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On October 23, after having more than four decades of his life stolen, Michael Africa Sr. was finally released from a Pennsylvania state prison. Only the second of the MOVE 9 to be paroled—his wife Debbie was released in June—Mike was able to join her and their son Michael Africa Jr., who was born in prison 40 years ago. (See WV No. 1136, 29 June.)
The MOVE 9 were sentenced to terms of 30 to 100 years on bogus charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer during a brutal cop assault on their Powelton Village home on 8 August 1978. After a months-long siege, an army of nearly 600 cops surrounded the MOVE house, unleashed a hail of gunfire and then stormed the home. One police officer, James Ramp, was killed in the cops’ own cross fire. At least eight witnesses testified that no gunshots came from the MOVE house, and no fingerprints of any MOVE member were found on the weapons supposedly recovered from their home. The presiding judge who entombed them in prison admitted he hadn’t “the faintest idea” who shot the cop.
Mike Africa’s freedom is welcome news. But we do not forgive or forget the decades of prison hell he and his family have suffered. This includes watching in horror on 13 May 1985 when the Philly police firebombed their Osage Avenue home, killing eleven, as well as the deaths of Merle and Phil Africa behind bars. The MOVE 9 are innocent victims of a vicious 1978 cop attack on their home and an obvious frame-up. Despite the overwhelming evidence of their innocence, MOVE members Delbert, Eddie, Chuck, Janet and Janine remain in Pennsylvania’s dungeons. We demand: Free them now!
From The Partisan Defense Committee- Native Americans Targeted Free Dakota Access Pipeline Activists!
Workers Vanguard No. 1143
2 November 2018
Native Americans Targeted
Free Dakota Access Pipeline Activists!
Six Native Americans who two years ago protested against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota today are facing years-long federal sentences. The Standing Rock encampment, which attracted thousands of American Indians and environmental activists in late 2016 until its dismantling in February 2017, was brutally assaulted many times by police, National Guardsmen and private security thugs, with over 800 arrested. The Water Protector Legal Collective reports that 132 state criminal cases are still active. We demand: Drop all the charges against the protesters now!
On 27 October 2016, cops used pepper spray, rubber bullets, Humvees, armored trucks and bulldozers in an attempt to clear the encampment, arresting more than 140 and leaving over 50 injured. One of those arrested that day was Oglala Lakota Sioux activist Red Fawn Fallis, a respected leader and medic at the camp whose family includes a number of American Indian Movement (AIM) members. As she was pinned to the ground by several burly cops, a .38-calibre revolver at her waist went off. Lucky to survive this assault, she was slammed with three federal felony charges, including discharge of a weapon, which carries a sentence of ten years to life. She took a plea deal and was sentenced in July to 57 months on the lesser charge of possession and is incarcerated in Texas.
Michael “Rattler” Markus, Michael “Little Feather” Giron, Dion Ortiz and James “Angry Bird” White were charged with starting fires during the cop offensive of October 27—a federal offense that carries a minimum of 15 years. Three have now been sentenced on civil disorder charges to 16 or 36 months. In a subsequent attack by state forces on 19 January 2017, Navajo student Marcus Mitchell was shot in the face with a bean bag pellet. He lost sight, feeling and taste on his left side and his spine was severely damaged. For surviving, he was charged with criminal trespassing and is due in federal court on November 5.
The capitalist state vendetta against these American Indians is the latest racist atrocity committed by federal authorities against the indigenous population. Indeed, the frame-up of Fallis is straight out of the FBI’s standard playbook. The gun that discharged during her arrest belonged to her then boyfriend, Heath Harmon, who has since been exposed as an FBI informant tasked with spying on AIM. Red Fawn’s mother, Yellow Wood, founded the Colorado chapter of AIM and protested forced sterilizations of American Indian women, among other issues. Her uncle is an AIM spokesman in Colorado today. Documents acquired by journalist Will Parrish and published on The Intercept website show that Red Fawn was targeted by state forces—they literally had her photo on the wall chart.
In the 1970s, AIM and the Black Panther Party were marked for murderous repression under the FBI’s COINTELPRO, which used infiltration, surveillance and disinformation to “neutralize” these organizations. Notable among the leaders of AIM who languish in prison to this day is Leonard Peltier. Framed for killing two FBI agents during a government assault on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, Peltier has been consistently denied parole because he steadfastly refuses to admit guilt for a crime he did not commit.
With the Feds throwing the book at the American Indian DAPL protesters, most were compelled to accept non-cooperating plea deals on lesser charges. Another factor was the prevalent racism against Native Americans in the area; a survey of jury-eligible locals showed that the vast majority assume they are guilty or are biased against them. As Michael Markus explained: “Having a fair trial in Bismarck was going to be impossible,” adding, “If you go to court in North Dakota, you are going to get convicted.” Indeed, it was an all-white jury in North Dakota that convicted Leonard Peltier even though prosecutors later admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents.” Free him now!
American capitalism was built on the brutal dispossession and near genocide of the indigenous peoples. Having pushed the Sioux onto a reservation established under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the federal government stole large chunks of the reservation land later in the 19th century, including a stretch of 35 miles that the DAPL goes through. The Sioux are owed substantial compensation for this historic land grab.
As for the DAPL itself, Marxists had no reason to either support or oppose it. Oil pipelines serve a socially useful function of transporting fuel and are overall safer than other forms of oil transport. Protesters expressed concern that the reservation water supply will be polluted by a leaking pipeline. Cutting corners to boost profits is the name of the game for the energy barons, as it is for the capitalists in every industry. What is needed are fighting unions that enforce safety standards and practices in construction, operation and maintenance. Then, both those living near pipelines and workers on the job would be better off.
To this day, the reservations are blighted by poverty and desperation. At the same time, much of the indigenous population now lives in America’s cities and is a component part of the multiracial proletariat. We seek to build a Leninist workers party that will unleash the social power of the working class in defense of all the oppressed, on the road to sweeping away the capitalist system and establishing a workers government. Such a government would immediately spend the money to provide a decent life for those who have suffered most under capitalism, not least Native Americans and black people. It would ensure the social emancipation of American Indians, promoting their voluntary integration on the basis of full equality while providing the fullest possible regional autonomy for those who desire it.
The Partisan Defense Committee, the legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has contributed to Red Fawn’s legal defense. Details on how to write to the prisoners, contribute to their commissaries and donate to the legal defense of the protesters can be found at waterprotectorlegal.org.
For Labor/Black Mobilizations to Stop the Fascists!
Fascist Proud Boys Rampage in NYC
It was an unmistakable call to murder leftists. On October 12, the fascist Proud Boys descended on New York’s Upper East Side to re-enact the 1960 assassination of Japanese Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma by Otoya Yamaguchi, a member of a far-right militarist organization. Asanuma, a well-known supporter of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, was speaking from a podium when Yamaguchi rushed the stage and stabbed him with a samurai sword.
After playing the assassin in the re-enactment held inside the Metropolitan Republican Club, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes went outside waving his katana and his gang of thugs attacked antifa demonstrators on the street. Cops stood by approvingly as anti-fascist protesters were slammed to the pavement, beaten and kicked amid barks of “faggot.” The cops then arrested three leftists at the request of the fascists. Drop all charges against the anti-fascist protesters!
The following day in Portland, Oregon, the Proud Boys teamed up with Patriot Prayer for a “flash march for law and order.” Their target was activists gathering for a memorial for Patrick Kimmons, a black man killed by the Portland police in September. Clearly, they were out for blood. One fascist wore a shirt reading, “I hunt Antifa cowards.” As they waved American flags, the fascists attacked the crowd with clubs, pepper spray and other weapons while the cops watched.
Although the Trump administration is not fascist, the fascists have been emboldened by the official racism and bigotry emanating from the White House. Trump’s recent declaration, “I’m a nationalist,” was making a play for them on the eve of the midterms. The fascists feed off the economic misery created by the capitalist system, which is based on brutal exploitation and racial oppression, whether administered by Republicans or by Democrats.
Today, fascist scum like the Proud Boys are targeting the left, especially antifa. Their ultimate purpose is the destruction of the workers movement, including labor unions, and racial genocide. The fascists are the paramilitary shock troops of the capitalist class, but with labor struggle at an all-time low, America’s rulers currently have no need to unleash them against the proletariat and oppressed. But they are held in reserve, to be let loose in times of social crisis, especially against convulsive struggles by the working class.
Every time neo-Nazis successfully mobilize, they win new recruits and encourage Hitlerite killers like the one who gunned down eleven Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27 (see article above). The roots of American fascism go back to the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union Army in the Civil War, after which the KKK and other race-terrorists arose to bloodily suppress the newly freed slaves. The fascists long to reverse the verdict of that war, as McInnes underscored to his followers: “This is the Civil War. If you’re dressed as a Confederate soldier and a Yankee comes up to you, don’t listen to what he has to say. Choke him.” Their goal is an all-white America where black people, Jews, Latinos and other minorities simply do not exist.
After the Proud Boys rampaged in New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo announced that state police forces will investigate the incident, and five Proud Boys members have been arrested. Don’t buy the lie that the capitalist state and its cops, who are the main perpetrators of violence against black people and the oppressed, are going to protect you from the fascists. The cops and fascists have always worked hand in hand, from the murder of activists during the civil rights movement and the 1979 Greensboro massacre of five anti-Klan leftists to Charlottesville last year, when a fascist plowed his car into a crowd of protesters and killed Heather Heyer.
After the race-terrorists mobilized in Charlottesville, the Democrats and their media mouthpieces howled their moral indignation at Trump’s condemnation of “both sides,” but then did the same thing by denouncing antifa “violence.” This month, after the attack by the Proud Boys in NYC, the right-wing rag New York Post (16 October) dismissed it as “no threat” while railing against “Antifa goons” for “threats of actual violence.” Just days earlier, the prestigious Washington Post (14 October) reported that “antifascists may have provoked the violence” in Portland. Joining the chorus against antifa, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) intoned: “A strategy focused on physical confrontation gives the reactionaries exactly what they want” (socialistworker.org, 26 October).
In fact, the fascist killers must be stopped when they mobilize. It is the fascists—not black people, Jews and other minorities—who should feel the sting of fear. While antifa activists are defiant and heroic, their program is merely the streetfighting face of liberalism and moral suasion. The fascist menace cannot be eliminated through isolated actions that do nothing to advance the political consciousness of the working class. A serious fight to eradicate fascism must be based on a revolutionary proletarian perspective to overthrow the capitalist system that breeds it.
Standing at the head of all the intended victims of fascist terror, labor has the power to drive these racist killers off the streets. That many working people and anti-fascist activists today cannot even conceive of such union mobilizations is squarely the responsibility of the union tops. They have shackled the social power of the working class to the interests of the capitalist exploiters, particularly through the Democratic Party, lying down as the bosses have waged a one-sided class war that has decimated the unions.
The potential for mobilizing labor/black power to crush the fascists was shown in a small but real way in New York City in October 1999. The Partisan Defense Committee initiated a united-front action to stop the KKK. Thousands, backed by the city’s powerful integrated union movement, mobilized on the streets. Fearing any possible display of labor/black power, Democratic officials preached “tolerance” and “peace,” even sharing their sound permit with the Klan. They were joined by the ISO, which built a diversionary rally organized by the Democrats and shared the platform with a Latino police association.
The aim of our action, like our other mobilizations against the KKK and Nazis in the 1980s and ’90s, was not only to stop the fascists. We also sought to imbue the working class with the consciousness of its social power as well as to draw political lessons on the nature of the capitalist state and the Democratic Party. These actions showed the possibility of mobilizing the proletariat in defense of itself and all the oppressed.
The proletariat has the numbers, power and organization not only to spike fascist provocations but to sweep away capitalist rule. What is lacking is the kind of leadership necessary to fight. We need a workers party that fights for a workers government to rip the means of production from the capitalist exploiters and institute a planned socialist economy that operates for the benefit of working people. We need a workers America that will hammer the last nail in the coffin of the fascist vermin.
OCTOBER 30—In recent weeks, President Trump has sought to whip up the nativists in his base by making the Central American migrant caravan the defining issue of the midterm elections. Daily Trump rallies feature hysterical chauvinist rants against the “onslaught of illegal aliens,” a reference to the Hondurans and other Central Americans desperately fleeing the poverty and violence imposed on their home countries by U.S. imperialism. With the White House pledging to stop them at all costs, yesterday the Pentagon announced the deployment of at least 5,200 active-duty U.S. Army and Air Force troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, dubbed “Operation Faithful Patriot.” There they will join 2,000 National Guardsmen and the battalions of the U.S. Border Patrol. A few days prior, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ominously commented that “the rules of engagement” were still being worked out: “We do not have any intention right now to shoot at people. They will be apprehended, however.”
The Trump administration had already enlisted the Mexican authorities to do Washington’s dirty work to prevent the caravan from moving further north. After crossing Mexico’s southern border, the once 7,000-strong caravan was met with detentions and deportations and is now reduced in size. Two days ago, as a smaller caravan trailing behind entered Mexico, a Honduran man was killed by the Federal Police.
Spewing his characteristic vitriol about Latinos and other “criminals” invading white America, Trump also has plans to invoke his presidential powers to close every door to their legal entry to the U.S., whether by banning them on “national security” grounds (similar to the racist anti-Muslim travel ban) or summarily denying asylum claims. We oppose these measures as well as all other racist, nationally discriminatory immigration laws and regulations.
The Democratic Party, the other party of racism and U.S. imperialism, has largely evaded the matter of the caravan so as not to alienate more socially backward potential voters. While there may be differences in what they say and how they say it, any policy differences between the Republicans and the Democrats boil down to how best to administer American capitalism. When on October 26 Democratic honcho Nancy Pelosi issued a statement regarding Trump’s anti-migrant “fearmongering,” it was to push “comprehensive immigration reform to protect our borders,” that is, a version of Trump’s wall.
The Democrats certainly know a thing or two about “protecting” the borders, as evidenced by the anti-immigrant crackdowns of the last two Democratic administrations. Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Operation Gatekeeper” militarized the U.S.-Mexico border, including through the building of a fence to seal off entry points. Two years later, his draconian “immigration reform” law established the detention and deportation apparatus seen today. For his part, Barack Obama not only deported a record 2.5 million people, but also massively expanded the detention system. During his reign, border enforcement was bolstered by National Guard troops and Predator drones as agents engaged in widespread abuses and repeatedly gunned people down, including killing three Mexican teenagers on Mexican soil.
All this paved the way for the current White House’s declaration of war against immigrants. I.C.E. raids, deportations, detentions and family separations have been part of the daily web of terror. Trump’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) threatens the forcible removal of nearly half a million people by January 2020. These immigrants, from countries like Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras, have legally lived and worked in the country for years. (In 2016, the Obama White House without warning called a halt to new TPS applicants from Haiti, stranding thousands on their way to the U.S.) At the same time, Latino citizens, especially in the borderlands, have been caught in a racist State Department dragnet that strips them of their U.S. passports under the pretext that their birth certificates were falsified.
Trump is now mooting the overturn of the right to citizenship for children born in the U.S. to non-citizens. That fundamental right is embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, one of the gains of the Civil War that destroyed black chattel slavery. This attack underscores that anti-immigrant chauvinism always threatens black people as well.
It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to take up the fight for full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here, legally or illegally. The same capitalist class taking aim at vulnerable undocumented immigrants also increasingly grinds down the working class as a whole. The bosses use anti-immigrant chauvinism, as well as anti-black racism, to divide the workers and weaken their struggles. A class-struggle fight against deportations and I.C.E. raids, together with a concerted drive to organize undocumented workers into the unions with full rights and protections, would go a long way toward advancing the unity and fighting capacity of the working class.
But the unions are not mobilized to defend the interests of their own members, much less the immigrant population, due to their traitorous leadership. Labor officialdom is committed to maintaining corporate profitability and the very system of capitalist exploitation, clearly shown in its allegiance to the Democratic Party. Today, the AFL-CIO tops are also giddy over Trump’s trade tariffs, which coincide with their longstanding calls for “American jobs for American workers”—protectionist poison that also fans the flames of anti-immigrant bigotry. Labor needs a new leadership dedicated to class struggle and proletarian internationalism. That requires breaking labor’s ties to the Democrats, Trump and all capitalist parties and politicians.
More recently, the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) threw open local economies to U.S. imperialist pillage. That economic ruin was exacerbated three years later by the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street. CAFTA has reduced the peasantry to abject misery, forcing millions to migrate to the cities or to the U.S. in search of subsistence, as NAFTA has done in Mexico for nearly a quarter-century. Washington’s plan to replace NAFTA with a new treaty, the USMCA (United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement), will only deepen the imperialist looting of Mexico. From the beginning, we Trotskyists of the International Communist League have opposed NAFTA (as well as CAFTA). What is needed is joint class struggle on both sides of the border to bring it down.
The social fabric of Central America was ripped apart by the dirty wars of the 1980s amid the anti-Soviet Cold War. Senior Honduran officials on the CIA payroll tortured and killed supporters of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. Clandestine cemeteries in Honduras are littered with the remains of the desaparecidos (disappeared), and survivors testify to the torture they endured at the hands of U.S.-trained military personnel.
After the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the U.S. had less interest in using Honduras as a front line for anti-subversive operations, but continued to supply millions of dollars in military aid under the guise of the “war on drugs.” In the name of fighting el narco, Washington has provided weapons and military training to Central American armed forces, which are totally interpenetrated with the drug cartels. Far from protecting the population, the purpose is to augment the bourgeois state apparatus of repression against the exploited and oppressed. Down with the “war on drugs”!
The conditions for Honduran workers and the urban and rural poor have grown even more dire since 2009 when then president Manuel Zelaya was toppled in a coup engineered by a section of the national bourgeoisie and headed by a general trained at U.S. imperialism’s notorious School of the Americas. One of Obama’s opening shots after first being elected Commander-in-Chief was to prop up the post-coup regime of Porfirio Lobo, including by funding security forces to smash the protests rocking the country. Since the coup, under successive reactionary Partido Nacional regimes, unemployment has skyrocketed and criminal gangs have mushroomed. In that time, at least 30 trade unionists have been killed as well as several activists, such as indigenous leader Berta Cáceres.
Cáceres was reportedly on a military hit list given to the elite TIGRES police unit, which was set up in 2013 by the Honduran government in conjunction with the U.S. State Department. Washington gives aid, training and advice to these killers who have terrorized poor communities like those defending their land rights against the huge U.S. and Canadian mining companies. The TIGRES death squads also hunted down those protesting the results of last year’s presidential elections, which were marked by fraud when Juan Orlando Hernández, a longtime U.S. ally, was re-elected after “computer malfunctions.” At demonstrations and in midnight home raids, some 35 were killed and over 1,000 detained.
The caravan was initiated by immigrant rights activists, including Arizona-born Pueblo Sin Fronteras director Irineo Mújica, who was arrested on October 18 in southern Mexico on the false claim that he had no papers. Now released on bail, Mújica was already in the sights of the Mexican authorities, having been arrested and beaten by federal agents while documenting the abuse of immigrants in Oaxaca in 2008. Last week, Mújica and other caravan leaders rejected a cynical proposal by Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that the migrants could apply for refugee status in Mexico on the proviso that they remain in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. The offer was an attempt to contain the “problem” for the U.S. imperialists through an empty promise of jobs when there are none.
Back in 2014, Peña Nieto was the one who launched the “Plan Frontera Sur” (the Southern Border Plan) with sponsorship from the U.S. State Department. The plan was pushed by Obama after he declared a “migration crisis” that same year, when U.S. border guards detained over 50,000 unaccompanied Central American children trying to cross into El Norte. Washington has provided nearly $200 million in funding to expand Mexico’s deportation machine under Plan Frontera Sur. Since its implementation, the Mexican government has deported over 600,000 migrants, overwhelmingly back to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. We say: All U.S. police and military forces out of Mexico and Central America! Down with the Plan Frontera Sur!
As the GEM emphasizes: “Despite the (timid) nationalist rhetoric of bourgeois politicians like AMLO, the reality is that in underdeveloped capitalist countries, such as Mexico and the Central American countries, the weak national bourgeoisies are incapable of breaking with the imperialists, to whom they are tied by a thousand threads.” It is impossible for the local bourgeoisies to satisfy the needs of the population under capitalism.
There is a powerful and young proletariat in Mexico that can lead all the oppressed, including the poor peasantry, the indigenous populations and the undocumented, in the fight for socialist revolution to expropriate the bourgeoisie and collectivize the means of production. As part of this perspective of permanent revolution developed by Leon Trotsky, we understand that the international extension of the revolution, especially to the U.S. imperialist colossus, is essential to defend the workers government and to proceed on the road to socialism. A revolution in Mexico would electrify the multiracial proletariat in the U.S., with its large Mexican and Central American components.
Only Proletarian Revolution Can Sweep Away Imperialism
Imperialism is not a policy but a global system rooted in the drive for profit. Under this system, a handful of advanced powers dominate the colonial and neocolonial world as they compete with one another over markets, raw materials and sources of cheap labor. U.S. imperialism cannot be reformed to be “humane” but must be overthrown through proletarian revolution that shatters the capitalist state machinery, which includes the cops and border enforcement, and establishes a workers state.
In contrast, some reformist outfits pretend it is possible to convince the capitalists to stop policing their borders. The pseudo-Marxists of Left Voice—U.S. section of the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International, whose Mexican affiliate is the Movimiento de los Trabajadores Socialistas—have recently published a series of articles calling to open the borders, including one titled “The Migrant Caravan: A Challenge to Donald Trump” (24 October) that concludes, “Today more than ever we socialists fight for #OpenBorders.” Such calls are a liberal utopian pipe dream; no capitalist ruling class has voluntarily given up control of its territory, and none ever will. The modern nation-state arose with the advent of capitalist property relations and will remain the basis for the organization of the capitalist economy until the profit system is swept away.
An earlier Left Voice article titled “Abolish ICE, and Abolish the Border Too: A Socialist Perspective” (30 July) dresses up a favored slogan of the anti-Trump “resistance.” While many of these Democrats and their hangers-on propose to “abolish I.C.E.” simply to replace it with a different immigration enforcement agency, Left Voice presents the slogan as a variant of “abolish the borders,” further imbibing in the liberal delusion that the capitalist state will dismantle itself through sufficient pressure. In addition, their call for “an end to national borders and all enforcement apparatuses” has a reactionary content. It would not only open up Cuba, China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states to counterrevolutionary attacks, but also intensify the imperialist plunder of dependent countries and obliterate the right to national self-determination.
Borders, and the state itself, will disappear only in the communist future. Getting there will take a series of revolutions around the world to establish an internationally planned socialist economy. The resulting vast increase in the productive forces will make it possible to eliminate material scarcity and lay the foundations for a decent life for everyone. In order to make this perspective a reality, it is essential to forge genuine Leninist-Trotskyist parties, based on the experience of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, in the U.S., Mexico and beyond, as part of a reforged Fourth International. Here in the belly of the beast, that party will largely consist of and be led by black people, Latinos and other minorities and will be internationalist and revolutionary through and through.
The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Dane Clark’s “Blackout” (1954)
DVD Review
By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell
Blackout (released in England as Murder By Proxy), starring Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Hammer Productions, 1954
Wouldn’t you want a long-time film reviewer like me, or my colleagues in this space who are the regular reviewers, Sandy Salmon and Alden Riley, to draw a map for you, let you know what is what about any particular film in relationship to others in the genre. As the headline to this review notes (and has on other occasions in this ten film series) I am reviewing a series of B-film noirs from the 1950s produced by the Robert Lippert organization in conjunction with Hammer Productions in England. The idea, at least this is what I have been able to gather from various readings and speculations after now having reviewed scads of these efforts, by Lippert was to grab some faded Hollywood star who either needed the dough or was looking for some film, any film to satisfy whatever stardust lust drove him or her to the studio lots in the first place and back him or her up with an English cast, do the production in England and get away with costs on the cheap. If you knew that and then somebody, me, came along and told you that these efforts didn’t compare, didn’t compare at all with classic noirs, you know Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Last Man Standing and others that you almost know all the lines from since you have seen the films so many times, wouldn’t you appreciate that knowledge
You would think so but you would at least in one case, actually more, but the reader I am thinking of as I write this has become something of a thorn in my side, my efforts to draw comparisons have given me nothing but grief, and had hung on me the title of “penny a word” writer as a joke by my colleagues.
In noted in my last review in this series, The House Across The Lake, that in my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. That is the person I am thinking of right now as I write yet another screed against the injustice done to be by that person. To cut to the chase a B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different.
I have as already noted done a bunch of these (excluding a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing.
Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various types of contracts for work over the years but not that one since nobody does that anymore. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (I also mentioned there as an aside that one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not fame any blow-back). Now Sandy, Alden, Pete Markin, the administrator of this space and a few others have started to call me that as well-‘hey, penny a word.” That has made my blood boil on more than one occasion but I have calmly put up with it rather than blow-up and threaten murder and mayhem to them-and to Nora.
But enough of that or Nora will really have case about me “padding” my reviews. Here is the “skinny” on the film under review Blackout in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. (This film was released in England and on the continent as Murder By Proxy which unusually in this series is not closer to the nub of the plot since in fact a the lead man character, Dane Clark, does blackout and face serious consequences for that hard fact and has to face all kinds of hell) A down and out drunk Casey, the role played by down and out faded Hollywood star Dane Clark picked up on the cheap by Lippert and who was so “from hunger” he starred in a few of these B-babies not necessarily to his career advantage) was sitting in a bar (a nice bar, maybe classy too, since it had a female blues torch singer up on stage as the film begins which may have been the cinematic and thematic highlight of the whole venture) putting a load on when a beautiful young woman, Phyllis, played by fetching Belinda Lee, comes up to his table and before long makes him an offer he can’t refuse. No, not that, not something sexual which would be catnip for most guys once they got a look at her but an offer for him to marry her for a pile of dough so she can grab some inheritance money from a stingy father. Offers him serious dough, serious dough then anyway but as I have mentioned more than once in previous reviews nothing but cheapjack walking around money these days. Offers him five hundred pounds, pounds sterling which in those heady English days was maybe twenty-five hundred US, and I don’t know and it doesn’t matter now post-Brexit how many Euros. He bites and she drags him out of the gin mill and to a preacher man or justice of the peace maybe better to tie the profitable knot.
Easy dough, real easy for a down and out guy who had a drinking problem and was out of cash-flush. Easy, except for one problem, he winds up in a Gainsborough apartment, you know an artist’s apartment, female, an apartment of a woman who had started a portrait of Phyllis and can’t remember a thing about the night before except he had blood on his coat. Which is not good, very not good, since Phyllis isn’t easy to find and moreover her father had been murdered by a party or parties unknown that night before. So yes the coppers and everybody else have him set up as the fall guy, as the guy to take the big step-off, the guy to be hung high as they used to say. But not so quick because under the threat of the gallows Casey gets “religion” gets on the case to find out who actually did kill poor Phyllis’ father. Through a series of twists and turns with various shady characters he eventually finds out the real killer-the wife, the mother, as usual since she would be left out of the goodies if Phyllis grabbed all the dough. Here is the funniest twist old Casey after having more than a few suspicions about Phyllis winds up in the sack with her (and her bag of dough) which is okay for 1950s film censors since remember they were married- a legal marriage at it turned out.
For a while the film took turns like a real thriller but the dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Dane in spots too too) make this thing a holy goof. As I have mentioned before in other reviews where things looked promising at the beginning here despite the come hither title and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one fades away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way.
Remember 1979 Greensboro Massacre!-Built The Anti-Fascist United Front!
Emboldened by the overt racism of the Trump administration, fascists have stepped up their provocations and deadly attacks. Their murderous intent was clearly seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, when hundreds of fascists mobilized in defense of the Confederacy. Heather Heyer was murdered by a Nazi-lover who drove his car at high speed into a group of anti-fascist protesters. The goal of today’s fascists is no different than that of their Nazi and Klan forebears: racial genocide, of black people in particular, and the destruction of working-class organizations, including unions and the left.
Today, “Charlottesville” is a byword for fascist terror, just as “Greensboro” has been for 38 years. On 3 November 1979, Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists murdered five union organizers and anti-racist activists, supporters of the Communist Workers Party, in broad daylight in Greensboro, North Carolina. The fascist killers did not work alone; they were aided and abetted by the government. Dozens of Klansmen and Nazis in a nine-car caravan drove up to the black housing project of Morningside Homes, the assembly point for an anti-Klan rally. With calculated deliberation, they took their shotguns and semiautomatic weapons out of their trunks, aimed and opened fire directly at the 100 protesters. Then they calmly packed up and drove away. The whole massacre was shown live on TV and recorded by the Greensboro cops.
Many of the anti-Klan activists who survived were fired from their jobs, jailed and hounded by the FBI and local police. These courageous people—black and white, men and women—were targeted because they acted to oppose the fascists’ vicious campaign against blacks, Jews, unionists and leftists. Many of them had a long and honorable history in the Southern civil rights movement and as union militants in North Carolina, where Klan terror has historically been used by the bosses to keep unions out.
The Greensboro Massacre was the product of collusion between the fascists and the capitalist state. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent helped train the killers and plot the assassinations; a police/FBI informer rode shotgun in the lead car; a Greensboro cop brought up the rear. The killers literally got away with murder. They were acquitted by all-white juries, affirming once again the meaning of “justice” in this racist, capitalist system.
The fascists announced they would “celebrate” the Greensboro Massacre a week later in Detroit. In response to this provocation in a black proletarian center, the Spartacist League built a labor/black mobilization at the same place and time that the Klan threatened to rally. Over 500 people, including black and white auto workers, turned out to make sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City. In organizing the protest, we had to overcome sabotage from the trade-union misleaders (especially UAW bureaucrats), who refused to endorse and build the rally, and from black Democratic Party mayor Coleman Young, who threatened to arrest the anti-Klan protesters. In an exemplary way, this mobilization showed that the working class, marching at the head of all the fascists’ intended victims, has the power to sweep the race-terrorists off the street.
The fascists must and can be stopped. Greensboro showed that the fascist killers can’t be effectively fought by individual direct action, no matter how courageous. What is necessary is to mobilize the strength of the working class. As we wrote in the immediate aftermath of Greensboro:
“Every successful cross burning, every fascist parade through a Jewish or black neighborhood, every courtroom victory in the liberals’ campaign for ‘free speech for fascists’ whets the murderers’ appetite for more violence.... This campaign of terror must be stopped. Socialists and militants in the labor movement must call on organized labor to mobilize its tremendous social power, in alliance with black and other minority organizations and the left to stop the Klan in its tracks.”
— “For Labor/Black Mass Mobilizations: Smash KKK Killers!” WV No. 243, 9 November 1979
Such mobilizations can give the working class a sense of its social power and of the class nature of the capitalist state and the Democrats. They also point to the need to forge a workers party to lead the fight for a socialist revolution. That is the only way to get rid of the fascist murderers once and for all—by doing away with the racist capitalist system that breeds them. In fighting for a workers America, we honor the memory of the Greensboro martyrs.
For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”-Build The Resistance-A Program
By the American Left History blog staff
[Sometimes and the period we are in of late, over the last several years, a period of cold civil war in the United States, is one of those times, we have to come up with some programmatic statements in order to help the process of clarification about the immediate and future tasks of the Left. To what the later Peter Paul Markin, forever known as the Scribe, called in his old hard-core working class growing up neighborhood days “seeking the newer world” which he unfortunately by his untimely early death was not able to help create although for a while he tried, tried like hell to do in his best days and which a number of us, his old comrades both from corner boy days and later have been trying to continue. The following is a draft, and only a draft, of what we collectively have come up with to help orient the newfound and promising Resistance that has sprung up in the era of one Donald J. Trump, his henchmen and his hangers-on to reverse the one-sided class war we have been on the brunt side of and of the cultural wars we have been fighting rear-guard action against for about the last forty years. Josh Breslin for the American Left History blog staff. ]
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule! ******** A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was as high in the American labor force as it is just tentatively recovering from of late, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession 2008 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. Socially productive work not make-shift stuff although we would support an vast expansion of public works to fix the broken down infrastructure in need of serious and immediate repair. his is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions’ plans as a result of battles like the General Strike in San Francisco in the 1934, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize.
Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections like the unsuccessful one against Governor Scoot Walker in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the huge defeat of public workers in Wisconsin funds and talents which could have been used to reorganize the public workers for union struggles ahead. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008, 2012, and 2016 labor, organized labor, spent over well over 700 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts rather than the serious labor organizing among low wage workers, the unorganized, the South and Wal-Mart the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement since they have been very generous with own paychecks. The old norm in need of revival is that the bureaucrats at all levels should receive no more than the pay of the average skilled worker they represent.
The hard reality today is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One of most egregious recent examples that we can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor when the deal went down from Bush to Obama to Trump on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio (also think, think hard, about having to go that far back to get a positive example). That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like the Scoot-Walker recall effort in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in previously in Libya and now in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Chad and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and other Middle East states we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. No War With North Korea, Iran! Out of Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaigns! Defend The Palestinian People! And as always after 16 long years, since 2001 for the forgetful Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off North Korea!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of North Korea and Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partners on this issue, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea) in North Korea or Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of North Korea and Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and the Kim regime in North Korea in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets and reneged on that promise by going to prison. The jailhouse the only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea preparations, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get our drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those like Trump and the majority of his Republican ilk r his who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion plus dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the 2008 crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble had also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda.
Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to socialism, to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
********
Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light, You stand up for your rights. jah!
Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )
Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )
Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )
Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )
Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )
Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )
We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )
So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (... )
Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )
*************
A special word about Bob Marley whose song above inspired us to update and present out programmatic ideas:
We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review
One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
Admit it, back in the late seventies and early eighties we all had our reggae minutes, at least a minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when that moved on the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.
Well not quite. A few year back, back in 2011 the Occupy movement, the people risen, had done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , had resurrected Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems, somehow, eminently right in the monster age of one Donald J. Trump, his henchman, and his hangers-on. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (ya, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight too.
