few months ago, interventionists were demanding a militant response by Washington to what George Soros branded “a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions” — the killing of “hundreds of people” by Russian and Syrian government bombing of rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo.  Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former New Republic editor, wasdenouncing the Obama administration as “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” asserting that its failure to “act against evil in Aleppo” was like tolerating “the evil in Auschwitz.”  How strange, then, that so many of the same “humanitarian” voices have been so quiet of late about the continued killing of many more innocent people in Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died and 12 million people face famine. More than a thousand children die each week from preventable diseases related to malnutrition and systematic attacks on the country’s food infrastructure by a Saudi-led military coalition, which aims to impose a regime friendly to Riyadh over the whole country.  More

Russia and the West: A NEW COLD WAR?

Not since the days of Ronald Reagan has Russia played such a prominent role in US political life. After Donald Trump’s shock victory – greeted in the Russian parliament with cheers and champagne – came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump. More recently there have been alarms over the Kremlin’s connections with and possible influence on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era…  All this makes it hard to shake the feeling that we are living through a deranged re-run of the Cold War. Of course, the idea of a reprise of the superpower stand-off that dominated the 20th century has been in the air more or less since the actual Cold War ended, the stuff of countless think-tank briefings and film plots. But it has gained particular force over the last decade or so, supplying a readymade framework for understanding the mounting tensions between Russia and the West.  More

Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump

The bipartisan, nearly full-political-spectrum tsunami of factually unverified allegations that President Trump has been sedi-
tiously “compromised” by the Kremlin, with scarcely any nonpartisan pushback from influential political or media sources, is deeply alarming. Begun by the Clinton campaign in mid-2016, and exemplified now by New York Times columnists (who write of a “Trump-Putin regime” in Washington), strident MSNBC hosts, and unbalanced CNN commentators, the practice is growing into a latter-day McCarthyite hysteria. Such politically malignant practices should be deplored wherever they appear, whether on the part of conservatives, liberals, or progressives…  The allegations are driven by political forces with various agendas: the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, which wants to maintain its grip on the party by insisting that she didn’t lose the election but that it was stolen by Russian President Vladimir Putin for Trump; by enemies of Trump’s proposed détente with Russia, who want to discredit both him and Putin; and by Republicans and Democrats stunned that Trump essentially ran and won without either party, thereby threatening the established two-party system.   More

Donald Trump’s Remarks Signal He Could Start a New Nuclear Arms Race

Donald Trump’s declaration on Thursday that “if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack,” flew in the face of decades of U.S. efforts to negotiate cautious, mutual reductions in nuclear arsenals around the world.  Trump’s comments to Reuters essentially invited other nuclear powers to escalate their capabilities, and has the potential to set off a new nuclear arms race…  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Congress ratified in 1970, requires the U.S. to pursue the “cessation” of a nuclear arms race between superpowers, and to take steps towards mutual disarmament. The whole idea was to end the nuclear arms race forever… “The US has certainly not ‘fallen behind on nuclear weapon capability,” wrote Hans Kristensen, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists, in an email to The Intercept. “It is already ‘at the top of the pack’ and has the most capable nuclear forces in the world backed up by overwhelming conventional forces.”  More

STANDING ROCK LIVES ON AS A MODEL FOR PEACEFUL RESISTANCE-Stand In Solidarity With Standing Rock

STANDING ROCK LIVES ON AS A MODEL FOR PEACEFUL RESISTANCE

Police have now taken full control of the Oceti Sakowin Camp, following an hours-long siege today at Standing Rock. A number of Water Protectors were forced to flee en masse across the Cannonball River to escape a running advance by heavily armed police. It is unclear at this time how many Water Protectors have been arrested. Today's raid came on the heels of additional forced evacuations yesterday in Standing Rock. Around 150 police from several states mobilized against the Water Protectors yesterday on Highway 1806 in South Dakota and forced a large number of people to evacuate from Standing Rock, using the threat of force…  With the fervent attacks on the Water Protection movement led by Indigenous peoples from around the world (but especially individuals from the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Nations) also comes a model for peaceful yet powerful resistance we must all learn to utilize. I refer to the remarkable degrees of respect, responsibility, persistence, courage and wolokolkiciapi (a love-based sense of internal and external peacefulness) taught by Indigenous people and quickly emulated by their non-Indigenous allies.  More

We Have to Keep Fighting: Water Protectors Vow Continued Resistance as Main Camp Is Evicted

The court cases that are coming up, I think there are more than just one on the 27th. There are others that are coming up. Right now, they are just trying to, as again, make them follow the law, to do a complete EIS—Environmental impact statement. nd to stop the construction, to sit down and talk. We understand that no matter what we do or say at this moment in time, we must stand by what the legal people are doing. You know, I always tell people, we are doing our best to follow the law, but we are also doing our best to stand up against injustice. And because they did the evictions, they thought they would stop the movement. All they have done is enhanced us. All they have done is made us understand what kind of limits they would go to. We know that when you are on the right side of justice, you continue to stand in prayer and nonviolent resistance, you will win.   More

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IT’S NOT OVER!

DPPer Emmy Rainwalker writes:

There are 17 banks identified as the funding source for the pipeline in North Dakota.

Bank Exits are actions that are happening all over the world, where someone closes an account as a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline with lots of people supporting and sending a message to the bank that funding fossil fuels is no longer a good or attractive thing to be doing!

There will be an action on Saturday, February 25 from 11 am to 1 pm outside Bank of America in Harvard Square.  Your support would be welcome!  

Please look for our exciting summary of the event we hosted last Thursday about Standing Rock with actions we can take together. We are researching some interesting ones.  Coming to your inbox in the next few days!

Warm regards and Peace

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Moisei Uritsky

Click on title to link to “Wikipedia”'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Moise Uritsky. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Uritsky's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday-OCTOBER 1917-The Film- Serge Eisenstein's Cinematic Mastepiece

DVD REVIEW

OCTOBER 1917 (TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD), SERGE EISENSTEIN, 1927

I have reviewed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s definitive three-volume work, "The History of the Russian Revolution", that covers this same topic elsewhere in this space. (See April 2006 archives.) Trotsky’s work gives a sweeping literary expression to the ebb and flow of the revolution much as the film under review, October 1917, does so cinematically under Eisenstein’s masterful direction. I noted in the Trotsky review that his work represented partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. That same standard is also applicable to the film director Eisenstein’s work to which he was commissioned in order to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1927. Although Eisenstein has taken the usual cinematic license in presenting his epic that one has come to expect from that medium and furthermore was working in the period of the Stalinist consolidation of political power it is no the worst political documentary produced in that era, not by a long shot.

Eisenstein was the master of montage, stage direction and reenactment of historical scenes. That skill does not fail him here. In scenes such as Lenin’s literally whirlwind arrival at Finland Station from exile in April 1917, the brutal response to a Bolshevik-led armed demonstration by the nefarious Provisional Government during the 'July Days’, the Petrograd proletariat’s appropriate and heroic response to the counter-revolutionary attempt to seize power by General Kornilov and the events surrounding the storming of the Winter Palace and the transfer of political power to the Soviets Eisenstein uses every trick of the cinematic trade. It shows in the faces of the actors used to portray the various participants. One may criticize this work as being too didactic in its portrayal of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys but my friends that is what this film is all about. It is a propaganda film made in the 1920’s and reflects the state of the art and the state of working class politics. The hoary-handed Petrograd worker, the star-struck Siberian peasant and the steely-eyed Kronstadt sailor were not society’s ‘beautiful’ people. And that is exactly the point. The intent of the revolution was to turn that world upside down with the forces that the Bolsheviks had to work with, warts and all.

I have endlessly pointed out that the October Revolution was the definitive political event of the 20th century. The resulting change in the balance of world power with the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s is beginning to look like a definitive political event for the 21st century, as well. I have urged those interested in the fight for socialism to read, yes to read, about the Russian Revolution in order to learn some lessons from that experience. Trotsky’s history is obviously a good place to start for a pro-Bolshevik overview. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing in 1917 from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". For a more journalistic account John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable. If, however, you want a quick overview of the revolution and view the film with that purpose in mind then Serge Eisenstein’s masterpiece is not a bad place to start.

Boston Event- "Why Congress Should Start an Impeachment Investigation Now of President Donald Trump."-Build The Resistance

Dear RootsAction supporter, We're pleased to let you know about this upcoming event in Jamaica Plain, "Why Congress Should Start an Impeachment Investigation Now of President Donald Trump." RootsAction is co-sponsoring this important gathering with several groups including Free Speech For People, our partner in the Impeach Donald Trump Now campaign, which has already gained more than 875,000 signers nationwide. The event will feature a conversation with John Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech For People. Please see his letter below and let others know about this exciting event. Best wishes, The RootsAction.org Team The nation is now witnessing a massive corruption of the presidency, far worse than Watergate. By refusing to divest fully from his business interests, President Trump has been in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution from the moment he took the oath of office. The President is not above the law. We will not allow President Trump to profit from the presidency at the expense of our democracy. I hope you will join me on Thursday, March 2, in Jamaica Plain to learn more about our campaign at impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org and how you can get involved in this fight for our Constitution and our democracy. I will be speaking and taking questions that evening from 7pm to 9pm at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain. You can RSVP with our partners via Facebook, by clicking here. I hope to see you on March 2 in Jamaica Plain! John Bonifaz   www.RootsAction.org

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice    

 

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.  

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind -Continue To Dec

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  

By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****

Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        

                 

That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.

As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.          

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Woody Guthrie's' "Deportee"

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Woody Guthrie's' "Deportee"  

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

Deportee
(aka. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos")
Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

      

A Belated RIP-The "Stately Queen Of England" Actor John Hurt Passes At 77

John Hurt, British Actor Hailed for His Shape-Shifting Roles, Dies at 77

By BRUCE WEBERJAN. 27, 2017

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Mr. Hurt in “Krapp’s Last Tape” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in 2011.CreditRichard Perry/The New York Times

John Hurt, an unprepossessing British character actor who vanished inside dozens of roles, from Shakespeare to science fiction, including John Merrick, the hideously deformed title character in the 1980 film “The Elephant Man,” died on Wednesday at his home in Norfolk, England. He was 77.

His wife, Anwen Hurt, confirmed his death. In June 2015, Mr. Hurt disclosed that he had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Hurt was a rising stage actor in England in the 1960s but spent most of the remainder of his career compiling a long résumé in movies and on television. A chameleon of a performer, physically unimposing but with a rich, melodic voice, he played a number of leading roles, though he could never be described as a leading man. Critics often seemed challenged to explain the appeal of his presence.

In “The Naked Civil Servant” (1975), seen first on television in England, he was Quentin Crisp, a flame-haired raconteur and social butterfly whose forthright flamboyance as a gay man helped push the acceptance of homosexuality in Britain.

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Mr. Hurt after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle in 2015. CreditPool photo by Steve Parsons

In a 1979 BBC mini-series, he was Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the brooding, conscience-stricken killer in “Crime and Punishment.” And in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” he was Winston Smith, the protagonist. Mr. Hurt’s pallor, fearful expression and prominent ears made him an especially feral and unromantic rebel.

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“His countenance is fishy and bizarre,” Cintra Wilson wrote in Salon in 2004. “He has dark, verminous little eyes, a smirky little mouth full of nicotine-varnished teeth, and that British complexion that evokes a poached worm. Even in his early films, he has eye bags and looks like he put on a face that was at the very bottom of his laundry basket. His body, when it isn’t a little overindulged around the abdomen, is scrawny. He has never, in any role, looked particularly masculine. The characters he plays are generally weak, immoral, murderous, slimy or insane. Yet to gaze upon John Hurt, in almost any role, is to feel a drooly adoration; he is irresistible.”

Frequently cast in fantasy films as a credibly real character, Mr. Hurt could be kindly or cruel. He was the wand expert, Mr. Ollivander, in several Harry Potter films, and the führer-like dictator of a barely familiar England in the futuristic “V for Vendetta” (2005).

Mr. Hurt slipped so easily into makeup that it often seemed a form of disguise. Professorially bearded with a Brillo pad of silver hair, he was almost unrecognizable as Trevor Bruttenholm, the British paranormal expert who discovers the young title demon in the sci-fi thriller “Hellboy” (2004).

In “The Elephant Man,” a film that also starred Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft (it had no connection with Bernard Pomerance’s stage play of the same name), Mr. Hurt found the apotheosis of this quality, the subordination of his own physical being to the character’s. In the role of John Merrick, which required hours of makeup application before each day’s filming, he was unrecognizable as the monstrous-looking but gentle sufferer of a rare affliction that enlarged his head, twisted his musculature and hampered his speech and mobility.

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Mr. Hurt, center, in a scene from “Alien” (1979), directed by Ridley Scott. CreditSunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images

For the calm dignity he brought to this performance — a powerful reproof to those who demonized and humiliated Merrick — Mr. Hurt was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for best actor, critical plaudits and the admiration of the film’s director, David Lynch, who said 10 years later, in an interview in The New York Times Magazine: “John Hurt is simply the greatest actor in the world.” (Robert De Niro won the best actor award in 1981.)

Though Mr. Hurt was more familiar to audiences in Britain, where he was knighted in 2015, his work there found its way to recognition across the Atlantic as well. He appeared as Richard Rich, a young man in pre-Elizabethan England who yields to his ambition and betrays Sir Thomas More in the film “A Man for All Seasons” (1966). In 1983, he gave an acclaimed performance as the Fool in a television production of “King Lear,” with Laurence Olivier in the title role.

And in “Scandal” (1989), he played an affable go-between who paired pretty girls with powerful men in a true-story, tabloid-fodder episode known as the Profumo affair, which ended the career of Britain’s secretary of state for war, John Profumo, and tainted the conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Mr. Hurt began appearing with greater frequency in American films in the late 1970s. The spur was the American broadcast, on PBS, of “I, Claudius,” a BBC series based on Robert Graves’s novels about the Roman empire. Mr. Hurt played the depraved, bloodthirsty emperor Caligula.

Some of his movie parts were in Hollywood trifles; in one, “King Ralph” (1991), he was the stodgily irate English opposition to the ascension to the English throne of an American yokel (John Goodman). But even before “The Elephant Man,” he was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as a self-lacerating drug addict imprisoned in Turkey in “Midnight Express” (1978).

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Mr. Hurt as John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” (1980). CreditPhotofest

Mr. Hurt achieved cult status in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” in 1979 as Kane, the first victim of the title space creature, who emerges bloodily from his chest. Testament to his appeal as a sacrificial lamb, it was one of many gruesome deaths Mr. Hurt suffered on film; he was stabbed, shot, hanged and burned to a crisp, all more than once. Indeed, in “Spaceballs,” Mel Brooks’s 1987 spoof, he reprised Kane’s death: As the little monster explodes from his rib cage, he says with some exasperation, “Oh, no, not again.”

John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, on Jan. 22, 1940. His father was an Anglican clergyman; his mother an engineer.

John appeared in school plays, often in female roles because, he said, he was small and his voice was high. His parents approved of his acting, but not as a profession — “They thought it represented something risqué and populist; it was out of the question,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1990 — and they sent him to art school instead.

He later auditioned for and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He made his film debut in 1962 in “The Wild and the Willing,” a drama about academic life in which he played the feckless roommate of a rebellious student played by Ian McShane. The same year, he appeared onstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company in “Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger,” a controversial work that ended with the gratuitous killing of a child.

Through the 1960s and early ’70s, his London stage credits included Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” and “The Dumb Waiter”; Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”; and John Osborne’s “Inadmissible Evidence,” which starred Nicol Williamson.

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John Hurt at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014. CreditIan Gavan/Getty Images

His film credits during this time included the lead role in “Sinful Davey” (1969), a John Huston film based on the autobiography of a 19th-century Scottish rogue; and “10 Rillington Place,” a 1971 drama based on the crimes of a real-life London serial killer, John Christie. Mr. Hurt played Timothy Evans, who in 1950 was wrongly convicted of some of Mr. Christie’s crimes and executed.

His theater career had a resurgence in the 1990s. He appeared in London in Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with Helen Mirren. Later, at the Gate Theater in Dublin, he took on the title (and only) role in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Samuel Beckett’s nostalgia-eviscerating portrait of a 69-year-old man revisiting his earlier life by means of listening to an old tape recording. It became a signature role. He performed it in London and appeared in a film version, directed by Atom Egoyan, before making his New York theatrical debut with it at age 71 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011.

“By now Mr. Hurt has the crusty Krapp thoroughly in his well-versed actor’s bones, and there isn’t a moment in his performance in which he is not fully inhabiting the corroded soul of the unforgettable character,” Charles Isherwood, who had seen Mr. Hurt in the role in London 11 years earlier, wrote in The New York Times. “The performance has only grown more prickly, funny and moving with age.”

Like many a British actor of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Hurt was known as a tippler, and his personal life was touched by tragedy. His partner of many years, the French model Marie-Lise Volpelière-Pierrot, was killed in a riding accident in 1983. He was divorced three times. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Alexander and Nicholas.

Mr. Hurt’s other film roles include a cross-dresser called the Countess in an adaptation of Tom Robbins’s picaresque novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1993); Professor Oxley, an archaeologist pal of the title character (Harrison Ford) in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008); the head of British intelligence, known only as Control, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011), from the John le Carré novel; and a Roman Catholic priest in “Jackie” (2016).

“When I say that acting is just a rather more sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians, it’s my way of trying to quash all the pretentious crap that’s said about acting,” Mr. Hurt said in 1990. “What I mean is, if you pretend well enough, the audience will believe you.”

He added: “In front of the camera you try to do subtle, telling things and hope the director, and the camera, notices. You can feel when you pass something through the camera. The old Alan Ladd story is the best one in that respect. He came back from a long day of shooting out in the dusty Arizona desert and someone said, ‘Did you have a good day, Alan?’ In his soft rasp, he said, ‘Yup, a couple of good looks.’”

Correction: January 28, 2017 

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated when and where Mr. Hurt died. He died on Wednesday at his home in Norfolk, England, not on Friday in London.

Correction: January 30, 2017 

An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary misstated the location of Windsor Castle, where Mr. Hurt was pictured after being awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. It is in Windsor, England, not London.

Christopher Mele contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2017, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: John Hurt, British Actor of Shape-Shifting Roles, Dies at 77. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Su