Fire on the Mountain

Revolutionary Recipes: Mao's Red Braised Fatty Pork

2009-10-29T17:50:00.008-05:00

[This inaugurates a new FotM series highlighting recipes associated with various revolutionary figures. I’ve only got a couple lined up, so I hope readers will chip in with their own favorites, or at least suggest some, or this will be a pretty short-lived feature.]

We’ll start with a recipe associated with Chairman Mao Zedong. Hong shao rou--red braised fatty pork--is reputed to have been among his favorite dishes, one he ordered before major combat, asserting that that he’d never lost a battle when fed on hong shao rou. It is also regarded in Hunan Province, where Mao grew up, as brain food.

Hunanese cooks traditionally leave the skin intact for maximum succulence (read: fat), and cut the meat into rather large chunks, perhaps 1 1/2 inches long. This recipe takes its color from caramelized sugar, which gives it a lovely reddish gloss, but many people just use dark soy sauce at home.

1 lb. pork belly (skin optional)
2 tbsp. peanut oil
2 tbsp. white sugar
1 tbsp. Shaoxing wine (or saki)
3/4 in. piece fresh ginger, skin left on and sliced
1 star anise
1 cup chestnuts (preferably real chestnuts-—water chestnuts can be substituted, but have more crunch than flavor)
4 dried red chilies (you can tone this down, although the late Chairman used to joke that the more chili you eat the more revolutionary you become)
a small piece cinnamon stick
shoyu (soy sauce) salt, and sugar
4 scallions sliced

1. Plunge the pork belly into a pan of boiling water and simmer for 3-4 minutes until partially cooked. Remove and, when cool enough to handle, cut into bite-sized chunks.

2. Heat the oil and white sugar in a wok over a gentle flame until the sugar melts, then raise the heat and stir until the melted sugar turns a rich caramel brown. Add the pork and splash in the Shaoxing wine.

3. Add enough water to just cover the pork, along with the ginger, star anise, chiles, and cinnamon. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 40-50 minutes.

4. Toward the end of the cooking time, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce, and season with soy sauce, salt, and a little sugar to taste. Add the scallion greens just before serving.

Note: It is purported that vegetarian variations of this recipe can be made using garlic gloves, deep-fried bean curd, preserved mustard greens and water chestnuts as main ingredients. I wouldn't know.

This recipe is adapted from the one in Fuschia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook—-she features a picture of a bowl of hong shao rou on the cover.

Black New Jersey: The community fights "Hollywood" Booker over right to water… Newark Wins!

2009-10-23T04:07:00.014-05:00

Wednesday evening, October 21, hundreds of concerned citizens gathered to picket outside the Newark, NJ City Hall and moved the protest into the Council Chambers when the weekly City Council meeting began. Residents were indignant about illegal water terminations that had been going on for months in the city. The massive protest had been organized by a coalition of the People's Organization for Progress, the Newark United Tenants Association, the Newark Water Group, the New Black Panther Party, as well as other concerned community organizations and residents.

These water shut-offs were most surprising to tenants who rely on their landlords to pay the water bill. In a substantial number of cases, residents were up to date in rent (which, according to their lease agreements, includes heat and water) and didn't event know that the landlord hadn't paid the water bill. Likewise, many residents receiving Section-8 housing subsidies have no way of even knowing if their payments are up-to-date. Their caseworkers send paperwork that result in vouchers to landlords who then get money that the welfare recipient never sees. These transactions take place without any "client" involvement, supposedly protecting the money from being misspent. When these tenants have their water turned off, they are clearly blameless.

Like many People's Organization for Progress sponsored demonstrations, this picket and rally began with 30 or so POP & NBPP members and supporters, but these numbers quickly grew to hundreds and hundreds of angry tenants before moving inside to the council chambers. In reaction to this undeniable mass of angry citizens, the Newark City Council was compelled to reverse the draconian water policy. This was truly a people's victory of major magnitude. But a more complicated, deeper and truer analysis must examine the background that allowed this policy to have been enacted in the first place. In many ways, this was (and still is) a government-imposed crisis, and the paper trail leads directly to Mayor Corey Booker's office, but we'll return to this later.

Some Background:
Months ago, a dedicated, young idealistic nurse, whom we'll call Aisha, went on a home visit to an indigent mother with five children and found a nursing nightmare; an apartment with no running water. As Aisha recently explained, the rules community healthcare workers operate under require that she report children living under these circumstances. Had these rules been followed, the next step would have involved the County taking these youngsters away from their mother's care. Aisha is a Newark resident and an active member of the People's Organization for Progress, and this is how POP initially found out about this aspect of Newark's water crisis.

The general issue of the city selling the water supply to outside investors was something with which POP had already become involved. Newark was historically the east coast's Milwaukee because, contrary to popular wisdom, it has some of the best water in the entire country. This is why the breweries for the New York metropolitan area, and much of the east coast were historically located within city limits. Any corporate purchase of Newark's water supply is not simply an attempt to make money from a staple of life that should be guaranteed to all residents, it is an attempt to control the food production industries as well.

The People's Organization for Progress united against prior schemes to sell Newark's water. The current double-billing and shut-offs by by Mayor Corey Booker (Newark's celebrity mayor) to balance the city budget involves attempting to charge residents twice for their water . If the mayor's business administrator doesn't understand that these tenants being penalized don't pay their water bills directly, she certainly doesn't have the business experience her office demands. More likely, Director Thomas is "firing a shot across the bow" of businesses that are delinquent in water payments without hurting those key businesses directly. If so, this is precisely the sort of attack on residents that Corey Booker claimed to be running against when he was first elected mayor.

The battle lines were probably best explained by the protest's organizer, Andrea Hughie chairwoman of POP's Youth Committee. “We discovered many families that receive Section 8 housing vouchers that have been living in homes without water for weeks. These families are already financially compromised and it is disappointed the city of Newark refused to protect the rights of these tenants against the absentee landlords. We rely on city officials to help us, not hurt us." Because sister Hughie reached out to her friends first, "this movement to protect community water was led by young people." Faced with potential charges of money-laundering, Newark's Hollywood Mayor "would agree to anything to avert bad publicity."

But this issue if far from settled. The people's victory at the City Council merely gives tenants a temporary reprieve through the end of the year. "In January," Ms. Hughie informs us, "the water cut-offs may begin again."

Thanks to the chairwoman of the People's Organization for Progress Reparations Committee (and POP photographer) Ingrid Hill for pictures used with this report…

NJ's People's Organization for Progress Celebrates the 150 Anniversary of John Brown's Heroic Campaign at Harpers Ferry

2009-10-21T07:48:00.002-05:00

Dr. William W. Sales, Associated Professor at Seton Hall University, speaks at the October 15th POP meeting

On Thursday, October 15, the day before the Sesquicentennial of the Raid on Harpers Ferry, the People's Organization for Progress acknowledged this important event in African American history with a presentation by Seton Hall Africana Studies professor, Dr. William Sales. Before discussing the Harpers Ferry Raid itself, or John Brown's participation, before explaining the history of the abolitionist movement that Brown came from and became one of the most significant representatives of, Professor Sales began outlining the history of slavery in the United States, and its unique role in creating the wealth that underwrites U.S. capitalism (click here to view a portion of Dr. Sales' speech).

Dr. Sales went on to explain what was unique about John Brown. While many abolitionists of the 1800s opposed slavery, viewing unpaid labor as unfair competition to small farmers because large plantations undercut the influence of homesteading by "free-soilers," John Brown opposed slavery because, in Dr. Sales words, he "loved Black people." He moved his family to settle among free Black families in the community known as Timbuctoo in North Elba, NY. This attitude made Capt. Brown unique among white abolitionists.

And while many 19th century abolitionists viewed battling slavery as a "moral calling," requiring prayer rather than action, Brown had learned in Kansas that the slavers had no qualms about employing violence and terror. Dr. Sales explained that Brown had gone to Kansas after hearing that his son's farm was under murderous attack by the border ruffians. These pro-slavery terrorists came across the border from the slave state of Missouri to try and insure that the Kansas also entered the Union as a slave state. (Later, during the Civil War, many of these same irregular troops joined the special "bushwhacker" units of Confederate Army that burned farms, terrorized civilians and after the war became backbone elements in the Ku Klux Klan.) Units like Quantrill's Raiders, carried out the shelling and burning of Lawrence during the Kansas border wars. Brown played a major role in building the free state resistance in Lawrence.

Dr. Sales explained that Brown became involved out of "a sense of family responsibility, yes, but …because John Brown went to Kansas and fought the bushwhacker terrorists… he slowed down a process by which Kansas was about to be engulfed by pro-slavery sentiment, and by slowing it down, when the Civil War broke out Kansas could come into the war as a free state, a very important intervention on his part."

One cannot understand Brown, Professor Sales added, without grasping why U.S. society needs to portray him as "crazy." Brown was feared because he represented a key thing that both the slaveowners and many whites in the abolitionist movement feared most, a white person who could identify and find true unity with African Americans.

Despite bad weather and limited advanced promotion in the media, this People's Organization for Progress celebration, The Sesquicentennial of the Harpers Ferry Raid and the Legacy of John Brown, drew a sizable crowd. Perhaps, some POP members speculated, word of mouth is more powerful than an "Upcoming Events" listing in the Star Ledger. Perhaps area academics assigning students to attend Dr. Sales' lecture or the use of so-called "new media" like blogs and Facebook by POP members made the difference. No matter the reason, the gathering left POP members and supporters demanding more. POP Chairman Lawrence Hamm has proposed that Dr. Sales return to another meeting simply to have the question-and-answer segment that, due to a lack of time, never occurred. (click here, to see additional photos from this event)

Professor Bill Sales with POP's chairman, Larry Hamm salute John Brown

From Kirke Mechem's Opera About John Brown

2009-10-14T19:08:00.003-05:00

More anent John Brown, as the 150th anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry is upon us.

Last year, as part of a continuing focus on music inspired by John Brown, I posted a piece here at FotM on the opera by Kirke Mechem, John Brown, which had just premiered in a performance by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

Here is a more recent concert performance of one of the highlights of the opera, "Dan-u-el." Mechem describes it thus:

The scene is based on a real incident. In December 1858, Brown helped a slave family escape to Kansas from Missouri, and then led them to safety into Canada. During that time, the mother gave birth to a boy whom she and her husband named after John Brown.

Some of the words come from the spiritual, "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?"; the others from my libretto. The music is original.

The fact that "Dan-u-el" seems to be entering the repertoire of adventurous modern "classical" pieces performed by college and university chorales is one more small but happy development in the reclaiming of John Brown as one of this country's greatest heroes.

Open Letter to the World - International Front in Support of the General Strike in Puerto Rico

2009-10-14T14:19:00.004-05:00

Open Letter to the World

To: All social, labor/trade union, feminist, environmentalist, and community groups

From: International Front in Support of the General Strike in Puerto Rico
frente.solidaridad@gmail.com and in Facebook “Frente Internacional en Apoyo al Paro (Huelga) en Puerto Rico”

On October 15, 2009, labor unions, students, community associations, progressive religious groups, and environmental organizations have called for a 24-hour strike demanding that the Commonwealth’s Government stop the systematic abuse that for the last 10 months it has subjected all citizens, in particular public-sector workers, poor communities and college students.

With the passing, in March of 2009, of the Fiscal Emergency Law (Law 7 of the Commonwealth), Gov. Luis A. Fortuño and an advisory board of the leading businessmen in Puerto Rico, have launched a “severance plan” that has meant firing more than 20 thousand public-sector workers. The current governor, from the Pro-annexation Party, is imposing the most blatant extreme right neo-liberal model in the history of the country, with the establishment of so-called “Public-Private Partnerships” (Alianzas Publico-Privadas - APP), the privatization of our natural resources and institutions and an unemployment rate of over 17 percent.

On the island we are preparing for a national strike called by the Broad Front for Solidarity and Struggle (Frente Amplio de Solidaridad y Lucha - FASyL), composed of over 30 organizations. The time for action has arrived. In Puerto Rico, class struggle sharpens and the street smells of resistance. We reject the mobilization of the Puerto Rico National Guard (part of the US military) and “Shock Force” (Fuerza de Choque – anti-riot forces) by the police against the workers, who are harassed and harried because constitute the main opposition forces.

Working people in Puerto Rico demand:

1. The repealing of the Fiscal Emergency Law 7 and the APP law and the restitution of all laid off workers.

2. To establish taxes on multinational corporations, and eliminating any benefits enjoyed by these multinationals under the US Federal Internal Revenue Act.

3. The immediate halting of the evictions of working-class and immigrant squatter communities and the halting of the expropriation of poor communities for development projects, and end to the political and military abuses to all, and the recognition of the right to equal housing for all human beings.

As workers of the world we face the same enemy. That's why we call for the solidarity of your organization or collective.

In solidarity,

International Front in Support of the General Strike in Puerto Rico

Let the rich pay for the crisis!
Workers of Puerto Rico in the streets and in struggle!
Let us support the General Strike!
Another world is possible!

Puerto Rico General Strike Support in New York City

2009-10-14T09:01:00.006-05:00

The Red de Apoyo a los Trabajadores, a coalition of labor, left, and community organizations from Puerto Rico with a presence in New York City is calling for a support picket on the General Strike in Puerto Rico, Thursday October 15th at 5pm in front of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration offices at 135 W 50th St. between 6th and 7th Aves. You can take the 1 to 50th St, the E to 50th St or 7th Avenue, the B, D, F, V to 47-50th Rockefeller Center or the N, R, W to 49th Street.

Puerto Rico: Ready for the National Strike
by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/10/13/puerto-rico-ready-for-the-national-strike/

Free Speech Radio - Puerto Rico prepares for general strike
http://fsrn.org/audio/puerto-rico-prepares-general-strike/5582

Hackensack, NJ Monument to African Ancestors

2009-10-11T10:23:00.016-05:00

On Saturday, October 10, 2009, Bergen County, NJ celebrated what is certainly the first monument to the Africans who perished during the Middle Passage in NJ. In fact, it may be a completely unique local memorial-stone in the entire United States. Earlier this year the Bergen County branch of People's Organization for Progress, together with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Observance Committee of Bergen County convinced the County Executive, the Board of Chosen Freeholders and the county's African American Advisory Committee of the need for such a monument. In April it was placed on the Court House lawn. It shares the northwest corner with similar monuments to the Armenian Genocide, The Irish Potato Famine, and the Nazi Holocaust.

Lawrence Hamm, state Chairman of POP, along with other speakers spoke extensively about the history of slavery in NJ and its legal abolition after the Civil War. "Many people don't know that the NJ State Assembly voted to nullify Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, even though it didn't apply to New Jersey. The Emancipation Proclamation was a Union Army recruitment document and only freed slaves in the area under Confederate rule and then only those who escaped bondage and joined the Army of the Republic," Hamm informed the crowd at the Court House. Larry also discussed Perth Amboy and Camden's roles as major slave ports, "larger at one time than the Port of Charlestown in South Carolina!" Chairman Hamm also linked the struggles of African people in the U.S. to slavery's origins with the voyages of "Admiral of the Ocean Seas" Christopher Columbus, as the country began this Columbus Day weekend.

The crowd responded enthusiastically to Larry and all the speakers. There were also cultural presentations by local poets, spoken-word artists and musicians. Clif Arrington and Margaret White, Chair and Co-Chair of POP's Bergen County Branch, introduced other speakers including the former Bergen County Chairman of the NAACP, other Hackensack-area clergy, and others who spoke with intense passion about both the struggles of African-Americans in Bergen County history, the struggle to erect this monument and the ongoing battles for Peace, Justice, and Freedom.

This wan't simply a memorial event, it was an educational and agitational forum as well: Participants promoted a variety of upcoming events including POP's Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Harpers Ferry Raid and the Legacy of John Brown this coming Thursday evening in Newark.

The plaque on the new memorial stone at the Bergen County Court House reads (in part):

"In memory of the millions of African people who perished during the Middle Passage, suffered the horrors of slavery, and endured the inhumanity of racial segregation.

We also remember the heroes who have struggled and continued to work for freedom, peace and justice."

As both this commemorative monument and the ceremony on Saturday indicate, the Struggle Continues!!!

A Bad Afternoon At Stella D'oro

2009-10-09T09:12:00.003-05:00

It was a rough afternoon.

At 2:00 PM yesterday, I was standing in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan, serving as an extra at a press conference for the Stella D’oro workers. After winning an arduous 11 month strike against concessions, the workers have been fighting plans by new owners Lance, Inc. to move the 78 year old bakery from the Bronx to Ashtabula, Ohio and reopen non-union.

The press conference/mini-rally had been a good one, though major media was thin on the ground, Speakers from the plant, a range of union officials and other supporters gave short sharp statements, demanding that Mayor Bloomberg do something to save Stella D’oro and its union jobs. As we were about to break up, two of the workers got hasty phone calls from the plant. Managers had told the morning shift that when they left at 3:00 PM, the bakery was shutting down!

Maybe a quarter of the 100-plus at City Hall headed up to 237th Street and Broadway, where the arriving shift had been ushered into work to empty their lockers. They were still trickling out at 3:00 when the day shift came out en masse, carrying plastic bags with whatever they had had inside. The three dozen supporters and workers outside the gate clapped as they did and there were chants that had become familiar to all from almost a year of picketing.

Still, while some workers looked angry, many had tears in their eyes, and the majority seemed to be in shock, a few still wearing their production-line hairnets. You know how it is--even if you know that something bad is almost definitely coming down the pike, it’s still a shock when it hits. Now imagine this layoff hitting workers with decades at the company, men and women who maintained a picket line for eleven months without a single worker out of 134 crossing it, breadwinners who had been back on the job only since an NLRB decision in their favor in the summer ended management’s scab-herding.

The struggle isn’t over. There’s a rally at the bakery at 3 PM today, which should be well-attended, and there’s a legal
strategy to try and to stop the company from moving out equipment based on the City’s right to recoup the half a million in tax abatements given Stella to upgrade its equipment and keep it in the Bronx.

I know it sounds kind of cheeseball, but this is a blow not only to the Stella workers and their supporters but to the whole working class—and for several reasons.

The Stella workers, members of Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, a rather dozy outfit on the whole, had become heroes to rank and file labor activists in NYC and, indeed, around the country, over the course of their long strike, and had drawn the attention of the city’s trade union establishment. These officials eventually proclaimed it, as they did at yesterday’s press conference, the front-line battle for all unionized workers in NY. The media, drawn by the David and Goliath aspect of the battle, gave sporadic but generally favorable coverage, more than small strikes and other labor disputes generally get.

Then there’s the whole Goliath thing. Stella D’oro spent decades as a family-owned business with a solid presence in a regional niche market. After the founders’ deaths it was sold to Nabisco. In 2000, Nabisco was eaten by Kraft Foods, now the second largest food and beverage company in the world. Kraft screwed up the tiny Stella D’oro brand bad and then unloaded it in 2006 on a private equity firm called Brynwood, whose efforts to pillage it before reselling it included the concession demands which triggered the strike.

Once the NLRB ruling went against them, Brynwood’s partners (perhaps upset by picket lines in front of their swank suburban homes as well as the failure of their “operating expertise” to produce the expected shower of gold) sold to Lance, Inc. (Even so Stella can’t compete with Simmons Bedding, recently featured in a NY Times story about how it had been flipped seven times in 20 years by investment groups—read “looters”—finally winding up in bankruptcy.

Lance is a publicly traded low-end snack company based in North Carolina—with Goldman Sachs as a large and influential shareholder. Goldman Sachs is, of course, far and away the biggest winner so far in the feeding frenzy in the shark tank of global finance capital that was kicked off by the economic meltdown. Are they so fat and so arrogant that they can ignore the protests and media attention that come with screwing a handful of mainly immigrant workers? So far, it looks like their answer is yes.

I plan to hit the rally today and learn more about what the next steps in the battle may be. While the prospects are daunting, there are a few positive lessons that deserve to be highlighted. First, the small but dedicated solidarity committee did effective work throughout the strike and since. Any number of socialist groups had a presence, with comrades from Solidarity playing a noteworthy role in keeping things on track, but the most striking thing was how generally well-behaved cadre from such diverse and sometimes fractious groups as Progressive Labor, the ISO, Workers World, Revolutionary Organization of Labor and others were. As the small US left, with no hegemonic organization, faces the continuing meltdown, such behavior will be crucial in building the broadest possible resistance among the people.

Second, while broader support for the Stella workers, especially from the NYC labor and political establishments, has tended to be a day late and a dollar short, a sign that things may be changing for the better comes with recent weeks’ firestorm of protest in the Boston area following the Hyatt Corporation’s layoffs of over 100 veteran hotel housekeeping staff and their replacement with part-timers working for a subcontractor for $8 an hour and no benefits.

Hyatt had the housekeepers train their replacements before telling them they were canned! Hyatt management pleads the necessity of the economy, but it is exactly awareness of the meltdown that appears to be driving the ferocity of the response from area residents, politicians and unions. Hats off to the Boston Taxi Drivers Association who wrote the company stating that if the workers were not rehired, the 1700 member cab drivers would boycott the company’s three area hotels!

So support the Stella D’oro workers. Support the Hyatt workers. And get ready to throw your weight behind whatever battle erupts where you live as greedy or desperate bosses try to make workers shoulder the costs of the deepening meltdown.

A Great Song About Harpers Ferry

2009-10-07T11:26:00.004-05:00

The sesquicentennial of the heroic raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry led by Captain John Brown is fast approaching.

Following up on Rahim on the Dock's recent posting here about the planned observation of this anniversary by the People's Organization for Progress in Newark, NJ, this video is one slice of what may well be the single most moving and nuanced work of art about John Brown yet created.

Magpie, the longstanding duo of folkies Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner, released John Brown: Sword of the Spirit in 2000. It is a song cycle, call it a folk opera, entirely about the raid on Harpers Ferry. I have praised it here at FotM before, in the first of several posts over the last couple years on music about John Brown.

This one tune, and lorry nose I'm glad they finally got a video cut in time for the observance of the anniversary, only gives a hint of the extraordinary musical and lyrical power of the whole CD. "Goodbye To Old Ohio" salutes, verse by verse, members of Brown's band: the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barkley, white Quaker abolitionists who had tired of ineffectual moral witness; John Kagi, Brown's fight-hand man since Kansas; John Copeland and his uncle Lewis Leary, free Black men from Oberlin; and Aaron Stevens, an Ohioan with roots, like Brown himself and others of the band, in Connecticut.

Other songs pay tribute to others of the raiding party, to Brown's wife and to his daughter, and to other abolitionist fighters. All are fine, several are splendid.

You can order this CD from the usual big on-line merchants, but I expect that Greg and Terry will do a little better if you purchase it from them with a postage stamp and a check.

Do this thing!! You won't be sorry!

Black NJ Celebrates the 150th Anniversary of Harpers Ferry Raid: Long Live John Brown!

2009-10-05T12:43:00.017-05:00

On October 16, 1859 John Brown, fresh from a successful guerrilla war that kept Kansas from entering the US as a slave state, attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in today's West Virginia with a small force of armed men. Brown came to Virginia to carry the war against slavery directly to the slaveowners' doorsteps. His plan was to put an army of runaway slaves and abolitionists onto the Blue Ridge. He and his backers believed that this initial force would terrorize the slaveowners, embolden those still in captivity and liberate the South.

Brown's expectations were cut short when his small army was trapped and then captured in town by U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee.

The People's Organization for Progress will honor the 150th Anniversary of the Harpers Ferry Raid on Thursday, Oct 15, 2009, with a presentation by Dr. Bill Sales, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Seton Hall University. To download a PDF version of the event poster, click HERE on this link.

For more information call (973) 801-0001.

Missing Sully, Part 4--A Commie In-Joke

2009-09-25T19:35:00.013-05:00

For Christmas of 1980, I sent Sully (the late David Irish Sullivan) a paperback book on the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, the Soviet spy ring in Nazi-occupied Europe. He responded with the best thank-you note I have ever received.

[Those FotM readers who may, by some quirk of fate, not have found themselves in the vanguard party of the US working class in the 1970s--and there were many to chose from at the time--will probably find what follows a bit difficult to connect with. For you, there is a brief explanatory note below the two images.]

[Click on images to view full size.]

Okay, as promised, a few points of orientation for those who weren't there or have spent the better part of the last four decades trying to forget that they were.

1. The group we were both in at the time, the unfortunately-named Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, had a couple hundred members and nalmost no leadership structure to speak of, let alone a Central Control Commission.

2. This snarky set of "letters" reflects Dave's (and the RWHq's) developing break with the kneejerk public defense of Stalin that had characterized the group we had split from, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and a broader break with the deeply dogmatic style of many of the organizations in the New Communist Movement.

3. Requests for further clarification requested will be addressed. Incidentally, Sully incorporated one literary and one historical reference into the piece

SDS at Woodstock!

2009-09-17T15:03:00.007-05:00

Here's an artifact for you: The leaflet/poster SDS printed up to distribute at the Woodstock festival forty years ago. This may be the only copy extant.

[click image to see full size]

A few points by way of background.

1. Though things were unraveling quickly, the October 8-11 Days of Rage were still officially an SDS action and not a Weatherman activity, with RYM II calling a separate demo. The leaflet, obviously, was an attempt to build it.

2. The leaflet was written, drafted and designed by one person in the NYC Regional Office of SDS on Spring Street, whose name I am not free to use. I think 2 cases, 10,000 or so, were printed. Most never got handed out.

3. The plan was to distribute them to the masses of alienated youth as they arrived. Our base was Movement City, a section of the Festival with a big-ass tent, a spanky new printing press and thousands of dollars worth of additional goodies Abbie Hoffman had jacked out of Mike Lang and the others bankrolling the Festival with threats of massive disruption.

4. Some folks from NYU Uptown SDS and the Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers and probably other chapters arrived a couple days early, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the chain-link fencing Lang's crews were humping to get set up before Friday somehow unraveled overnight Wednesday and Thursday, all of it. Nothing, honest.

5. The producers had remained pretty worried about disruption from the relative handful of movement forces there. The night before the concert started, Hugh Romney (not yet Wavy Gravy), whose Hog Farm commune had been imported to provide security, made his way to Movement City with what you might call a burnt offering--a chunk of very strong hash the size of a regulation softball.

6. The main SDS forces who showed up in Movement City were Weather types, in their early wannabe street-fighter mode. Some of them did help organize a couple of appropriations of vendors who were jacking prices through the roof in the happy knowledge that there were too many people and not enough supplies present. These guerrilla actions were watched with interest and sympathy by festival-goers, but the old "Join us!" cry drew minimal response.

6. Some of the core weather types dropped acid on Friday and others were completely freaked out by the size and apolitical character of the crowd even without benefit of chemical adulterants, but they all fled by Saturday afternoon, even as young people in their tens of thousands were still making their way to Yasgur's farm by any means necessary. Wusses.

7. The forces of sweetness and light did have a nifty, decently-executed banner with a picture of Che (less than two years dead) and his famous quote "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."

8. Me and Lee stayed for two days after the concert ended until chapter folks dispatched home were able to get back with a U-Haul to pick up the printing press, cases of paper and loads of other abandoned goodies. Never mind him getting clocked onstage by Pete Townshend, all respect to Abbie for the stuff he pried out of Lang & Co., which served the movement for the next decade.

The Dead of Birmingham

2009-09-15T18:46:00.004-05:00

Denise McNair.

Carole Robertson.

Addie Mae Collins.

Cynthia Wesley.

For many of us who came up in the ‘60s, these names will always be instantly recognizable, impossible to read or to hear—no matter how long it has been—without a deep emotional pull, an admixture of sorrow and anger and, most of all, a profound sense of loss.

Forty-six years ago today, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan murderers took the lives of four young teenage girls as they prepared for the first ever Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. I write this to acknowledge their deaths, sacrifices in the long and painful struggle for Black Freedom, burnt offerings in a conflagration that wound up helping to consume the system of Jim Crow segregation in the Black Belt South.

I write also to memorialize two other young African Americans who died in Birmingham that day. Their names do not have the same resonance, but they died at the hands of white supremacy in this country as surely as did the young women in the basement of Sixteenth Street Baptist, and their deaths are the kind of deaths that the system still deals out to young Black men in this country.

For all the hold that the Civil Rights Movement’s non-violent ideology had in Birmingham, which had been a battleground against segregation, the killings sparked intense fury in the Black community and the area around the church seethed in near-riot all afternoon. The cars of white gawkers coming past had a hard time of it. When sixteen-year-old Johnnie Robinson saw one marked up with slogans like "Negro, Go Back To Africa," he chucked a rock at it.

Seeing cops, he fled. As Johnnie ran down an alley, Birmingham cop Jack Parker shot him. In the back. With a shotgun. Johnnie was DOA at University Hospital. An all-white grand jury failed to indict Parker for anything.

The final death was that of thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware, "Peanut" to his family. His father and uncles were coal miners, working at the Docena mine, and Virgil and two brothers shared a paper route. Riding home on the handlebars of his brother James‘s bicycle, Virgil crossed paths with Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old white Eagle Scouts, who had just attended a rabid segregationist rally where an effigy of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was burned.

Riding with Farley on his red motorbike decorated with a confederate flag picked up at the National States’ Rights Party headquarters and pieced up with Farley’s pearl-handled pistol, Sims fired at the bike twice.

Virgil fell off and James cried, "Get up, Virge. You trimmin’ me."

"I’m shot," Virgil replied. He was, through the lung and the aorta. He died, the sixth victim of a racist murder in Birmingham that day.

The Birmingham press treated it as a tragedy--for the killers. “These two raw, grieved untutored boys who have had this unfortunate thing come into their lives at their age,” was how their high–priced lawyer put it. Both were charged with first degree murder. A Birmingham jury convicted Sims of second degree manslaughter and Farley pleaded to the same. Wallace Gibson, a white judge, the only kind on the bench in Alabama at the time, completed the travesty by suspending their sentences in favor of two years probation.

When we remember Addie, Carole, Denise and Cynthia, it behooves us to remember Johnnie and Virgil as well.

Because young African Americans are still being shot in the back by cops, like Oscar Grant in Oakland last year. Because cops still routinely get a slap on the wrist, if that, for outrageous shootings. Because the "criminal justice system" in the US still treats the killing of a young Black man as a lesser crime than other murders. Because today there are racists every bit as rabid, and as desperate, as those who attended the rally on the day of the church bombing, and they too are burning effigies, waving the Confederate flag and hiding behind talk of states’ rights.

Missing Sully, Part 3

2009-09-03T06:41:00.007-05:00

[A lot of people were stunned by the sudden death of Dave Sullivan, Sully, as the two previous posts (here and here) indicate, had an outsize impact on those who knew him. Perhaps the biggest of all was on Djar Horn, whose mother and Sully moved in together for some years in the early '80s]

All The Dad I Had

Djar Horn

Dave taught me a lot of things. To start with, it was because of him that I had the confidence to work as a union carpenter. The first time I met him, a large crew of leftists were building out a movement office in Chicago. He made me a pair of stilts. Shortly after that my mom and I started making routine visits to the south side. And around 1979 we moved in with him. I was about 8.

He had me paint my room. He and Bill Boardman worked with me to build a bookshelf for my 4th grade class. They taught me basic tool use. And when I graduated from high school, they offered to have me apprentice with them rather than head off to college. I took the path I was meant to take, but I came back to construction ten years later.

When my mom went to China in 1979, Dave got me into school and took care of me for a month. While I was happy to eat pizza for 30 days, Bill and Christine made sure I got an occasional well-balanced meal. Our time together had its kinks, but we worked them out. But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell the story of the fork. I know he told it quite a few times. Shortly after my mom left on her trip, Dave was instructing me in proper table etiquette. I have wonderful table manners.

A very important rule which he learned from his grandfather: Do not reach across the table. When he was kid, his grandfather would hold a spoon in his coffee. If a child reached across the table, his grandfather would take the hot spoon and place it on their hand. We were living in the late 70’s. You might send a kid to pick up your Marlboros at the corner store, but you didn’t burn children with a spoon. Now you used a fork to get the point across. I understood the balance of power in the household until my mother came back 30 days later. And before I could hug her or even see my presents, I blurted out “Dave stabbed me with a fork”. Still makes me laugh.

I like to think that I am street-smart, but the fact is when I moved to South Chicago, a mainly working class Chicano 'hood, I was a pretty easy target. A naïve, super-friendly 8-year-old white girl could find a lot of trouble. By the time we left 87th and Burnham, I was 12. And I know that Dave had laid down the law to the neighborhood boys.

It didn’t hurt our rep when word got out about the car thief. Someone tried to steal his pickup truck (I still have an unhealthy obsession with pickups; my first new vehicle was an F-150 just like his). Late at night he heard a noise, ran out of the house with a shotgun and pointed it at the guy. Lucky for the guy, he was inside Dave’s truck; Dave wasn't about to fuck up his new truck. The guy ran. Being that we were white, the cops came immediately, found the guy ditching his tools and brought him back so Dave could “speak” to him. I never knew what he whispered to the guy.

I remember lots of other things: episodes of MASH, Giordano's deep dish pizza, walks at the Indiana dunes, no vegetables, a blue US Steel workers hat, Molly and Erica, the firehouse, a trip to Utah. In the end, we had some hard times, in part because he was less than supportive about me being queer. But when I was a kid, he was all the dad I had and I needed that.

Missing Sully, Part 2

2009-09-02T05:34:00.004-05:00

[Fire on the Mountain continues to post material about Sully, David Sullivan, whose untimely death last Saturday has left so many of his friends shaken and bereft. (See the previous post here.) Below, you will find a photo taken of David in his teens during a stay in Austria, with an explanation by Mike Ely, a moving and thoughtful poem by Jed Brandt and another Sully anecdote focused on his badassery from Joe Iosbaker.]

Left: David Irish Sullivan

This was in the train station in Innsbruck, near the moutain village where David had spent a year in grade school. We went high up in the nearby ridge of Alps, and found a farming family grazing their herd at the timber line. They let us (all five) stay in their hayloft for a tiny bit of money -- and fed us whatever the family was eating. From there we could see the whole Inn valley up and down, draped in morning mists or crystal clear in the midday summer sun, and beyond rows of more high mountains.--Mike Ely (with red bandanna in photo)

DAVID | poem 35
Jed Brandt

In this only life,
throw your chest for the people
without irony.

In this only life,
let us save dying for death,
our back to the wheel.

Another Story About Sully
Joe Iosbaker

[This is edited from a note written to Molly Sullivan Nestor, one of Sully's daughters.]

Molly, you had said your dad was a bad ass. Here's a story to back that up.

While I knew Sully for 30 years, we didn’t hardly see him from the early '80s until a few years ago, when Stephanie and I and the boys started seeing him a couple times a year. especially at Jon and Marsha Baker’s annual pre-Thanksgiving get-together.

In 2004, we were still very involved in the anti-war protests in Chicago. The previous year, on the night the Iraq War began, over 800 people had been arrested in the protest in downtown Chicago. We had pissed off Mayor Daley when 10,000 people seized Lake Share Drive by totally outmaneuvering the police. 2000 riot cops were brought in, boxed us up, and proceeded to arrest us. The cops were rough with a lot of people, although it wasn’t August, 1968 or anything.

There has been a class action suit against the city since that night, claiming that the protesters were cooperating with the police when they started arresting us without warning. I was explaining this story to Bill Davis (¡Presente!) and Sully after dinner, telling them about the suit.

Sully’s response: “We never bothered with complaining about police brutality. If the cops beat us up at a demo, we showed up at the next protest for payback.”

So, I’m having a couple fingers of Cinco Blancos tonight in your dad’s honor, Molly. Here’s to payback!

Missing Sully

2009-08-31T19:53:00.006-05:00

David Irish Sullivan--Sully to some, Dave to others--suffered an unexpected heart attack in his Chicago home on Friday, August 28. Despite efforts to stabilize his condition, he died in the hospital the next night at 9:45.

I don’t know quite how to proceed here. I lived with Sully for a couple of years in the late 1970s, and we remained good friends from then on. He was in every respect one of the finest human beings I have known.

While there is much I can say about Sully, it would be only a snapshot from a long and varied life. I did not know him during what I believe were his glory days, as a young rebel in the high school struggles that shook NYC in the late ‘60s. I only heard stories from him of the subsequent years as a revolutionary activist at Antioch College, a period that so rattled that supposedly liberal institution that, on the school’s 150th anniversary in 2003, the late ’60s and early ‘70s were all but excised from displays and speeches. I didn’t know him when, as part of the vibrant New Communist Movement, he went to work in industrial plants in Ohio (though I did get to skim the extensive FBI files he accumulated, pried open by the Freedom Of Information Act).

Nor was I in Chicago when he stepped his fervent activism down during the early 1980s. Sully went back to school in Chicago and in Austria, writing his masters on the social democratic militias there that waged armed resistance against the fascist Dollfuss regime and the Austrian Army in 1934. I followed from the East Coast the construction firm he and other old ‘rades there put together when he returned, which trained inner-city youth in building trades and, by the late ‘90s, became a leader in green construction of affordable housing.

Those are stories for others to tell. And it occurs to me that telling stories is the best way to remember Sully and to sketch a picture forthose who, like myself, weren’t there for big chunks of his life. There are scores of good Sully stories. He lived a packed existence, and told his own stories with verve and self-deprecating humor.

I also understand that his daughters, who did not live with him growing up, want to hear stories of their father. So I will tell one here, one I would have hesitated to commit to print (well, pixels) while he was alive, and I hope that other of Dave’s friends will weigh in with their own anecdotes or memories or just words of appreciation for a wonderful man, gone too soon.

Sully’s Big Security Adventure

Because he was big, gutsy and coolheaded, Sully did more than his share of security work for the movement. And he liked it. He had taken up fencing in high school and was a student of military history.

During the 1980s, when the Reagan regime was bending every effort (and breaking plenty of laws) to destroy the revolutionary Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, Sully got a call. Ernesto Cardenal, the great poet and, at that time, foreign minister of Nicaragua, would be speaking at a private house in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Serious death threats had been made toward Cardenal, and the Nicaraguan contras (counter-revolutionaries) were based in the US and had working alliances with other Latin American reactionary groups.

As a foreign official, Cardenal had Secret Service protection, but Central America solidarity activists in Chicago felt that it was not to be trusted, Even if there was no funny business, how certain was it that a Secret Service agent would take a bullet for an official from a small, unfriendly foreign nation? So some experienced movement folks in Chicago were asked to form their own security squad, among them Sully, who borrowed a handgun for the occasion.

The two forces met, uneasily, at the house and agreed to work carefully around each other. As Sully was checking out a back stairway in the house, where no one was supposed to be, he heard footsteps coming down from an upper story. He drew down on the intruder and found himself holding a federal agent at gunpoint! Emergency over and both continued, more cautiously, with their tasks.

Obviously I was not in that stairwell, and folks who didn’t know Sully might suspect that this was a confabulation of his. But Sully was a pretty modest guy, and when I heard him describe this, more than once, there was a note of wonder in his voice that he had gotten the drop and lived to tell the tale. Wonder--and a touch of pride.

His only reward came after the event was over. Dave had brought with him a book of Cardenal's poems translated into English and asked him to inscribe it to me.

I have it to this day.

Sully, man, I miss you.

White Noise: White Adults Raising White Children To Resist White Supremacy

2009-08-12T06:28:00.006-05:00

[FotM is pleased to be able to repost this incisive and insightful article from the Anti-Racist Parent website.]

by Susan Raffo of White Noise

It hit me while I was still pregnant. Standing there at the Mall of America, looking up at the huge rotunda of bright lights and countless stores, I realized something. This baby I carried inside of me, at this point no bigger than a knucklebone, was going to be privileged with a capital “P.” And with that awareness, I entered a place of contradiction. You see, I could already feel the mama-self growing in me; that place where my bear claws would live, where the desire to do anything to make this child safe, make this child whole, would growl as it grew stronger. That mama-self doesn’t feel like a choice. It’s in there, hooked around my mitochondria and woven into the DNA.

But there’s this other self; sometimes called the political self or the activist self or the stand back and pay attention self. It knows that my child — white and raised by white parents in a family where the adults have the gift of education, have choice about their work, and own their own home — is a privileged child. Every gain my mama-self wants to support my child in making will be on the backs of other children, children with mother’s whose mama-selves are just as fierce as mine but who have to fight against real monsters like hunger or violence.

And this is the contradiction that crept into my belly standing there, at the Mall of America. I felt sad, and a different flavor of fierce. Luca’s creativity, her curiosity and her passion have the time and space to be priorities when we think about raising her. We don’t have to protect her daily from violence or spend most of our time finding food. All children should have the same kind of space. Standing there in the Mall of America, my fierceness shifted and grew larger. It became less about my child and more about the community of children. In other words, my question was not “what is the best for my daughter” and more, “what is the best for all children?” How does this question affect how I parent? How do my partner and I – and all of our friends and families – raise our children in a way that honors the lives and struggles of all children?

Whiteness

Here is what we noticed right away: both the race of our daughter and the economic privilege of our family. We have enough – not a lot, but enough. And we are white women raising a white daughter. Here is the question that followed that: how do we, from the very beginning, start raising Luca to be a different kind of white? What does it MEAN to be a different kind of white? This feels about way more than having a commitment to anti-racism. It feels like being a different kind of person entirely.As a quick aside, my partner and I have a belief system about race, racism and white privilege that assumes that the legacies of slavery, the attempted genocide of Native Americans, European colonialism and its affect here in the Americas and elsewhere in the world has created a present day moment of inequity based on skin color, language, culture of origin and so on. Within that belief system, the fact that my partner and I have light skin and ethnicities with the majority of ancestors being European gives us a kind of privilege. There isn’t the space in this article to explain what we mean by white privilege and white supremacy and racism. At the end, there are resources listed for further exploration.

So, white parents raising white children. We looked at books and blogs. We googled for magazine articles and newspaper features. We talked with our friends – white and of color – and kept coming against the same thing: there is hardly anything out there that directly talks about raising white kids to be anti-racist, to work against white privilege, to be a different flavor, an accountable and creative flavor, of white. There are resources about raising children to live in a multicultural world. There are resources about raising your children to respect difference. There are books about nonviolent child-rearing. But really thinking about what kind of white your kid might be? It’s not out there. And here’s why: most of us white adults don’t really understand what it is to be white ourselves. We sometimes have language about being Irish- or Italian-American, or about growing up on a farm, being Midwestern or from the mountains, but this whiteness thing? The ways in which being white affects our sense of who we are and the communities around us? We usually have no words.

My partner and I decided that if we’re going to raise a white child we want to pay attention to how she becomes white and how she is white. It’s the same thing as paying attention to the fact that she is a girl, that she likes to dance but isn’t so into playing soccer, that she gets shy in front of lots of people she doesn’t know. Each of these things is about her, and each is about the world around her.

Paying attention to how our child becomes white is about a lot of things: and we already know that we don’t know half of them. Sometimes it means paying attention to all of the ways in which being white gives her a kind of “get out of jail free” card, a kind of free pass into better jobs, more income, and less stress and struggle. It means watching and learning from what happens when she pops out of me, all instinct for survival and connection to mama, and starts to grow a personality and set of understandings about herself and the world. It means learning what there is to be proud of, to celebrate, about who she is in the world as a white person.

So, since this is true, we decided to get help. And while folks of color probably are smartest about what being white means, after all, they have to deal with us all of the time, they aren’t the ones who have to fix this part of the crazy mess. It’s up to us to figure this one out. I mean, if as white parents, we can’t figure out how to help our white kids become compassionately or powerfully or collectively white, well, then who can? It’s pretty much our responsibility.

Laying the groundwork

We gathered together a group of white friends, parents every one of them, and decided to form a group. We call it White Noise as a way of describing the everyday annoying distraction from thinking and paying attention that’s akin to living with white privilege. Our kids are all young – the oldest is Luca and she’s only seven. And we sure haven’t figured everything out. But we figure it’s time to bring the light in. The more we share what we’ve learned, the faster it’s going to grow. And growing our understanding of how to raise a white child to make being white an entirely different thing, that’s what we want to grow.

Right now, we call what we do “laying the groundwork.” Meaning, since we have young children whose needs and questions are still more simple than complex, we figure we’re just trying to help their bodies get clear about whiteness. At the end of the day, there is no single recipe for how to do this. Raising white children is really about just plain raising our children to pay attention to all of who they are. We can’t protect them from anything. The best we can do is prepare them to carry the tools they need to weather the multiple storms their lives will bring them. That’s why we call the work we are doing with our young children, “laying the groundwork.” Our intent is to support them to experiences themselves and the world around them in a way that will feed their ability to not only do anti-racist work but also be anti-racist “from the ground up.”

Making whiteness visible

Somewhere around four years old, we started to notice Luca, when describing her friends, only “raced” her friends of color. Meaning, when she was describing people to us who she knew, she described her friends of color as “Black” or “Native” but her white friends as “with red hair” or “tall.” Already, at four years old, and living in a multiracial community, white had become normal for Luca. Normal in a way that means invisible. So, one of the first steps is to just plain make whiteness visible. This means making sure that all of us, when we are describing people, talk as much about white friends as we do our Black or Asian friends. But making whiteness visible is more than that.

The minute we are born, we are surrounded by information. Some of it is directly pointed out for us by the adults in our lives. Most of it goes completely unnoticed by all of us, children and adults alike. Making whiteness visible means seeking to notice the presence of whiteness in every aspect of our lives. How do we do this? We practice everyday. What does that mean? Well, one example is when we walk into a store or into a restaurant or down a neighborhood street, we ask: “Who is here?” and then we notice. Once we notice who is here, we began to intentionally wonder about why they are here. And then to notice who isn’t here. And to wonder the same thing.

A story for explanation: we are out running errands and we all get hungry. We stop by a coffee shop. Right away, Luca notices, “There are only white people in here.” Raquel and I both look around and see that she is right. So then we ask, “Why might there be only white people in here?” We notice that the coffee shop is in a predominantly white upper-middle-class neighborhood. So we assume that drop-in traffic is going to be mostly local. We wonder if people of color might not come by this coffee shop or this neighborhood because it might not be comfortable or because they wouldn’t feel welcome or reflected back by the staff or other customers. We next wonder if there are people of color who would even be interested in this coffee shop – maybe the culture of this coffee shop is one that mostly white people are attracted to and so some folks of color are choosing to not come here, or to instead go somewhere that will better reflect their experiences. Then we talk about what it is like for us to be in this coffee shop – noticing that when we are white and we fit in with the other white people, we barely even notice that we are white. We talk about how there are different kinds of white people, but even though there are different kinds, we don’t really need to think about race when we are among all white people. This is important. We notice that we don’t need to think about or even notice race when we are around other white people.

Making whiteness visible means noticing the books we read, the movies or television shows we watch, the people in our families and neighborhoods, and the rhythm of everyday life. It’s a practice for white people, just like meditation or parenting is a practice. If we don’t do it constantly, we don’t notice.

Learn together

Don’t assume you have to already know everything before you start trying to teach your children. You know the syndrome: the perfect parent syndrome. Our kids look up to us. They ask us questions about the world around them and wait for us to share what we know. When they’re young, we are all-knowing in their eyes. It can be scary to have to admit to your child that you are clueless about some aspect of the world around you.

Figuring out how to be white is something we do together with our children. We can tell them what we have experienced, our ideas and struggles and understandings, but living in the world with consciousness as a white person is not about getting it right once and then being done forever. It’s about making mistakes and learning and then making more mistakes and then learning more and inch by precious inch, feeling the world open up around us.

Learning with our children is about being in process, in struggle, in family with the most important people in our lives. It is about sharing the fact that this is life-long work, that we are all learning together, and that your child has some valuable things to teach you even as you have things to share with them. That last piece is really important. The minute our kids are born, they are learning –both directly and indirectly – how to be white, which includes how to be a racist. Thandeka in her book, “Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America,” states that the first act of child abuse directed towards all white children is that the minute they come out of the womb, they are being taught to be racist. So the game has already started, whether or not we ever directly address race and whiteness in our family. But kids have something we don’t have. Even though they have already started learning their whiteness, it hasn’t embedded itself over decades of experience. Their brains and nervous systems are still literally creating their bodies, their identities, their sense of self in the world. Much has already been established no matter when we start, but much is also open for shifting and changing.

Some of what is confusing to adults is likely to make gentle sense to children. Some of the places where we adults make this thick and complex is likely to be simple and poetic to our children. In listening to the questions they ask, the reflections they make, we can learn a whole bunch about how whiteness grows.

Know your own shit

Know your own shit. Oh lovely shit, oh layered deep old stuff which gets triggered by the innocent voices of our children. The shame of it. The guilt. The embarrassment. What do I do if my child says something racist? What will others think of me? Will they look over at me, knowing what a horrible mother I am, because my son just came out with something funky about that woman’s hair, her skin, the way she talks? What will people say?

This is a big one. A really big one. As soon as we encourage our children to reflect on the world around them, to say what they are thinking and feeling and to invite conversation, well, they start to talk. And they will say things just about everywhere. And in front of just about everyone. And they will ask questions. Why is your hair like that? Did you notice that your skin is really dark? Wow, look, my mom’s arm is really white next to your arm! How come all the Black kids play basketball? Did you know that your grandfather was probably a slave? Your kids will say things that are beyond what you could possibly imagine. And they should say those things. Because this is how they learn. But they are only going to learn if you are open to hearing them. Which means knowing your own shit. Here is what we mean by that: What is going on for you when you hear your kids say something that triggers your “that’s racist” button? What emotions come up? What are you concerned about? What do you do when those emotions come up? We have all seen parents, when reacting to something their child has said, looking quickly around and saying, “Shhhh, that’s not a nice thing to say,” or “Stop that! Don’t be rude!!” or any number of other things. We know the feeling in our bellies when we are walking through the world, thinking about our grocery list or the drive back home, when junior says something that immediately makes us feel exposed and visible. As white people. As potentially bad parents. Raising our children to be white is about knowing our reactions and finding ways to NOT shut our children down when they ask those kinds of questions.

Of course, this is also complicated. It’s a different thing to have a three-year-old making a comment about a stranger in a store, it’s another thing for a 13-year-old to say it. Embedded in supporting our children to ask questions and be open to learning about the world around them, is also teaching them about respect. Teaching them that people are not objects but individuals with feelings and complex lives. Because the reality is that while our children are reflecting on the world around them, the people of color they are reflecting about are real people who just might not be in the mood to hear yet another person talk about their hair – even if it is a gap-toothed five year old. Everything about this work includes supporting our children to act as respectful members of communities, every single day and in every single context.

Another part of knowing your own shit is knowing your own story, all of it. What is your culture? Did you grow up in a city, a suburb, the countryside? What celebrations and rituals did you grow up with? What kind of food? Do you have a word for it? What did you learn about work? About taking care of your own family or other people? Who felt “like you” and who felt different? What is your culture?

The other piece of knowing our own shit is knowing our own understandings of race and whiteness. What did you learn about race and whiteness when you were a child? Really, spend time here. Think about the kinds of things you were directly taught and the things you witnessed. Notice what your life looks like, who the people are who surround you, your sense of why different people are different form you. Think about what it means for you to be white, to be an anti-racist. Find people you trust to talk to about these things. There is a whole bunch you can talk to your children about, and there’s a whole bunch you need to learn with other adults. Don’t stop thinking about yourself, noticing your beliefs, your reactions, your concerns. Stay with your own work.

Don’t immediately go big, stay specific. Remember those reflections our children make in public places – or sometimes private? The ones that make our insides flare up as we struggle to make sure our own shit doesn’t get in the way of our children learning? This is about those times. Example, when Luca was walking by the basketball court in our neighborhood park, she suddenly asked why only Black people play basketball. In my belly flared up things like: oh shit, that’s so racist. It isn’t only Black people that play basketball, and oh god, I have to help her understand the complexity, and on and on. But here’s the funky thing about young children: she was only describing what she saw and asking about it. It is true that when Luca walks by this playground, most of the time the people she sees are Black men. And so she wants to know why. And while the answer is complex and many-layered, there is an answer. Or there are answers that will unravel over the time of her growing up. It’s a legitimate question based on an observation. Stay specific, listen to what your child is saying or watch what they are doing. Are they in distress? Are they worried or having any kind of emotion? Is it just a question? Before making any assumptions about what your child’s question might mean, ask them about it. Refer to knowing your own shit and learning together. Keep the channels of conversation and learning open.

Making Mistakes

Here’s another example from a white friend of mine: she picked up her white grandson from his preschool. His first comment to her was: “I don’t like Black people. I don’t think I want them to be my friends”. My friend freaked out, her emotions rose up to the sky, and she jumped in immediately, asking with an anxious voice what he meant but also saying that of course he doesn’t know all Black people, and a whole bunch of other things that she doesn’t remember because her emotions were so high. And as she was talking, she saw him retreat into himself, getting quiet and logging away the information that this wasn’t something he should talk about.

And my friend kicked herself from here to the preschool and back, knowing that she had goofed but feeling overwhelmed. As she later asked more questions, she learned that her grandson’s school had just done a chapter on the civil rights. During this chapter, there was a lot of conversation about Black folks as a people or as a community. Her grandson knew Black folks but he knew them as individuals. He had never thought of anyone as a “people.” While he knew Black folks out in the world, there was only one Black child in his preschool class: a boy who, for whatever reason, teased him a lot. So my friend’s grandson put things together in a pattern in his head: “this kid is a Black kid and he is mean to me. Black kids are part of a Black people. I don’t like playing with this Black kid and I don’t want to be his friend. Therefore, I don’t want to be friends with Black people.” If you take away the sting and the legacy of racism, you’ve got to admit there’s a logic to this.

As we talked about it, my friend wished that she had just hit the pause button after her grandson spoke. She wished she had started right away with asking questions, not putting any kind of value on his words until she understood what he was actually talking about. Because now she has to undo something, one of the somethings that white supremacy depends on. She has to undo this idea that some things are not “polite” to talk about, that there is something uncomfortably emotional about talking about Black people, that grandma freaks out when you bring it up so don’t bring this kind of stuff up.

And every single one of us is going to have to undo moments like this. Because we will all make mistakes. Because we are learning as we go. We make mistakes and we will continue to make them. The important thing is to keep coming back, being honest with our kids about our own struggle, and asking for their help in figuring this out.

And maybe that’s how this article will end. As we enter our third year of White Noise, the group focus is shifting. There are some new people joining in the Fall, some people who are stepping out. We now share a groundwork among ourselves as adults, and we share some thoughts about how to start laying the groundwork with our children. In our meetings, we laugh a lot, we freak out, we forget to bring up important things, we spend too much time talking about the easy stuff and sometimes we dip into the hard and scary things that move us all forward.

Recently, we’ve been talking about the aspects of our cultures that really prop up white supremacy. We’ve been talking about how the protestant work ethic is one aspect of white supremacy, the particular values about how we approach work and “responsibility”, what gets called laziness or self-indulgent, how we think about the relationship between work, family and community. We have talked about the difference in valuing relationships and community versus valuing “getting things done.” We have talked about how raising our children to code-shift is an important part of resisting white supremacy. This means being able to move across cultures and communities without losing a sense of themselves and without assuming that everyone else has to be just like them. And we are talking about moving outside of our own comfort zones in figuring these out. Meaning, not just reading books and getting together to discuss, but maybe, actually, playing; with our kids and not just alone as a bunch of serious adults.

We will continue to learn together. As our children get older and enter different developmental stages with different relationships with friends, community and self, we will need to figure out new things. And at the end of the day, we know this group is far more for us adults than for our kids. Because they will be living their lives separate from us. Their choices will be their own and their mistakes their own as well. By laying the groundwork, our hope is that we support our children to feel empowered and creative as white people to live in the whole world, with wide open eyes and a sense of accountability and celebration. And that in living in the whole world, they might be part of shifting the pattern so that there are more children with each successive generation who also truly have access to the whole world. What we have realized is that we can’t take our children’s privilege away but we can work to shift our collective understanding of what that privilege means.

A good basic article on White Privilege is by Peggy McIntosh: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

White Privilege: Essential Readings on the other side of Racism (an anthology) by Paula S. Rotherberg, Worth Publishers

White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun http://www.prisonactivist.org/archive/cws/dr-culture.html

Acknowledgements: Susan, Raquel, Susan, Nicola, Amy, Lisa and all past members of White Noise, Vikki, Kris, Kristen, Kristin, Jen, Laura, and Karn.

White Noise is a group of white parents with white children who have been meeting for two years to learn together and support each other in ending white supremacy.

A Song For Honduras

2009-08-10T20:49:00.008-05:00

Golpe (Honduras) -- Lyrics & Music by Simon Rios

Oye, Nica, Salvadoreño,
Indio, Garifuna, Brazileiro,
Gringo, Gaucho, y Caraqueño,
Chilango, Cholo, Potorro y Porteño
Esto es una llamada, en nombre de los Hondureños
Hay ke levantarnos todos, por este justo desempeño
Hay que defender ese pueblo, con puño y con cerebro
Hay que defender ese pueblo, con puño y con cerebro

June 28th, 2,009 was the day
When they uprooted los catrachos, from the progresista way.
Mel Zelaya was the president, who'd gone from right to left,
He was a magnate of the old school, but was calling out the theft
& pillage of Honduras, & the whole of the continente
by los gringos asesinos, & their local asistentes.
So they kidnapped Mel at gunpoint, at five o clock in the morn
And America woke that Sunday, said what the hell is going on?
Que carajo esta pasando? Otro golpe militar!
Otro once de septiembre, otro tiempo pa gritar!
This isn't about Manuel Zelaya, it ain't about the constitution,
It's about the oligarchía, and it's about the revolution.
The Honduran Magna Carta, was designed by the ruling class
With the oversight of Washington, & the rulers of the past
And Zelaya wanted reform, to promote participation
Cuz democracy ain't about, pulling a lever & waiting patient
It ain't about a rich criollo, sucking blood out of the nation
Its about power to the people, & the old order is changing
Pues America esta cambiando, por un modelo socialista,
anti-fascista, contra estes malditos golpistas
Tres-cientos mil up en la calle, dicen Zelaya no se va!
Los golpistas dicen democracia, mientras hacen coup d'etat
It's like saying save the trees, while revving a chainsaw
It's like saying it ain't me babe, when you're the one I saw.
And the golpistas waved a banner, reading we shall overcome
Which side would Martin be on, if Martin could've come?

Oxala pudiera cantarte, una rolita mas alegre
But the golpe en Honduras, makes me mutherfucking angry
I wish this was a nightmare, or a skit on cha cha cha
But its real as rigor mortis, cuz they made a coup d'etat
Hay que tener rabia pueblo, Honduras es America
La misma sangre y consigna, desde Ushuaia hasta Merida
Y de ahi para Recife, y de ahi pa Torreón
Desde el bosque de Chapultepec, hasta las minas de Cerrejón.
No importa que pinche dia, no importa en que lugar,
Pues la esperanza comun, es lo quieren asesinar.
And they speak of an invasion by Venezolano agents
Y no aguantamos eso, they say, cuz we're a sovereign nation.
Sovereign nation? With a gringo base in Chaperola?
You mean sovereign to the people? Or sovereign to Coca Cola?
And you'd be foolish if you thought that the gringos didn't play a role
You think that the ambassador, Hugo Llorens, didn't know?
This ain't the US of Obama, but of Reich & of la CIA
The ones who planned the golpe contra Hugo Chavez Frias
The ones who killed Allende, & who tried to kill Fidel
The ones who speak of freedom, while manifesting hell
The ones who infiltrated the mighty Tupamaros
The ones who drew & quartered, the brave Tupac Amaru
The ones who own la prensa, y las haciendas y maquilas
The ones who stand to profit, from the riches of the minas
And the reporters of the mainstream, are more full of shit & piss
Than the sewage tank at midnight, on the Chinatown Express
Sowing fear of comunismo, and a thousand huevonadas
Cuz la prensa esta vendida, y su gente, comprada
Comiendo baleadas, mientras los pobres comen basura,
And they still can't understand, why there's tanta amargura
And you think they give a damn about the starvation of a people?
The disenfranchising of a people? the genocide of a people?
Cuz they're killing little kids, & they're killing periodistas,
They're killing esperanzas, & they're killing sindicalistas.
Here's a fist up for Murillo, martyr of Tegucigalpa
Whose death served to make la resistencia stand mas alta
Here a fist up to COFADEH, OFRANEH, y el COPINH
From the pueblo of Geronimo & Martin Luther King.
This is the wakening of Honduras, in the form of a class war
It's a fight of good & evil, & the good ones are the poor
Nothing more, and it sure ain't nothing less
And it wont stop till the coup drops, and justicia is addressed.
Caerá la dictadura, como todos los demas
Y llegará un tiempo de justicia, justicia con paz
Pero mientras tanto y los llantos, los molestaré con mi canto
En frente de las marchas, con mas bravura que mil Rambos
Ambos ladosde la izkierda y por debajo
Venceremos Hondureño dale duro pueblo catracho.

Black NJ demands accountability, from both the cops & Newark's celebrity mayor: "Justice for Basire Farrell"

2009-08-08T16:04:00.014-05:00

This past May, Fire on the Mountain reported on the beating death by Newark police officers of popular Clinton Hills neighborhood resident Basire Farrell within blocks of Mayor Cory Booker's residence (see The People's Organization for Progress Demands Justice for Basire Farrell for the May posting). By August, in the heat of the summer of 2009, this year's spate of police-sanctioned murders has only increased…

The community response to this outrage became a flood of discontent as more than 100 residents, New Black Panther Party supporters, and People's Organization for Progress members shut down Newark's central business intersection at Broad & Market Streets this past Wednesday evening (see this video).

This weekend, after pointing out that we were picking the Newark Police Headquarters at 31 Green Street on a Saturday for the convenience of family members and working people, POP NJ State chairman Lawrence Hamm upped the ante, stating that next time, we would be around the corner from the Police Headquarters, "at City Hall on a week day, to confront Mayor Booker and the Police Commissioner, and demand a response."

As the leaflet from People's Organization for Progress stated:

We ask, are lives in Black skins less important than lives in white skins? We ask why is Basire Farrell's life in Black skin less important than a life in a white skin?
We ask, why Basire Farrell couldn't survice an arrest by Seven Newark Police Officers?
We ask, why was Basire Farrell added to the list of Blacks murdered by the Newark Police?

We also ask:
Why did it take seven police officers to arrest one man?
Why did the police need to chase Basire Farrell, and then hit him with a police car to stop him?
How was "public safety" served by beating and kicking a man who was already on the ground and in handcuffs?
Why was Basire Farrell repeated tasered (tortured with an illegal "non-lethal" weapon that the City of Newark does not even provide to officers), while in cuffs?

The death of Basire Farrell is simply a single example of an every-increasing number of homicides that police officers in Essex County are either directly responsible for or complicit in. These include Randy Weaver, Jahqui Graham, and many, many others.

Justice for all victims of Police Brutality!

(See a YouTube video of Chairman Hamm's speech this past Saturday at 31 Green Street in Newark)

A Retort on the Left and Elections

2009-07-21T18:21:00.004-05:00

Recently there has been a ratcheting up of rhetoric that borders more and more on sectarian polemic concerning elections and the left's role, tasks and perspective with regards to them. For the sake of clarity I'd like to propose a series of questions that seem at the heart of the disputes and address each of them. What follows are individual views and should not be confused as representing the line of any particular organization. Anyways, let's get real:

Are elections under capitalism an important area of political work for radical leftists?

Are there conditions when it is permissible, or even wise for radical leftists to engage in politics with flexible tactics - including working within the big-bad Dems?

When Democrats sell us out, and they will, how do we as leftists discuss the implications with advanced and intermediate fighters in our mass movements (what we refer to as the "struggle for summation")?

And given the level of involvement of mass organizations and social movements with electoral politics and the US two party political system, does the left in this country have the ability to shift the focus away from engagement with the Democrats? In the present period, should we even try?

Isolation or Engagement

In the spirit of unity-struggle-unity I want to offer two criticisms of an approach taken by some on the Left with which I disagree. These are not personal criticisms but political differences. Some on the left are so isolated that they lack the ability to see and understand the importance of elections. All attention is focused on are ancient texts, public events where bearded dudes living under self-imposed exile at some villa in France talk about some grand new synthesis - but these folks are not my audience.

A corollary of the former is that the left is so insular that some elements appear not to see the potential of involving those mobilized by the elections in the peoples' struggle. Again these folks are not my audience.

But for much of the left, our practice refutes both points. We see the importance of electoral politics and struggles for reform. We raise pressing issues and conduct organizing among the masses of folks while paying attention to the electoral cycle. We see the importance of many of the folks that elections mobilize and the roles that these folks can and do play in the peoples' struggles.

The main points of difference I will focus on rotates around the issue of flexibility: namely do we engage in elections only through third party, or even anti-capitalist formations and candidates, or do we adopt broader strategies which may include (in addition to working in third party and anti-capitalist electoral formations) work within the Democratic Party (most often characterized as an "inside/outside" strategy)?

Opportunities and Threats: Tennessee

Many of these concerns hit home for me because of the political situation here in Tennessee. The General Assembly in the state teeters on the verge of a qualitative shift. Presently a right-center coalition of Democrats and Republicans holds a razor thin edge in the House, the Senate is firmly under the control of some of the most conservative elements of the Republican Party and Phil Bredensen the lame duck Governor (a Democrat) has done as much, perhaps more to devastate social spending on healthcare for the poor, higher education, state mental health services and special education than any executive in recent memory.

In the political maneuver of this young century the DP leadership convinced a sole Republican to cross party lines, and vote in alliance with the 49 Democrats for himself as a candidate for Speaker against his caucus's nominee and the other 49 Republican votes. This allowed for split committee member and chair appointments.

During the 2009 legislative session a galvanized right wing majority pushed for a proposed constitutional amendment limiting abortion rights, a constitution amendment abolishing the prospect of taxation based on income (which Tennessee does not have presently with the limited exception of some income derived from capital gains), statute preventing any municipality from passing a living wage ordinance, the most reactionary anti-immigrant legislation, continued legislative gay bashing, etc. Through much hard work on the part of social movements across the state these efforts were stymied in the state House but only because Democrats were able to kill the measures in committee.

Democrats, as Bredesen and many other local examples prove, are not our friends. But some of these Republicans are certainly our enemies. Here the only forces that can be targeted by social movement to prevent some really heinous shit from happening are Democrats. No single Green Party candidate appears to be contesting any state House race in Tennessee. In fact in the Knoxville area where I live we haven't even had one run a campaign.

Meanwhile a growing militant, radical right wing movement is a major cause for concern. Already, the far right violence of the Dr. Tiller murder, the Von Brunn incident at the Holocaust Museum, the PA cops who died in the shoot-out with a lone white supremacist hit home in real ways. Nearly one year ago Jim Adkisson walked into Sunday morning services at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, drew a shotgun and began shooting into the congregation as children preformed in a production of Annie. We'd later learn of the fascist's numerous connections to far-right politics. The tea-party movement, the Ron Paul signs, the massive increase in the sale of firearms to white men, and legislative action to expand where these weapons can be publicly carried are real, growing threats.

For these reasons, what happens in the 2010 election cycle, how the small number of mass, base-building organizations in Tennessee are able to propagate our issues during these campaigns, and in very real ways the outcomes of a small number of "in-play" races will determine much of the legal and political landscape for radical left politics over the coming years. Perhaps most importantly, whoever wins next year gets to redistrict - a main target of which will be Tennessee's three Black Belt counties including the city of Memphis. We have some very real shit to loose.

Under these circumstances I feel that it is a main task for radical leftists in Tennessee during the current period to unite the advanced mass and intermediate organizations (those forces directly engaged in base and movement building that participate and lead the segments of various social movements in the state) to win over the intermediate and isolate the backwards - specifically when possible in key House races in 2010. We should use the heightened focus on "politics" that the election cycle brings to highlight issues raised by our movements; we should use street heat and other tactics to force our issues onto the agendas of progressive and even moderate candidates for political office. We should consider forming mass electoral organizations that can unite our forces in concrete ways. And we must be willing to do this work with the broadest flexibility possible. And in order to complete many of these tasks, we are going to have to work to get Democrats elected.

This is a major difference I have with many folks in groups like Solidarity, ISO, the Socialist Party and others (especially those coming out of Trotskyist and Anarchist traditions).

Ultra-"leftism" - A quick path to Isolation

Earlier I dealt with the issue of engagement or isolation around the questions of elections. I stand by my assessment that most socialist forces see the importance of the elections cycle, the gains to be made in raises our issues, and the lengths to which our opponents will go to paint us as so out of touch that no one should ever pay attention to us. I think that the way in which we talk about flexible tactics in elections have another consequence in the struggle for ideas and summation - namely when the Dems fuck us over. Given the relative class origin of most conscious socialists in this country, even those of us who have worked to root ourselves in working class communities, I do not see "I told you so!" posturing as helpful within mass work in the slightest. This is especially true given the history of anti-communism fanned by the ruling class, perhaps acutely in the South.

Instead this attitude is perceived as cocky, arrogant and disconnected form the lived experience of so many. But what's more - it doesn't have to be! When the Dems do sell us out, and they will, we need to be able to call it what it is. But all too frequently groups that refuse to participate in elections except in third party formations that most people encouraged by Democratic party types look at as silly or contemptible don't even take advantage of the situation. They respond to the realities of hegemony and political power with pompous remarks that are more focused on spotlighting their own political stance than on helping actually fuse theory with the lived experiences of advanced and intermediate fighters in struggles for reforms.

Sometimes this is argued by appealing to the need, and serious lack, of radical organization in the US -"Isn't it about time we had a real party of the working class!?"

Certainly the lack of a clearly embodied vehicle for our class's political independence is important. In fact with regards to the key questions facing the socialist movement, I would argue it is dominant in the current period - but we need more than mechanistic application of this analysis as it extends to our work in the mass movements. Recognition of our need for a party does not help us in our work to pass EFCA as "the card check bill" this summer. Just the same, endorsing Cynthia McKinney or Nader for president in 2008 when they had no chance of polling even sufficient numbers to increase their own, let alone the left's, level of appeal beyond the point it currently reaches did little to advance the work of bringing our party onto the scene. No such party exists, but neither would its existence guarantee us victory on the question of EFCA.

With regards to work in the labor movement at the present juncture I would argue the primary task is building and supporting political work that focuses its attention at class exploitation and wins all that can be won while hurting the enemy (which the compromise EFCA of firmer employer penalties, binding arbitration for a first contract, and shorter election timeframes in fact does). If we do this work well there will be new layers of fighters deeply committed to and politicized by local fight backs, who are already at what Lenin called "trade union consciousness" who we should be able to win over to "working class consciousness" more broadly defined and hopefully the fight for socialism itself.

This "left" posturing, where one's actions appear to be left but are actually far from it, appears to be revolutionary, but the net effect undermines our objectives. In the end flexible engagement, rather than a practice of purity, allow us access to many of the fighters in social movements at moments when they are most open to revolutionary ideas. I would argue that these moments often coincide with power fucking us over, and given the reliance of many social movements on work within the Democratic Party, power here often times is ceremonially wielded by Democrats. Folks reach these places not through arguments and interventionist tactics (which are among the weakest of teachers) but from actual struggle and practice - the "be all, end all" of instructors!

Our Tasks, Our Movements

On the final question, I feel that it is not possible for the left to push the scattered, weak, at points nascent and at points declining social movements away from a focus on electoral politics that is largely directed at the political system in this country and its two parties. And yet these are movements that many of us have devoted the better part of our lives to building, movements that are winning some real victories in the lives of millions of people, movements that continue to inspire new waves of fighters to view our goal as that other world we get to glimpse when we roll up those pant-legs and wade into struggle.

This is surely a complicated question, one that I would argue turns a lot more around our internal capacity (and by internal I'm sticking with "left" broadly defined, but folks can reapply the question to individual collectives, organizations, or trends if you like) than around the conditions in which we operate.

But I feel that on the one hand the opportunities, especially given our relative strengths and weaknesses, number too great and the threats pose simply too great of a danger to opt for purity and rely on a misapplication of analysis concerning the need for a revolutionary party. That said, I'm arguing for flexibility and I do believe that there will be many instances where it is worse than simply a waste of our time and limited political resources to make electoral work, especially inside the Democratic party a key part of our work.

I think that this flexibility accomplishes many, at points contradictory, things at once - but it has to be rooted in analysis of certain specific conditions. I also think that often times we gain the most when our electoral work is based in a specific municipality, state, or region, especially when we are doing this work from within independent mass organizations (like a specific union, neighborhood group, or student organization) or with local intermediate movement building formations (like worker centers, Jobs with Justice, or the many movement building strategy centers that are being built across the country).

So, for the comrades that disagree - please respond. Give examples, I want to know what work to build power in the current period that refuses any potential engagement which may include support for Democrats looks like in the labor movement around the EFCA fight, or in the queer liberation movement around Prop 8 and gay marriage, in the immigrant rights movement around opposition to a new bracero program, etc. with details that elevate the analysis above mere sloganeering. I want to know the social forces you think constitute the cohesive element, and the line and method of practice we're going to employ. Please engage in real discussion, and give an argument greater than "they'll sell us out." I guess this is the whole point trying to be made here: we know what they're going to do, so my my question is what can we stand to gain or lose by playing their game in limited, calculated ways right now to position ourselves for tomorrow.

I'm serious, if you think that we can make gains by sitting out or running a third party presidential candidates at the explicit exclusion of engaging within the two party framework in specific ways at specific times in specific places - by all means put out a strategy that shows how we get there from here, explain the tactics we are going to use, itemize some bench-marks, get real about capacity, roles and the shit that is not going to get done because we're going to convince the labor movement, or the movement for queer liberation, or the immigrants rights movement to give up work with the Democrats. Convince me of a plan that can win and I'll give my life to it, and that ain't just words! But right now your line smacks of a kind of purity that lets us criticize from a safe enough distance so as to keep our hands from getting dirty, all the while denying us the ability to build struggle with folks we are going to have to have in our corner (and who aren't there at all right now), and that's amateurishness.

In the meantime, while I wait for that strategy to be shared like promethean fire, I'll be building the base, meeting folks where they are at and fighting for a seat at the table I know that for at least the next couple of years many of the best and brightest fighters I get to work with want to sit at. And in Tennessee over the next two years that is going to mean working with, and at certain points even for Democrats. To me this seems a good bit more productive than "I told you so" quips 6 months after the inauguration.

The "Teenage Kicks" Gap

2009-07-16T13:02:00.005-05:00

Back in the Early Mesolithic Era, when I got my rock and roll on vinyl slabs and paid a substantial chunk of my disposable income for it, there were some songs that every up and coming new band learned and covered—tunes like “House of the Rising Sun” and, even before you tackled that, “Land of 1000 Dances” (which conveniently has only one chord). And that was within a couple years of hit versions becoming substantial radio, jukebox and party standards.

This FotM is a tribute to a little-heralded gem, a song that is only a decade younger than those chestnuts, but seems to be one of the definitive tunes young bands take on, right up to the present, 30 years later. It’s a song I suspect relatively few ‘60s-era boomers have more than a vague memory of, but I am convinced that it is one of the greatest tunes in rock and roll history.

Here gentle reader, is “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones, a first generation punk band from Derry in occupied Northern Ireland.

The “Teenage Kicks” Gap appears most strikingly in a book by first generation rock critic and people’s fighter, Dave Marsh, The Heart Of Rock & Soul. Immensely interesting and useful, his annotated list of “The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made” contains nary a mention of this wonderful tune. Yet in the 20 years since Marsh published it, few songs have shown the staying power of “Teenage Kicks.” Probably the most vivid external demonstration of its greatness is the fact that hundreds of bands make it one of the songs they cut their teeth on. If you are willing to spend hours rummaging around YouTube you will find homemade videos of this played (and sung a capella) in garages, living rooms, basements, junior high talent shows, and cruddy bars. To spare you the search—or perhaps to whet your appetite for it--here are the Ice Cold Idiots, a trio with the combined age of 33 when they recorded this.

Yet another sign of a song’s greatness is how well it lends itself to interesting and imaginative covers. Skipping over such worthies as Snow Patrol and Nouvelle Vague, I close my argument with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, doing The Undertones justice.

POP commemorates anniversary 0f 1967 Newark Rebellion

2009-07-13T08:20:00.010-05:00

On Sunday, July 12, the People's Organization for Progress returned to the intersection of Springfield Avenue, 15th Avenue, & Irvine Turner Blvd. to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the 1967 Newark Rebellion (see the Newark Star Ledger report here). POP has held this observance annually for the past 25 years, in recent years mainly at this junction where a monument to the fallen was erected on the 30th anniversary in 1997.

Unique to this year's gathering was the presence of former Mayor Kenneth Gibson, who defeated Hugh Addonizio in 1970 to become the first African-American mayor of Newark, as well as Clifford Minor, the reform candidate running against Corey Booker. The parallels are interesting. Addonizio's administration was a center of corruption and criminal enterprise, as well as the racist apartheid that led to the '67 Rebellion. While Booker is a darling of Hollywood, his administration has become a magnet for racist violence against the city's youth.

As we noted in a previous posting here covering police-violence in Newark, (see The People's Organization for Progress demands Justice for Basire Farrell) "The instances and incidences of police violence against the citizenry has increased since Mayor Booker took office.

"…not that long ago that Mayor Booker proudly proclaimed to TV-networks and print media alike that the kind of police "over-reaction" that led the street rebellion that he describes as the "1967 Riot" are behind us."

In fact, a careful examination of the legacy of 1967 Newark shows us that the rebellion was part of a series of urban uprisings at the time which led to the important Black Power conventions of the next years, particularly the one that took place in Newark itself. Former Mayor Ken Gibson's July 12, 2009 announcement that he was at the commemoration to pay his dues and join the People's Organization for Progress may be and indication that our next ten years will be as revolutionary as the decade that followed the '67 rebellion!

Will Israel Attack Iran Or Is It Selling Wolf Tickets?

2009-07-09T06:54:00.006-05:00

Today will be the first test of how well the Iranian people’s movement has rebounded from the wave of repression that hit it two weeks ago and weathered the arrests and repression of suspected activists that have become business as usual as the Revolutionary Guard assumes more and more power.

An Iranian friend wrote me yesterday:

By the way, do you know that a massive silent demonstration is planned for tomorrow. The government has closed the universities for two weeks, but the student are organizing. The streets that marches are going to take place have been published on the web and the organizers have asked people who are afraid to march help the protesters by parking their cars at the end of route or even pretending that there is a car accident so as to block the road and make it difficult for the police to attack.

(Yesterday’s FotM post on Iran and even moreso the Freedom Road “Statement on Iran” of June 28 provide crucial context for today’s events.)

But in the last few days, Iran has been back in the news for a more familiar reason—a renewed buzz in the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike about the imminence of an Israeli missile and bombing raid on Iran. This would target Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program, which means its very real nuclear power program.

What’s up?

I have been among the skeptics about such reports for years, starting when it was supposed to be the Bush administration launching the attacks back in 2004 or so. I remain skeptical but there are issues about the current situation that need some thought.

I first became aware of the new discussion when the worthy Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies forwarded this note from Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and progressive military analyst:

Six months ago I was a non-believer. I did not think Israel had the military capability to pull off an effective strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. New pieces of information have pushed me to believe otherwise.

First, within the past few months, we have read that production of a conventional Jericho missile has been stepped up. This is an important new capability. This is a new strategic condition

On Friday, there were numerous reports that Egypt has recently allowed Israeli submarines to transit the Suez Canal. (Some sources say all three submarines; some sources report only one transited.) These boats have been operating in the Mediterranean for many years but have not moved into waters that would give them greater access to Iran with their conventional cruise missiles. This is a new strategic condition.

This morning the Times Online is reporting that Israel and Saudi Arabia have an agreement that would allow Israeli aircraft to transit Saudi airspace to conduct an attack. That makes sense from the Saudi perspective, given their position on the Iran nuclear program. This is a new strategic condition.

My new position, Israel is putting the pieces together to conduct an attack on Iran.

Note that Gardiner doesn’t predict an attack, simply argues that Israel is seeking to develop a capacity to conduct such a criminal assault which it has not heretofore had.

The Administration’s Twostep

What put this whole kerfluffle on the front pages, though, were the bizarre remarks Vice President Biden made on ABC's "This Week" when asked about Israeli saber-rattling toward Iran:

Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else. Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.

For starters, this is hypocrisy of a very high order—hey, never mind anyplace else the US is meddling in, Iran is a sovereign nation and the US is hell-bent on interfering with their building of nuclear power plants or weapons.

More striking to most observers, it seemed like a barely disguised endorsement of an Israeli attack, “You’re sovereign; do what you gotta do.” So great was the outcry at Biden’s statement that the White House made a particular point of “walking it back.” From a Russian trip President Obama denied that this was a green light to Israel, “Absolutely not.” The head of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mullen, hastily chimed in about what a bad idea it is.

Is An Attack Likely?

A lot of this makes very little sense. Take Saudi Arabia. Sure, its feudal ruling family is Sunni and Arab; Iran is Shi’ite and Persian. Let’s stipulate that they are afraid of a nuclear armed Iran and glad that someone else is going to do something about it. Still complicity in an attack by Israel on a Muslim nation would destabilize the rule of the Sa’ud family and its bought and paid for influence within Islam.

What are the calculations in Israeli ruling circles? A go-it-alone attack just might do real damage to Iran’s nuclear program, but bear in mind that those facilities are considered to be widely scattered, seriously hardened and located in some cases in or near population centers. A truly serious effort would have to try and degrade a lot of Iran’s industrial and research capacity, and its military establishment to pull the teeth of a retaliatory strike. This is still well beyond Israel’s capacity—unless, of course, it employs its own nuclear weapons in the attack.

The international rage and disgust aroused by even a conventional attack with low (i.e. in the thousands) casualties would be a heavy price to pay. It may be that the Israeli government and the IDF feel that the tide of global opinion is turning irreversibly against the Zionist experiment after the Gaza invasion and the Obama election in the US, so striking where there’s still goodwill on the plus side of the ledger makes a certain sense. I have seen little to suggest that this is really the case.

Last fall Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was leaving office and gave an interesting interview to The New York Review of Books. In it he fretted:

One senses a megalomania and a loss of proportion to the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of scale. The assumption is that if America, Russia, China, England, and Germany don’t know how to deal with the Iranians, but we, the Israelis, will know, and that we’ll do something, we’ll act, is an example of this loss of proportions.

Now that’s a little frightening.

Another Explanation?

Although this is only my speculation, let’s start with the fact that all the previous the-US-and/or-Israel-are-about-to-bomb-Iran scares did serve a political purpose even as they evaporated. They contributed to the demonization of Iran as part of the Axis of Evil invented by Bush’s speechwriters. And in foreign policy think tanks, the task of the day became figuring out really bad but less dangerous things the US and countries following its lead could do to isolate Iran and harm its economy.

Can it be mere happenstance that all this is happening on more time in the midst of an unanticipated mass upsurge in Iran? I sure don’t think so. Remember that the Israeli rulers and their amen corner among US neo-cons have been ardently rooting for Ahmadinejad to come out on top. Meir Dagan, the head of the secret service, the Mossad, told the Knesset: “If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally as a moderate element.”

What has happened is a nightmare for them. As the FRSO/OSCL statement points out:

Perhaps the most important effect so far has been to humanize the people of Iran in the eyes of millions here. The courageous millions who are risking and indeed giving their lives to protest repression and dictatorship have struck a chord in the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere.

So with this as background, the beating of the war drums takes on another meaning—it amounts to campaigning for Ahmadinejad and his backer, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The threat of military intervention strengthens their call for national unity, directed at the protesters and at disgruntled clerics and makes it easier to paint opposition as unpatriotic. If the regime can be provoked into bellicose rhetoric and thus more easily isolated so much the better.

This is not to say an attack is impossible, but to point out that the best way to forestall one right now is for us to spread the word on the popular movement there and build support for it and to expose Zionist and neo-con schemes to strengthen the Iranian reactionaries’ hold on power.

Tracking the Meltdown: Sweating the Small Stuff [updated]

2009-07-08T07:30:00.003-05:00

The big economic news is all over the place—lately the truly dire unemployment figures which have administration officials suddenly hemming and hawing instead of bragging about “green shoots.”

But the unfolding depression is making its mark in a thousand pinpricks of pain as well. A newspaper that will flesh this point out a bit just rose to the top of one of the piles here at Casa FotM. It’s an issue from last month of The Millbrook Independent—a six page weekly whose masthead proclaims “Serving Millbrook and Stanfordville and the Greater Millbrook Region” in Dutchess County, New York.

Along with coverage of wetlands regulations and high school math scores were two articles that illuminated unexpected aspects of the crunch.

One, on the front page, plugged a new “state of the art” storage facility opening in a former bowling alley in Mabbetsville. It struck me as perhaps an unfortunate business to be starting in this climate, but the owner had a quote which led me to reconsider: “With the huge advent of home offices, people now need to store what was once in that room.”

And damned if the NYC exurbs aren’t fuller than ever of folks freelancing after losing their jobs. And one woman of my acquaintance is working most of the week at home on the computer for the big name financial firm she used to commute to every day.

The other story in The Millbrook Independent, on page 5, celebrated a local dairy cow, judged the #2 Holstein in the US. The owner, Stephen Van Tassell, explained that this ranking had permitted him to keep the farm’s finances above water by the sale of Sheray’s embryos. Otherwise things didn’t look so good with bulk milk selling for $11.70 a hundredweight “about as low as it’s been in the past, but our costs are higher, around $19 cwt, so the damage is greater.”

Even more significant, this little seven paragraph piece includes striking evidence of neoliberalism’s effects on US agriculture, combined with the impact of the contraction of global trade since the credit crisis broke:

What happened to getting milk prices pegged to regional production costs?

"It’s gone exactly the other way,” Stephen explained. “Now our prices are based on national and international supply and demand. Last year, we [the American dairy industry] exported about 15 percent of our US production. This year we are down to two or three percent. China seems to be importing less."

UPDATE:

A whole other angle on this from my sweetie, Dody. She points out in Cornwall, CT, the nearby small town where she lives, there are now three small dairies which pasture their cows year round and bottle their own milk—two selling raw milk and one pasteurized but not homogenized—and all three are doing well. One guy I know with a largely Jersey herd mentioned that demand for his milk was so great that that he was 20 gallons short on a store order last week.

This may be one of the positive effects of the crisis—accelerating the trend of people turning to healthier, locally-produced foods, including stuff they raise themselves, and in doing so, making smaller scale, environmentally sound agriculture economically feasible again

Iran: It's Not Over

2009-07-07T23:59:00.006-05:00

The situation in Iran has largely fallen out of popular consciousness as the mediagenic street demonstrations have been repressed and arrests of activists have increased. But the political situation there continues to be extremely volatile and, while things do not look good for the forces fighting the regime right now, neither the popular upsurge been decisively crushed.

The best overall summation I know of, at least for progressives in the US, is the "Statement on Iran" released last week by FRSO/OSCL. You can read it here and I highly recommend that you do. I was gratified when a Iranian friend I forwarded it to, a woman who had been active in Marxist-Leninist groups there during the ‘70s and who remains an inveterate revolutionary, sent me the following note:

Your article has covered the main issues and is quite informative. For us, as I am sure you know, the details are important. I guess we are resigned to the fact that the general picture is pretty depressing and try to find a slight ray of hope to cling to. For example, after 30 years, Rafsanjani's daughter and Mosavi's wife are advocating voluntary hejab (Islamic Dress Code) and not forced hejab. It took them three decades to realize that they cannot force women to accept Islamic hejab.

Perhaps, they might decide to ease some restriction for the young as well, however, I do not have that much hope for the change in the system. Unfortunately, the workers strike did not materialized and there is no leadership for this spontaneous movement. At this point the fight is between the clergy and the secular masses who protested by the millions are not organized. There is an obvious lack of political party to lead the movement.

Now everybody is waiting to see if there would be a mass demonstration next week. (18th of Tir).

When the Freedom Road statement addressed tasks for folks in the US, the first thing it called for was our attention.

We have to keep informed. This may require a bit more work than it has in the past. There has never been a political upsurge of this scope in which the new media has been so central, whether organizing on the ground in Iran or spreading the word in the rest of the world.

In that spirit I offer three recent developments for FotM readers to consider. But first let me recommend that folks who want to follow this should, at minimum, visit the Iran liveblogging section maintained by Nico Pitney inside the Huffington Post empire. It contains first hand reports from Iran and aggregates the best and most timely reportage on developments there. It is updated every day, in real time.

So what is up in Iran today?

First, the Revolutionary Guard has moved even closer to the center of power in Iran. With the Army standing to the side and local police shunted to the side, Revolutionary Guard leaders announced to the press on Sunday that it has been “assigned the task of controlling the situation, [it] took the initiative to quell a spiraling unrest.” Guard General Yadollah Javani declared at the press conference:

Today, no one is impartial. There are two currents -- those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it.

Second, the internal differences within the clerical establishment have not abated. The repression or street demonstrations and arrests of activists, and the lack of clear leadership to the mass struggle have made this the main battlefield of the moment. Threats, declarations that dissent is treason and the like have not significantly cowed the reform mullahs who wish to diminish the role of the clergy in the state. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and Mehdi Karroubi, announced they will continue to protest the election they regard as stolen. The day after the National Guard announced “We in charge here,” the party headed by senior cleric, political powerhouse and plutocrat Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani spoke out for the first time since the voting. Its statement declared

We declare that the result is unacceptable due to the unhealthy voting process, massive electoral fraud and the siding of the majority of the Guardian Council with a specific candidate.

Third, the millions who demonstrated, calling for democracy and chanting “Death to the Dictator” have not been crushed—the nightly rooftop chanting of “Allah-u-Akbar” is still going on. 18 Tir, referred to in the letter above, is Thursday, July 9 by our calendar is the 10th anniversary of the last major eruption of protest in Iran, when students protesting the suppression of a popular newspaper were attacked in their dormitory rooms by the police and thrown from the windows in Tehron and Tabriz. Using the excuse of a massive sandstorm, the government has closed all schools and government buildings until after Thursday. SMS transmissions throughout the country are down, without explanation. They clearly fear a revived protest movement.