December 13, 2007

Thirteen Days of War Resistance at the Port of Olympia
Blocking the Strykers
(http://www.counterpunch.org/mayes12132007.html)
By SANDY MAYES

The US military will have to think twice before it ever again tries to use Olympia, WA as a launching point for war.

For 13 unforgettable days in November, people in this small community engaged in a courageous and spirited campaign of resistance to the war in Iraq. Sixty-six arrests were made and untold numbers were assaulted by police during a campaign which made national and international news. Day after day, and night after night, people put their lives on hold and their bodies on the line to prevent movement of military equipment from the Port of Olympia to nearby Fort Lewis.

The campaign was organized primarily by the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR), a coalition of peace groups, students, and individual community members. As well, there were student groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and non-affiliated folks, all of whom have worked together in recent years to oppose shipments of war materials through the ports of Olympia, Tacoma and Grays Harbor.

Early in November activists learned that the USNS Brittin would arrive on Nov. 5, bringing Stryker combat vehicles and other equipment back from Iraq through the Port of Olympia to Fort Lewis. The equipment belongs to the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, whose roughly 3,600 soldiers returned home in October from a 15-month deployment to Iraq * except for the 48 who died from injuries sustained in Iraq.

OlyPMR was founded in May of 2006 when activists attempted to block outgoing equipment in advance of the deployment of that same 3rd Stryker Brigade. Activists then united under the banner of Port Militarization Resistance, declaring a common mission to "end our community's participation in the illegal occupation of Iraq by stopping US military use of the Port of Olympia."

......

A call to action

Olympia's resistance to war has inspired peace activists throughout the US and the world. OlyPMR has issued a call for people everywhere to find the ways that their own communities participate in the war, and to join together to creatively resist that participation:

"We are ordinary people who have found a way to organize ourselves in resistance to this unjust war. We call on all people of goodwill to find their own methods of creative noncompliance. In so doing, we will be joining together to dissent from unlawful and unjust authority, which should be considered the essence of democracy. In this way we will act in the interests of the Iraqis, the soldiers, our children, and ourselves."


more



Port Militarization Resistance -- Peppersprayed in Olympia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgi5ESpueX8)


Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w)

Stop Wars -- a day of struggle in Olympia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07ip9LDH7JU)

Damn I want to move to Olympia




http://media.komotv.com/images/071115_olympia_protest.jpg

20 here, 30 there, 60 there....

I wonder how many people have been arrested around the country in total? It may be like the immigrant sweeps - 833,000 people illegally arrested and detained over the last couple of years, and yet that flies under the radar of most people - 20 here, 30 there, 60 there, all with little or no media coverage.

Seven contrary points, buckets of cold and dirty water flung by a longtime Washington resident:

(1)-Olympia’s protestors are primarily from Evergreen State College, an enclave of pampered, mostly-white bourgeois elitists who are as viciously anti-working-class (as demonstrated by their enthusiastic support of murdering loggers by tree-spiking) as they are fearful of the resumption of the draft. Thus, with the characteristic regional hypocrisy we encounter also in the realm of mass transit (for which see below), they conceal their bottomless selfishness by fanatically proclaiming themselves anti-war. Thus too -- as careful scrutiny of the video tapes will demonstrate -- working-class folk including people of color are conspicuously absent from the ranks of the protests.

(2)-The schism between working-class folk and the pampered bourgeoisie here in Washington state has never been greater, which means -- the usually working-class-friendly governorship of Christine Gregoire not withstanding -- the possibility of meaningful change here has never been smaller.

(3)-This schism has long been vividly apparent in the RATPOD pro-Global-Sweatshop-Economy, anti-union votes of our two allegedly "Democratic" U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell (RATPOD = "Republicans Acting The Part Of Democrats").

(4)-The schism itself, obvious here at least since the overwhelming support the bourgeoisie gave the malevolently anti-working-class Eugene McCarthy cult during the 1960s, was savagely re-animated and expanded to the festering status of an incurable wound during the anti-WTO demonstrations of 1999, the so-called Battle of Seattle. The source of the schism was a band of arrogantly smirking bourgeois-elitist college students, mostly from the University of Oregon but with substantial reinforcement from their trust-fund peers at Evergreen State College and other such Washington schools, who proclaimed themselves "anarchists" and committed deliberately provocatively violence in hatefully anti-union defiance of organized labor's disciplined plans for non-violent protest. This pampered minority of wealthy white college students deliberately turned the anti-WTO demonstrations into a riot which -- exactly as the Ruling Class intended (and therefore with huge help from mass media) -- gave organized labor a (new) black eye from which it will probably not recover in a hundred years. The resultant antagonisms are -- just as the Ruling Class clearly foresaw -- so huge any notion of worker/student coalition is too absurd to even contemplate, not now, not in another century.

(5)-Though the “anarchists” deliberate betrayal of the Working Class has never been proven, application of the principle of class struggle and use of objective analysis -- essentially asking who was pardoned, who got rich(er) and who was ruined -- make it undeniably clear these "anarchists" were agent provocateurs: Ruling Class goons.

(6)-While the anarchist goons' enormous service to the Ruling Class is stridently denied -- never mind the region’s reflexive anti-intellectualism guarantees that anarchism here today is scarcely more than an excuse for rampages of bourgeois violence -- the West Coast bourgeoisie's hatred of organized labor and the working class in general is conscious and venomous.

(7)-Thus nobody should allow themselves to be duped -- as I was duped in 1970 -- into believing the Puget Sound region is some sort of utopian paradise. It is in fact quite the opposite. Here for Seemslikeadream are some telling examples both scholarly and personal:

(a)-Seattle's xenophobia and anti-intellectuality are internationally infamous (see Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States; see also the Internet sites Seattle Sucks and Seattle Shmeng, for which Google).

Olympia and Bellingham are every bit as bad if not worse.

The one exception is Tacoma, which -- often defiantly -- retains a few vestiges of working-class consciousness lingering from IWW times and is thus also sometimes open to seemingly radical ideas. For example, Tacoma politicians -- not Seattle’s -- have been the statewide leaders in pressing for adequate public transport. It was just such (relative) radicalism that spawned a T-shirt popular in Seattle a few years ago: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?”

(b)-The anti-intellectuality of West Coast Caucasian youth is notoriously vicious: note the chanters at Berkeley -- “Hey hey ho ho Western Civ has got to go” -- whose target was not merely the academic course of study but all of Westernesse itself.

Here in the Puget Sound region the anti-intellectuality is even worse: rich pampered white teenagers actually burned to the ground the community library in the town of Federal Way, not for formal protest but just for “fun” -- that is, to demonstrate their infinite contempt for books and learning. The fact they got off with slap-on-the-wrist probation instead of the years in the penitentiary such a crime deserves illustrates how even among the area’s Ruling-Class adults, such disrespectful attitudes plunge to a nadir that is shocking and indeed unimaginable to those of us from civilized backgrounds.

The breadth and ferocity of the region’s anti-intellectuality also dominates public school policy, where it mandates powerful official opposition to exempting intellectually gifted students from the hollow rigors of the conventional classroom -- vacuous pedagogy that to the well-above-average intellect is genuinely mind-destroying. Thus Washington ranks dead worst of all the states in deliberately denying public-school encouragement to exceptionally brilliant children. Even by itself and in relative isolation, the region’s anti-intellectuality is so overwhelmingly oppressive -- and so utterly reflexive -- it has to be witnessed firsthand to be believed.

(c)-No matter where it occurs, such anti-intellectuality is a primary mechanism by which the Ruling Class protects itself; hence its refinement from fascist roots (by operatives such as Timothy Leary at places such as Esalen Institute) into the so-called New Age Movement, a process profoundly abetted by the cultural isolation of the West Coast.

A major function of anti-intellectuality -- which I have heard European visitors say is so intense here on the West Coast, it is actually comparable to the anti-intellectuality of Nazi Germany -- is to forever suppress any sort of analysis: for example, analysis by which the college students of 1999 might have prevented themselves from being manipulated into a Ruling Class goon-squad during the infamous WTO episode.

(d)-The hypocrisy of Puget Sound voters is as breathtaking as their anti-intellectuality, of which their hypocrisy may well be a subset.

These voters smugly claim to be the most environmentally enlightened electorate on the planet -- in contrast to which, note their overwhelming defeat of a recent mass transport measure: literally the region’s last chance to take advantage of its abundant electricity to build a light-rail system that would have at long last freed the region from its total automobile-and-bus enslavement to Big Oil and Big Automotive. (Second only to the land of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Washington state has the cheapest and most abundant electricity in the U.S.)

Since 1968, three other light rail proposals have been similarly defeated, an electrification proposal calling for the use of trackless trolley-buses in Tacoma was slain forever by the summary ouster of its transit-executive proponent, and the present, bare-minimum light-rail effort (which November’s defeated ballot measure sought to expand) has been so hopelessly sabotaged by political treachery, it is now nine years behind schedule. Thus -- obviously -- it will never be completed before the economic collapse inflicted by petroleum exhaustion and terminal climate change ends all such construction forever.

(e)-At this point one might reasonably ask why is there such opposition in the Puget Sound region to a service that literally everywhere else on the planet is deemed indispensable.

The answer is a unique combination of bigotry, xenophobia, corruption and moronic selfishness, not necessarily in that order, with a huge dose of toxic irony thrown in.

Thanks to the vast discrepancy between rock-bottom average wages and the prohibitively expensive cost of living, used car prices in the Puget Sound area are the highest in North America, possibly the highest in the world. This is one of several reflections of the area’s worse-in-the-nation gap between income and cost of living -- the fact that beyond the privileged few employed by high-tech, the real “average worker” here earns only about $10 per hour, while living costs -- the third-most-expensive rentals in the U.S. radically inflated by the highest grocery and fuel prices in the Lower 48 -- are comparable to those of the ritziest neighborhoods of New York City or Boston. Normally such dire economic circumstances would spark an ever-more-determined demand for adequate public transport.

That these conditions do not spark such activism here is proof of the fact -- precisely as the Nixon co-conspirator John D. Ehrlichman admitted during Watergate testimony -- that the Ruling Class has structured the Puget Sound area into its own experimental rat maze: a place where it deliberately maintains a hopelessly divided, permanently dumbed-down population on which to refine its techniques of oppression.

Hence the protective collaboration of mass media -- further encouraged by the fact automobile advertising means megabucks -- allows powerful politicians and bureaucrats to get away with being brazen whores to Big Oil and Big Automotive.

Meanwhile the Big Oil/Big Automotive hammerlock is strengthened by whisper campaigns to foster and reinforce the Ku Klux notion that public transport breeds crime because minorities are its primary beneficiaries -- this despite the fact the minorities themselves are constantly manipulated into denouncing mass transit projects for alleged failures to function as replacement welfare programs.

Thus too -- playing on the hatred of Jews increasingly common on the pseudo-Left -- light rail is damned as “Manhattanization”: the dark cabalistic magic that will somehow transform the Puget Sound region into another “Jew York.”

The shopping-moll opinion of the typical white bourgeois housewife is depressingly predictable: “I don’t wanna hafta sit next to some stinking -- well, you know -- when I can drive to work in the safety and comfort of my SUV. If the poor are such failures they need public transit, let em ride buses. They certainly don‘t deserve anything more, and we shouldn’t even have to pay for that: it just encourages their laziness and irresponsible breeding. Make em get jobs and buy cars like the rest of us. Actually I think most of em should be sterilized. O and by the way what are you wearing to the Sierra Club fund-raiser? I just loved that outfit you wore to the Democratic Caucus.”

Thus the ugly truth about allegedly “leftist/environmentalist” Seattle is revealed by the fact it has the worst public transport -- and some of the worst traffic congestion -- in urban North America.

(I know these dismal facts because I covered public transport here in the ‘70s and the early ‘80s for both the alternative and mainstream press and now cover it again for an advocacy journal -- in total nearly 20 years exposure over three decades to its infinitely depressing Moron Nation realities. But even with gas at $3.40 a gallon -- even if gas rose to $10 a gallon -- last November’s election proves once and for all and beyond any further question that local bigotry renders adequate public transport a lost cause forever, a point on which even the most formerly optimistic observers now agree. With a 39-year string of defeats demonstrating a hatred of public transport that has no counterpart anywhere else on the planet, its opponents have clearly had the final word. There will never again be another such effort, not even locally. The region is thus forever doomed to the Third World reality of lavish limos for the Ruling Class and herky-jerky buses for the rest of us.)

(f)-I moved here from Manhattan in 1970, and I returned here after a three-year stay in Manhattan during the mid-1980s, each time drawn by opportunities for wilderness trout fishing and various kinds of hunting that since 1995 no longer exist.

All roads into the back country are gated closed, with the little public access that remains strictly limited to hikers and the horse-aristocracy. The gates are typically 10 or 15 miles from the onset of genuine wilderness, which means the deep back-country -- the places I used to fish, hunt or simply go to recharge my spiritual batteries -- is now off limits to everyone save the very rich, those who can afford the requisite horses, mules and wranglers or can afford the extra day or two it takes to hike merely to the beginning of the (now rapidly fading) trails into the Deep Woods. Thus the Cascade wilderness has become like the royal forests of medieval England -- forever prohibited to everyone save the Ruling Class, this time until the human species itself becomes extinct.

(g)-Because like most writers I have always been something of a loner, the ability to experience real wilderness compensated for the slash-your-tires hostility (again see the aforementioned Internet sites) of the vast majority of the native-born Puget Sound-area white bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless this hostility is so implacably vicious it prompted a Seattle-born Bellingham Public Library librarian -- a well-educated and seemingly radical woman I had foolishly supposed for a dozen years was a real friend -- to literally dance with glee at my announced departure for NYC in 1983, “O goody we’re getting rid of another fucking Jew York intellectual.”

And even now after all these years I am still hatefully regarded by most native white Puget Sounders as an outland stranger --someone to be thwarted by every means possible.

(h)-However, despite the relentless hostility of the native white bourgeoisie, staying here was not a total mistake.

My professional prospects -- the teachers and editors of my youth assumed I was destined for The New York Times -- had already been destroyed beyond repair by my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, so conventional journalistic success would have been denied me anywhere I lived.

But the experience of being one of the founders of The Seattle Sun -- an excellent alternative newspaper that published from 1974 until 1981 -- was without peer in both the positive and negative senses.

In the latter, it taught me an invaluable lesson about the absolute relentlessness of Seattle xenophobia: drawn into the center of Seattle’s avant garde by my involvement with The Sun, I was nevertheless despised for my “Jew York” origins, confronted with an aggressive go-back-where-you-came-from hatred that not only never diminished with the passage of time but actually intensified the longer I stayed.

Spiritually, however, my years here were the most productive of my life. Indeed I question if one can genuinely claim paganism without spending time alone in real wilderness. In my case that is surely true. The access I enjoyed during the years the back-country was open and the associated scholarship then and now has brought to full maturity a pagan/agnostic sensibility born in the 1952 summer woods of Northern Michigan by an encounter so breathtakingly eerie I dared not even speak of it for years afterward. Exploring a long-abandoned road, I found myself surrounded by the indescribably beautiful trilling of seemingly invisible birds -- a phenomenon from which I thus fled in absolute terror. But later it perplexed me into a lifetime of quest and inquiry that continues to this day, often with rewards that, albeit utterly intangible, are nevertheless of enormous personal significance and sometimes exquisitely beyond description. Similarly experienced fellow pagans will surely understand my citation of a line from the Robert Graves poem “To Juan at Winter Solstice”:

But nothing promised that is not performed.

Yet in another, equally important personal sense -- and with the very notable exception of a tiny coterie of dear friends (the only people I have met here who are not rendered hateful by the ubiquitous anti-“Jew-York” xenophobia) -- I have never been so thoroughly damned for what I am (ultimately a New York intellectual) nor more painfully ostracized for my appearance (the dark eyes and curly, formerly near-black hair most of the locals thought marked me as Jewish). Nor have I ever been so wrenchingly lonely.

Knowing what I now know, I would warn everyone they should avoid this place like the proverbial plague: the economy is implacably hostile to outlanders and the restrictions on back-country access prohibit even spiritual quests.

Indeed all that keeps me here, besides those dishearteningly few friendships, is the fact Washington is one of the rapidly dwindling number of states that hasn’t yet criminalized the act of seeking self-betterment through psychotherapy. Thus it hasn’t yet stripped me of vital rights of citizenship and thereby effectively declared me not just subhuman but officially designated prey. When that happens -- something I fear is not only inevitable but looming (federal law to criminalize mental health treatment has passed the House and is now pending in the Senate) -- I will go back East to die and hope that before my last breath I can convince someone to bear my ashes to Michigan and -- with an appropriate reading from Taliesin ("I shall be until the day of doom upon the face of the Earth") -- scatter them off the Old Smith Bridge into the waters of the South Branch of the AuSable, that I may ride that blessed river one last time.

_________
Edits: grammar, typos.

We rarely get such a great example of the two threads of thought in the modern left juxtaposed like this for comparison.

I'd like to see this generate some discussion.

We rarely get such a great example of the two threads of thought in the modern left juxtaposed like this for comparison.

I'd like to see this generate some discussion.

You got that right. Lots of questions swirling around, first one that occurs to me is,"What's the longshoremen's take on this?". If they wanted to they could've made that action 10 times more effective. Why not?

Never been to that part of the world but my limited exposure to the petit bourgeois agrees with Wolf's sentiments, they are condescending, self-absorbed and essentially useless. Yet in this case it seems that they are to some degree "putting it on the line", risking arrest and physical abuse from the cops. Would they do so for immigrant rights?

By and by politics will lead to the question of alliances. Many criteria enter into consideration, some rooted in practical considerations, others more philosophical. Would these folks make the cut? Under what circumstances? I suspect Lenin might know.

Seven contrary points, buckets of cold and dirty water flung by a longtime Washington resident:

(1)-Olympia’s protestors are primarily from Evergreen State College, an enclave of pampered, mostly-white bourgeois elitists who are as viciously anti-working-class (as demonstrated by their enthusiastic support of murdering loggers by tree-spiking) as they are fearful of the resumption of the draft. Thus, with the characteristic regional hypocrisy we encounter also in the realm of mass transit (for which see below), they conceal their bottomless selfishness by fanatically proclaiming themselves anti-war. Thus too -- as careful scrutiny of the video tapes will demonstrate -- working-class folk including people of color are conspicuously absent from the ranks of the protests.

(2)-The schism between working-class folk and the pampered bourgeoisie here in Washington state has never been greater, which means -- the usually working-class-friendly governorship of Christine Gregoire not withstanding -- the possibility of meaningful change here has never been smaller.

(3)-This schism has long been vividly apparent in the RATPOD pro-Global-Sweatshop-Economy, anti-union votes of our two allegedly "Democratic" U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell (RATPOD = "Republicans Acting The Part Of Democrats").

(4)-The schism itself, obvious here at least since the overwhelming support the bourgeoisie gave the malevolently anti-working-class Eugene McCarthy cult during the 1960s, was savagely re-animated and expanded to the festering status of an incurable wound during the anti-WTO demonstrations of 1999, the so-called Battle of Seattle. The source of the schism was a band of arrogantly smirking bourgeois-elitist college students, mostly from the University of Oregon but with substantial reinforcement from their trust-fund peers at Evergreen State College and other such Washington schools, who proclaimed themselves "anarchists" and committed deliberately provocatively violence in hatefully anti-union defiance of organized labor's disciplined plans for non-violent protest. This pampered minority of wealthy white college students deliberately turned the anti-WTO demonstrations into a riot which -- exactly as the Ruling Class intended (and therefore with huge help from mass media) -- gave organized labor a (new) black eye from which it will probably not recover in a hundred years. The resultant antagonisms are -- just as the Ruling Class clearly foresaw -- so huge any notion of worker/student coalition is too absurd to even contemplate, not now, not in another century.

(5)-Though the “anarchists” deliberate betrayal of the Working Class has never been proven, application of the principle of class struggle and use of objective analysis -- essentially asking who was pardoned, who got rich(er) and who was ruined -- make it undeniably clear these "anarchists" were agent provocateurs: Ruling Class goons.

(6)-While the anarchist goons' enormous service to the Ruling Class is stridently denied -- never mind the region’s reflexive anti-intellectualism guarantees that anarchism here today is scarcely more than an excuse for rampages of bourgeois violence -- the West Coast bourgeoisie's hatred of organized labor and the working class in general is conscious and venomous.

(7)-Thus nobody should allow themselves to be duped -- as I was duped in 1970 -- into believing the Puget Sound region is some sort of utopian paradise. It is in fact quite the opposite. Here for Seemslikeadream are some telling examples both scholarly and personal:

(a)-Seattle's xenophobia and anti-intellectuality are internationally infamous (see Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States; see also the Internet sites Seattle Sucks and Seattle Shmeng, for which Google).

Olympia and Bellingham are every bit as bad if not worse.

The one exception is Tacoma, which -- often defiantly -- retains a few vestiges of working-class consciousness lingering from IWW times and is thus also sometimes open to seemingly radical ideas. For example, Tacoma politicians -- not Seattle’s -- have been the statewide leaders in pressing for adequate public transport. It was just such (relative) radicalism that spawned a T-shirt popular in Seattle a few years ago: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?”

(b)-The anti-intellectuality of West Coast Caucasian youth is notoriously vicious: note the chanters at Berkeley -- “Hey hey ho ho Western Civ has got to go” -- whose target was not merely the academic course of study but all of Westernesse itself.

Here in the Puget Sound region the anti-intellectuality is even worse: rich pampered white teenagers actually burned to the ground the community library in the town of Federal Way, not for formal protest but just for “fun” -- that is, to demonstrate their infinite contempt for books and learning. The fact they got off with slap-on-the-wrist probation instead of the years in the penitentiary such a crime deserves illustrates how even among the area’s Ruling-Class adults, such disrespectful attitudes plunge to a nadir that is shocking and indeed unimaginable to those of us from civilized backgrounds.

The breadth and ferocity of the region’s anti-intellectuality also dominates public school policy, where it mandates powerful official opposition to exempting intellectually gifted students from the hollow rigors of the conventional classroom -- vacuous pedagogy that to the well-above-average intellect is genuinely mind-destroying. Thus Washington ranks dead worst of all the states in deliberately denying public-school encouragement to exceptionally brilliant children. Even by itself and in relative isolation, the region’s anti-intellectuality is so overwhelmingly oppressive -- and so utterly reflexive -- it has to be witnessed firsthand to be believed.

(c)-No matter where it occurs, such anti-intellectuality is a primary mechanism by which the Ruling Class protects itself; hence its refinement from fascist roots (by operatives such as Timothy Leary at places such as Esalen Institute) into the so-called New Age Movement, a process profoundly abetted by the cultural isolation of the West Coast.

A major function of anti-intellectuality -- which I have heard European visitors say is so intense here on the West Coast, it is actually comparable to the anti-intellectuality of Nazi Germany -- is to forever suppress any sort of analysis: for example, analysis by which the college students of 1999 might have prevented themselves from being manipulated into a Ruling Class goon-squad during the infamous WTO episode.

(d)-The hypocrisy of Puget Sound voters is as breathtaking as their anti-intellectuality, of which their hypocrisy may well be a subset.

These voters smugly claim to be the most environmentally enlightened electorate on the planet -- in contrast to which, note their overwhelming defeat of a recent mass transport measure: literally the region’s last chance to take advantage of its abundant electricity to build a light-rail system that would have at long last freed the region from its total automobile-and-bus enslavement to Big Oil and Big Automotive. (Second only to the land of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Washington state has the cheapest and most abundant electricity in the U.S.)

Since 1968, three other light rail proposals have been similarly defeated, an electrification proposal calling for the use of trackless trolley-buses in Tacoma was slain forever by the summary ouster of its transit-executive proponent, and the present, bare-minimum light-rail effort (which November’s defeated ballot measure sought to expand) has been so hopelessly sabotaged by political treachery, it is now nine years behind schedule. Thus -- obviously -- it will never be completed before the economic collapse inflicted by petroleum exhaustion and terminal climate change ends all such construction forever.

(e)-At this point one might reasonably ask why is there such opposition in the Puget Sound region to a service that literally everywhere else on the planet is deemed indispensable.

The answer is a unique combination of bigotry, xenophobia, corruption and moronic selfishness, not necessarily in that order, with a huge dose of toxic irony thrown in.

Thanks to the vast discrepancy between rock-bottom average wages and the prohibitively expensive cost of living, used car prices in the Puget Sound area are the highest in North America, possibly the highest in the world. This is one of several reflections of the area’s worse-in-the-nation gap between income and cost of living -- the fact that beyond the privileged few employed by high-tech, the real “average worker” here earns only about $10 per hour, while living costs -- the third-most-expensive rentals in the U.S. radically inflated by the highest grocery and fuel prices in the Lower 48 -- are comparable to those of the ritziest neighborhoods of New York City or Boston. Normally such dire economic circumstances would spark an ever-more-determined demand for adequate public transport.

That these conditions do not spark such activism here is proof of the fact -- precisely as the Nixon co-conspirator John D. Ehrlichman admitted during Watergate testimony -- that the Ruling Class has structured the Puget Sound area into its own experimental rat maze: a place where it deliberately maintains a hopelessly divided, permanently dumbed-down population on which to refine its techniques of oppression.

Hence the protective collaboration of mass media -- further encouraged by the fact automobile advertising means megabucks -- allows powerful politicians and bureaucrats to get away with being brazen whores to Big Oil and Big Automotive.

Meanwhile the Big Oil/Big Automotive hammerlock is strengthened by whisper campaigns to foster and reinforce the Ku Klux notion that public transport breeds crime because minorities are its primary beneficiaries -- this despite the fact the minorities themselves are constantly manipulated into denouncing mass transit projects for alleged failures to function as replacement welfare programs.

Thus too -- playing on the hatred of Jews increasingly common on the pseudo-Left -- light rail is damned as “Manhattanization”: the dark cabalistic magic that will somehow transform the Puget Sound region into another “Jew York.”

The shopping-moll opinion of the typical white bourgeois housewife is depressingly predictable: “I don’t wanna hafta sit next to some stinking -- well, you know -- when I can drive to work in the safety and comfort of my SUV. If the poor are such failures they need public transit, let em ride buses. They certainly don‘t deserve anything more, and we shouldn’t even have to pay for that: it just encourages their laziness and irresponsible breeding. Make em get jobs and buy cars like the rest of us. Actually I think most of em should be sterilized. O and by the way what are you wearing to the Sierra Club fund-raiser? I just loved that outfit you wore to the Democratic Caucus.”

Thus the ugly truth about allegedly “leftist/environmentalist” Seattle is revealed by the fact it has the worst public transport -- and some of the worst traffic congestion -- in urban North America.

(I know these dismal facts because I covered public transport here in the ‘70s and the early ‘80s for both the alternative and mainstream press and now cover it again for an advocacy journal -- in total nearly 20 years exposure over three decades to its infinitely depressing Moron Nation realities. But even with gas at $3.40 a gallon -- even if gas rose to $10 a gallon -- last November’s election proves once and for all and beyond any further question that local bigotry renders adequate public transport a lost cause forever, a point on which even the most formerly optimistic observers now agree. With a 39-year string of defeats demonstrating a hatred of public transport that has no counterpart anywhere else on the planet, its opponents have clearly had the final word. There will never again be another such effort, not even locally. The region is thus forever doomed to the Third World reality of lavish limos for the Ruling Class and herky-jerky buses for the rest of us.)

(f)-I moved here from Manhattan in 1970, and I returned here after a three-year stay in Manhattan during the mid-1980s, each time drawn by opportunities for wilderness trout fishing and various kinds of hunting that since 1995 no longer exist.

All roads into the back country are gated closed, with the little public access that remains strictly limited to hikers and the horse-aristocracy. The gates are typically 10 or 15 miles from the onset of genuine wilderness, which means the deep back-country -- the places I used to fish, hunt or simply go to recharge my spiritual batteries -- is now off limits to everyone save the very rich, those who can afford the requisite horses, mules and wranglers or can afford the extra day or two it takes to hike merely to the beginning of the (now rapidly fading) trails into the Deep Woods. Thus the Cascade wilderness has become like the royal forests of medieval England -- forever prohibited to everyone save the Ruling Class, this time until the human species itself becomes extinct.

(g)-Because like most writers I have always been something of a loner, the ability to experience real wilderness compensated for the slash-your-tires hostility (again see the aforementioned Internet sites) of the vast majority of the native-born Puget Sound-area white bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless this hostility is so implacably vicious it prompted a Seattle-born Bellingham Public Library librarian -- a well-educated and seemingly radical woman I had foolishly supposed for a dozen years was a real friend -- to literally dance with glee at my announced departure for NYC in 1983, “O goody we’re getting rid of another fucking Jew York intellectual.”

And even now after all these years I am still hatefully regarded by most native white Puget Sounders as an outland stranger --someone to be thwarted by every means possible.

(h)-However, despite the relentless hostility of the native white bourgeoisie, staying here was not a total mistake.

My professional prospects -- the teachers and editors of my youth assumed I was destined for The New York Times -- had already been destroyed beyond repair by my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, so conventional journalistic success would have been denied me anywhere I lived.

But the experience of being one of the founders of The Seattle Sun -- an excellent alternative newspaper that published from 1974 until 1981 -- was without peer in both the positive and negative senses.

In the latter, it taught me an invaluable lesson about the absolute relentlessness of Seattle xenophobia: drawn into the center of Seattle’s avant garde by my involvement with The Sun, I was nevertheless despised for my “Jew York” origins, confronted with an aggressive go-back-where-you-came-from hatred that not only never diminished with the passage of time but actually intensified the longer I stayed.

Spiritually, however, my years here were the most productive of my life. Indeed I question if one can genuinely claim paganism without spending time alone in real wilderness. In my case that is surely true. The access I enjoyed during the years the back-country was open and the associated scholarship then and now has brought to full maturity a pagan/agnostic sensibility born in the 1952 summer woods of Northern Michigan by an encounter so breathtakingly eerie I dared not even speak of it for years afterward. Exploring a long-abandoned road, I found myself surrounded by the indescribably beautiful trilling of seemingly invisible birds -- a phenomenon from which I thus fled in absolute terror. But later it perplexed me into a lifetime of quest and inquiry that continues to this day, often with rewards that, albeit utterly intangible, are nevertheless of enormous personal significance and sometimes exquisitely beyond description. Similarly experienced fellow pagans will surely understand my citation of a line from the Robert Graves poem “To Juan at Winter Solstice”:

But nothing promised that is not performed.

Yet in another, equally important personal sense -- and with the very notable exception of a tiny coterie of dear friends (the only people I have met here who are not rendered hateful by the ubiquitous anti-“Jew-York” xenophobia) -- I have never been so thoroughly damned for what I am (ultimately a New York intellectual) nor more painfully ostracized for my appearance (the dark eyes and curly, formerly near-black hair most of the locals thought marked me as Jewish). Nor have I ever been so wrenchingly lonely.

Knowing what I now know, I would warn everyone they should avoid this place like the proverbial plague: the economy is implacably hostile to outlanders and the restrictions on back-country access prohibit even spiritual quests.

Indeed all that keeps me here, besides those dishearteningly few friendships, is the fact Washington is one of the rapidly dwindling number of states that hasn’t yet criminalized the act of seeking self-betterment through psychotherapy. Thus it hasn’t yet stripped me of vital rights of citizenship and thereby effectively declared me not just subhuman but officially designated prey. When that happens -- something I fear is not only inevitable but looming (federal law to criminalize mental health treatment has passed the House and is now pending in the Senate) -- I will go back East to die and hope that before my last breath I can convince someone to bear my ashes to Michigan and -- with an appropriate reading from Taliesin ("I shall be until the day of doom upon the face of the Earth") -- scatter them off the Old Smith Bridge into the waters of the South Branch of the AuSable, that I may ride that blessed river one last time.

_________
Edits: grammar, typos.


You sound like Chalmers Johnson before he saw the light!

http://12.170.145.182/Video/?ProgramID=1079
http://12.170.145.182/Transcript/?ProgramID=1079

They struck me as pampered little brats who didn’t really know what they were doing. I was very proud of the University of California. I thought they were damaging the university at the time and so, I guess there was another issue that when we talk about the Vietnam War, one seems to think that this was the only issue out there. It was a period of enormous change in America and at this time, I was very much caught up with racial integration in America. I had many students in the Black Panther Party who were students at my university. That being the case, Lyndon Johnson became a kind of hero because of the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, things of this sort and we tended not to pay as much attention to what he was doing in Vietnam, as I should have and was wrong

Anti-war sentiment is meaningless by itself, and to make it a significator of radicalism is a huge and often terminal mistake.

Bluntly, those who rail at U.S. imperialism abroad but collaborate with the oppression of the working class at home -- collaborate not just unwittingly but in full acknowledgement (whether by tree-spiking, opposing mass transit or participating in the infinity of mercantile/Britney Spears fads by which the pyramid-scheme of capitalism co-opts the young and foolish) -- are no better than the most brazen fascists. Indeed they may be worse than fascists. Their leftward-gesturing (getting busted etc.) suggests a trustworthiness that might grant them admission to realms where -- once pressured by the authorities -- they (predictably) resort to the self-advancing treachery that is one of the core bourgeois values and thus (like the bourgeoisie who willingly became the informers of the McCarthy Era) destroy the lives of thousands, even millions, whose only sin was that we took the First Amendment at face value.

Also in this context note the Democrats -- in fact a huge majority of the Democrats -- who spout all the proper anti-war slogans but whose RATPOD politics are as anti-working-class as the most diabolical schemes of any Wall Street fat-cat.

One example: Washington's Democratic U.S. senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray stridently claim to favor reproductive choice, but their countless RATPOD votes to expand the Global (Sweatshop) Economy by outsourcing and downsizing are as anti-choice as any fundamentalist legislator's vote to ban abortion outright. This is because in the U.S. -- where there has been no publicly funded birth control since the Carter Administration began the process of turning the nation into a Christian theocracy -- whether one has "choice" is entirely determined by whether one has access to health care. And since access to health care in the U.S. is determined entirely by wealth, any RATPOD vote that throws millions of people out of work and into poverty is just as much a RATPOD vote against reproductive choice. (If the feminist movement ever awakens to this fact -- something it will not be allowed to do as long as the CIA/Steinem faction keeps it dumbed-down by anti-intellectualism and thus retains control -- we might see a REAL revolution in this country.)

Hence the old saying from the Civil Rights Movement South: "better the sheriff who wears his Klan robes openly than the sheriff who keeps his sheet and pillowcase hidden in the back of his closet."

The corollary point is that what is happening in Olympia is pure theater: if the pseudo-leftist domination of U.S. academia were a true threat, it would be summarily crushed; likewise the demonstrations in question which -- after all -- do nothing whatsoever to stop the war itself but in fact further the (hidden, bourgeois) goal of exterminating the Working Class. This is because (apart from the warrior aristocracy that makes up the officer corps), the U.S. military is the employer of last resort for the American Working Class, and denial of equipment as attempted by Olympia demonstrators would, if successful, very literally kill U.S. soldiers.

The following passage from Trotsky is especially relevant in terms of understanding American fascism and thus how the demonstrators (thoughtlessly?)support it both by providing the illusion of democracy (the fact they are merely arrested rather than exterminated) and providing the Ruling Class with the rationale for overt suspension of civil liberties should it deem it necessary -- all the while without doing a thing to support the cause of the economic transformation (without which all other talk of change is merely word-salad nonsense).

Quoth Trotsky:


At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, directly and immediately, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the cooperatives. When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism. (Emphasis added.)

Trotsky's full essay, "What Next?" (written in response to the triumph of fascism in Germany and Italy), is here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/index.htm)

For those unfamiliar with the fascist conquest of Germany -- the "democratic" seizure of the most civilized, best educated, most technologically advanced nation on earth and the suppression of the most avowedly Marxist electorate outside the Soviet Union -- here is Trotsky's (very excellent) summation of what happened:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/index.htm)

It seems to me -- just as Blindpig surmised -- several of Lenin's essays are also relevant to this discussion. But -- alas -- there is no search facility by which to run "bourgeois treachery" through the Marxist archive, and I haven't time just now to search the site item-by-iten or page through my 1940 edition of Ten Classics of Marxism for the links. Thus I will defer to Anaxarchos, our commissar of quotes (and sometimes too our comic star of quotes), who in any case is far more learned on the subject of theoretical Marxism than I.

...It seems to me -- just as Blindpig surmised -- several of Lenin's essays are also relevant to this discussion. But -- alas -- there is no search facility by which to run "bourgeois treachery" through the Marxist archive, and I haven't time just now to search the site item-by-iten or page through my 1940 edition of Ten Classics of Marxism for the links. Thus I will defer to Anaxarchos, our commissar of quotes (and sometimes too our comic star of quotes), who in any case is far more learned on the subject of theoretical Marxism than I.

V. I. Lenin
The Attitude Towards Bourgeois Parties

Published: Published in 1907 in the collection Results of the London congress of the R.S.D.L.P., St. Petersburg. Signed: N. Lenin. Published according to the text in the collection.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, Moscow, Volume 12, pages 489-509.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2004). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

...The two trends in Russian Social-Democracy on the question of an assessment of our revolution and the tasks of the proletariat in it, had become perfectly clear at the very beginning of 1905, and in the spring of that year were given full, precise and formal expression, recognised by the organisations concerned, at the Bolshevik Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in London and the Menshevik Conference held simultaneously in Geneva. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks discussed and adopted resolutions that people who have forgotten the history of their Party or their section of it, or who desire to avoid an analysis of the real sources of disagreements on matters of principle, are now too inclined to ignore. In the view of the Bolsheviks the proletariat has had laid upon it the active task of pursuing the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its consummation and of being its leader. This is only possible if the proletariat is able to carry with it the masses of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, especially the peasantry, in the struggle against the autocracy and the treacherous liberal bourgeoisie. The inevitability of bourgeois treachery was deduced by the Bolsheviks even then, before the open activities of the Constitutional-Democrats, the chief liberal party; the deduction was based on the class interests of the bourgeoisie and their fear of the proletarian movement...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/w ... may/00.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/may/00.htm)

Writting an e-letter to someone very dear to me a few minutes ago it suddenly dawned on me that the bourgeois demonstrators' efforts in Olympia to obstruct the shipment of life-saving armor to our soldiers in Iraq is exactly equivalent to the bourgeoisie's notorious effort to stop logging by spiking trees:

(1)-Soldiers and loggers are each definitively members of the Working Class (indeed in the outsourced/downsized of the U.S., the military is the employer of last resort);

(2)-Obstruction of supply lines and tree-spiking are each theoretically deadly tactics (the denial of vital materiel can kill and wound soldiers; a tree-spike can break or shatter a saw blade with fatal consequences to the workers nearby);

(3)-Therefore each tactic expresses the murderous hatred of the Working Class that is increasingly the core value expressed by the politics of the U.S. bourgeoisie;

(4)-Therefore too, the application of such tactics is limited to the bourgeoisie and to government agent-provocateurs;

(5)-By way of disclosure, I am a former soldier myself: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1962, 19 months service in Korea; honorably discharged from the Army Reserve in 1965.

To protest the government policy that reduces Working-Class men and women to tools of imperialism is courageous, vital and praiseworthy. To attack our soldiery -- even passively, as by obstruction of supply lines -- is like tree-spiking: hateful, craven and deplorable.

Writting an e-letter to someone very dear to me a few minutes ago it suddenly dawned on me that the bourgeois demonstrators' efforts in Olympia to obstruct the shipment of life-saving armor to our soldiers in Iraq is exactly equivalent to the bourgeoisie's notorious effort to stop logging by spiking trees:

(1)-Soldiers and loggers are each definitively members of the Working Class (indeed in the outsourced/downsized of the U.S., the military is the employer of last resort);

(2)-Obstruction of supply lines and tree-spiking are each theoretically deadly tactics (the denial of vital materiel can kill and wound soldiers; a tree-spike can break or shatter a saw blade with fatal consequences to the workers nearby);

(3)-Therefore each tactic expresses the murderous hatred of the Working Class that is increasingly the core value expressed by the politics of the U.S. bourgeoisie;

(4)-Therefore too, the application of such tactics is limited to the bourgeoisie and to government agent-provocateurs;

(5)-By way of disclosure, I am a former soldier myself: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1962, 19 months service in Korea; honorably discharged from the Army Reserve in 1965.

To protest the government policy that reduces Working-Class men and women to tools of imperialism is courageous, vital and praiseworthy. To attack our soldiery -- even passively, as by obstruction of supply lines -- is like tree-spiking: hateful, craven and deplorable.


OK wolfgang I'm new here and probably miss it but how do you advocate protesting the governments policies?

Writting an e-letter to someone very dear to me a few minutes ago it suddenly dawned on me that the bourgeois demonstrators' efforts in Olympia to obstruct the shipment of life-saving armor to our soldiers in Iraq is exactly equivalent to the bourgeoisie's notorious effort to stop logging by spiking trees:

(1)-Soldiers and loggers are each definitively members of the Working Class (indeed in the outsourced/downsized of the U.S., the military is the employer of last resort);

(2)-Obstruction of supply lines and tree-spiking are each theoretically deadly tactics (the denial of vital materiel can kill and wound soldiers; a tree-spike can break or shatter a saw blade with fatal consequences to the workers nearby);

(3)-Therefore each tactic expresses the murderous hatred of the Working Class that is increasingly the core value expressed by the politics of the U.S. bourgeoisie;

(4)-Therefore too, the application of such tactics is limited to the bourgeoisie and to government agent-provocateurs;

(5)-By way of disclosure, I am a former soldier myself: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1962, 19 months service in Korea; honorably discharged from the Army Reserve in 1965.

To protest the government policy that reduces Working-Class men and women to tools of imperialism is courageous, vital and praiseworthy. To attack our soldiery -- even passively, as by obstruction of supply lines -- is like tree-spiking: hateful, craven and deplorable.


OK wolfgang I'm new here and probably miss it but how do you advocate protesting the governments policies?

Seems,

Its not a matter of protesting government policies. Its who we stand with and how. It is quite empty to say we support organized laborers and industrial workers only to then rally behind groups and forms of portest that are openly and deeply hostile to that sector of workers. It reveals our own ideological bent and class bias or, in a less sinister but no less damning formulation, our naive posturings and colored glasses.

[quote="wolfgang von skeptik":29djw4c2]Writting an e-letter to someone very dear to me a few minutes ago it suddenly dawned on me that the bourgeois demonstrators' efforts in Olympia to obstruct the shipment of life-saving armor to our soldiers in Iraq is exactly equivalent to the bourgeoisie's notorious effort to stop logging by spiking trees:

(1)-Soldiers and loggers are each definitively members of the Working Class (indeed in the outsourced/downsized of the U.S., the military is the employer of last resort);

(2)-Obstruction of supply lines and tree-spiking are each theoretically deadly tactics (the denial of vital materiel can kill and wound soldiers; a tree-spike can break or shatter a saw blade with fatal consequences to the workers nearby);

(3)-Therefore each tactic expresses the murderous hatred of the Working Class that is increasingly the core value expressed by the politics of the U.S. bourgeoisie;

(4)-Therefore too, the application of such tactics is limited to the bourgeoisie and to government agent-provocateurs;

(5)-By way of disclosure, I am a former soldier myself: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1962, 19 months service in Korea; honorably discharged from the Army Reserve in 1965.

To protest the government policy that reduces Working-Class men and women to tools of imperialism is courageous, vital and praiseworthy. To attack our soldiery -- even passively, as by obstruction of supply lines -- is like tree-spiking: hateful, craven and deplorable.


OK wolfgang I'm new here and probably miss it but how do you advocate protesting the governments policies?

Seems,

Its not a matter of protesting government policies. Its who we stand with and how. It is quite empty to say we support organized laborers and industrial workers only to then rally behind groups and forms of portest that are openly and deeply hostile to that sector of workers. It reveals our own ideological bent and class bias or, in a less sinister but no less damning formulation, our naive posturings and colored glasses.[/quote:29djw4c2]


Why stand by a sector of workers if they are the ones wearing the colored glasses?

[quote="wolfgang von skeptik":3lyaoygb]Writting an e-letter to someone very dear to me a few minutes ago it suddenly dawned on me that the bourgeois demonstrators' efforts in Olympia to obstruct the shipment of life-saving armor to our soldiers in Iraq is exactly equivalent to the bourgeoisie's notorious effort to stop logging by spiking trees:

(1)-Soldiers and loggers are each definitively members of the Working Class (indeed in the outsourced/downsized of the U.S., the military is the employer of last resort);

(2)-Obstruction of supply lines and tree-spiking are each theoretically deadly tactics (the denial of vital materiel can kill and wound soldiers; a tree-spike can break or shatter a saw blade with fatal consequences to the workers nearby);

(3)-Therefore each tactic expresses the murderous hatred of the Working Class that is increasingly the core value expressed by the politics of the U.S. bourgeoisie;

(4)-Therefore too, the application of such tactics is limited to the bourgeoisie and to government agent-provocateurs;

(5)-By way of disclosure, I am a former soldier myself: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1962, 19 months service in Korea; honorably discharged from the Army Reserve in 1965.

To protest the government policy that reduces Working-Class men and women to tools of imperialism is courageous, vital and praiseworthy. To attack our soldiery -- even passively, as by obstruction of supply lines -- is like tree-spiking: hateful, craven and deplorable.


OK wolfgang I'm new here and probably miss it but how do you advocate protesting the governments policies?

Seems,

Its not a matter of protesting government policies. Its who we stand with and how. It is quite empty to say we support organized laborers and industrial workers only to then rally behind groups and forms of portest that are openly and deeply hostile to that sector of workers. It reveals our own ideological bent and class bias or, in a less sinister but no less damning formulation, our naive posturings and colored glasses.


Why stand by a sector of workers if they are the ones wearing the colored glasses?[/quote:3lyaoygb]

Sure, that's a legitimate question. The larger question is, of coure, of sectarianism within the working class -- which hardly exists as one entity other than as an abstraction -- and what to do about that central Question. Divisiveness is not something that can be wished away or overcome on the basis of any Program or Unity. Nevertheless questioning which factions we ally with, or even align with ideologically, is a constant obligation and going concern on our part.

I don't personally think anything is so clearcut as we might think let alone as we'd like it to be.

OK wolfgang I'm new here and probably miss it but how do you advocate protesting the governments policies?

That is the main subject of debate here, and a discussion that isn't happening anywhere else, so we are all new to it in a sense. There is no consensus about that or groupthink or dogma or cliques here, by the way - don't ask me how we accomplished THAT miracle lol, I just ascribe it to having some really special people here.

The debate on this will get very intense, but never, or very rarely personal or destructive. At other boards, people either tip-toe around on eggshells and steer clear of certain subjects, or descend into flame wars. Neither works very well.

It is hard to see it from the inside - when we are in the middle of the activist community - but white (and token minority) upscale, educated, liberal suburban folks get a free ride everywhere else and are immune from criticism. That is, in my opinion, the most important mechanism for keeping the murderous empire and exploitative and oppressive "free market" capitalism in power, and failing to look at that, let alone criticize it, is the reason why all of the opposition activism is so unsuccessful.

Folks get really, really, really pissed off when you suggest that modern liberals are complicit in propping up the ruling class, or that modern liberal positions are not in any way left wing or in serious or efffective opposition to the right wingers. They take it personally, because there personal identity is all wrapped up in "being the change they wish to see" and taking a liberal political stance in the world. Of course that itself is one of the attitudes we have been inculcated with that surreptitiously promotes the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

If we can get past the anger and indignation - "what me? Are you saying that I am complicit with Bush and those fundy assholes??? How dare you!!!" - it is very liberating and you start wondering how you could tolerate living in that cage for so long.

I got the crap kicked out of me back in the beginning and had huge battles with anax, wolf and chlamor especially. But I am living proof that there is life after liberalism lol.

Are the protestors "bourgeois"? Nah, the bougies own the port.

Is the army a part of the working class? Sure... same as the cops (and I would put no more stock in that than in the class origins of the police).

Is it a shame that somebody blocked body armor for an occupation army? Nope.

Are the protestors confuzzed? Most certainly.

Could they use a little class-consciousness? Certainly.

Do the protestors who come from middle-class backgrounds necessarily take a less proletarian position than workers interwoven with imperialism? Not necessarily. The proletariat ain't "American".

Most of all, though... I love them anarcho-kids and don't give a shit if their heads are on straight or not... because they are willing to risk those very same heads – something rare in the current "culture".

http://home.earthlink.net/~jamiranda/aug13anarchists.JPEG

We rarely get such a great example of the two threads of thought in the modern left juxtaposed like this for comparison.

I'd like to see this generate some discussion.

You got that right. Lots of questions swirling around, first one that occurs to me is,"What's the longshoremen's take on this?". If they wanted to they could've made that action 10 times more effective. Why not?


Interestingly, the west coast longshoremen (ILWU) are one of the two most important "red" unions to have survived McCarthy (alongside UE). They are the polar opposite of the east coast longshoremen (the ILA - which might as well be declared a Mafia "family"). They were hugely important in helping to initiate the anti-Vietnam War movement on the West Coast. Maybe things have changed but the irony is that today's "suburban" protestors often have ILWU for fathers, uncles, gramps, etc...

Here is the wiki on Harry, which is a good place to start:


Harry Bridges (July 28, 1901–March 30, 1990) was an influential Australian-American union leader, in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a longshore (dock) and warehouse workers' union on the West Coast, Hawai'i and Alaska which he helped form and led for over 40 years. As controversial as he was charismatic, he was prosecuted by the US government during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and was convicted by a federal jury of having lied about his Communist Party membership — a conviction which was set aside. On the West Coast, Bridges still excites passions both for and against the labor movement.

Early life on the docks

Bridges was born in Melbourne, as Alfred Renton Bridges. He went to sea at age 16 as a merchant seaman, and joined the Australian sailors' union. He took the name Harry from a beloved uncle, who was a socialist and an adventurer, much in the cut of Jack London, the writer that also inspired young Harry to go to sea.

He entered the United States in 1920, where his American colleagues nicknamed him "The Beak" for his prominent nose, "The Limey," as they couldn't tell the difference between an Australian and an Englishman, and finally "Australian Harry" or "Racehorse Harry" to differentiate him from all other Harrys by his nationality and love of the racetrack. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1945.

In 1921, Bridges joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), participating in an unsuccessful nationwide seamen's strike. While Bridges left the IWW shortly thereafter, with doubts about the organization, his early experiences in the IWW and in Australian unions would influence his beliefs on militant unionism, based on rank and file power and involvement.

Bridges left the sea for longshore work in San Francisco in 1922. The shipowners had created a company union, generally known as the "blue book union" because of the color of the membership books that members carried, after the International Longshoremen's Association local in San Francisco was destroyed by a lost strike in 1919. Bridges resisted joining the blue book union, finding casual work on the docks as a "pirate". When he joined the San Francisco local of the ILA and participated in a Labor Day parade in 1924, he found himself largely blacklisted for several years. Bridges eventually joined the blue book union in 1927, finding work as a winch operator and rigger on a steel-handling gang.


The Albion Hall group

The ILA renewed its efforts to reestablish itself on the West Coast, chartering a new local in San Francisco in 1933. With the passage that year of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which contained some encouraging but unenforceable provisions declaring that workers had the right to organize unions of their own choice, thousands of longshoremen joined the new ILA local.

At the time Bridges was a member of a circle of longshoremen that came to be known as the "Albion Hall Group", after their meeting place. The group attracted members from a variety of backgrounds: members of the Communist Party, which was then trying to organize all longshoremen, sailors and other maritime workers into the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), as a revolutionary, industry-wide alternative to the ILA and other AFL unions; former IWW members, and; others with no clearly defined politics. While the federal government later spent more than a decade trying to deport or convict Bridges, on the ground that he was a member of the Communist Party, it never was able to produce any hard evidence. (In 1994, Harvey Klehr published evidence from Soviet archives, suggesting Bridges was a member at one point of the Communist Party USA; there is no evidence he was a Soviet agent.)

This group had acquired some influence on the docks through its publication The Waterfront Worker, a mimeographed sheet sold for a penny that published articles written by longshoremen and seamen, almost always under pseudonyms, that focused on workers' day-to-day concerns: the pace of work, the weight of loads, abusive bosses, and unsafe working conditions. While the first editions were published in the apartment of an MWIU member on a second-hand mimeograph machine, the paper remained independent of both the party and the MWIU.

Although Bridges was sympathetic to much of the MWIU's program in 1933, he chose to join the new ILA local. When the local held elections, Bridges and fellow members of the Albion Hall group made up a majority of the executive board and held two of the three business agents positions.

The Albion Hall Group stressed the self-help tactics of syndicalism, urging workers to organize by taking part in strikes and slowdowns, rather than depending on governmental assistance under the NIRA. It also campaigned for membership participation in the new ILA local, which had not bothered to hold any membership meetings. Finally, the group started laying the groundwork for organizing on a coastwide basis, meeting with activists from Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and organizing a federation of all of the different unions that represented maritime workers.

Under Bridges' leadership, the group organized a successful strike in October, 1933 to force Matson Navigation Company to reinstate four longshoremen it had fired for wearing ILA buttons on the job. Longshoremen at other companies followed suit, using strikes and slowdowns to defend ILA members.


The Big Strike

As 1934 began, Bridges and the Albion Hall group and militants in other ports began planning a coastwide strike. The Roosevelt administration tried to head off the strike by appointing a mediation board to oversee negotiations, but neither side accepted its proposed compromise. Bridges was elected chairman of the strike committee.

The 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike began on May 9. While the elected local officers were the nominal leaders of the strike at its outset, Bridges led the planning of the strike, the rank-and-file opposition to the two proposed contracts that the leadership negotiated and the membership rejected during the strike, and the dealings with other unions during and after the four-day San Francisco General strike after "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, when police shot and killed a striker and strike sympathizer during a battle to bring cargo through the union's picket line. Bridges became the chief spokesperson for the union in negotiations after workers rejected the second agreement negotiated by the old leadership in June.

Bridges did not, on the other hand, control the strike: the ILA membership voted to accept arbitration to end the strike over his strong objections. Similarly, Bridges' opposition did not stop the ILA leadership from extending the union's contract with the employers, rather than striking in solidarity with the seamen, in 1935.

Growth and independence

Bridges was elected president of the San Francisco local in 1935 and then president of the Pacific Coast District of the ILA in 1936. During this period the ILA commenced "the March Inland", in which it organized the many warehouses, both in the ports themselves and further removed from them, that received the goods that longshoremen handled. Bridges led efforts to form Maritime Federation of the Pacific, which brought all of the maritime unions together for common action. That federation helped the sailors union win the same sort of contract after a long strike in 1936 that the ILA had achieved in 1934.

In 1937, the Pacific Coast district, with the exception of three locals in the Northwest, formally seceded from the ILA, renaming itself the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, after the International attempted to reorganize the existing locals, abandon representation of warehousemen and reverse the unions' policies on issues such as unemployment insurance. Bridges was elected president of the new union, which quickly affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Bridges became the West Coast Director for the CIO shortly thereafter.

The ILWU also established strong unions on the docks in Hawai'i during this time and later, despite the concerted opposition of the employers, the military and most of the political establishment, among sugar and pineapple workers there. The ILWU's work changed the political climate in Hawai'i, breaking the hold on power that the white landed elite had exercised for half a century.

Legal battles

The Roosevelt administration attempted to deport Bridges in 1938 on the grounds that he was a member of the Communist Party. When the case came to hearing in 1939, however, the government's case dissolved: its witnesses included an admitted perjurer, a lawyer who had been disbarred by New York and Illinois for jury tampering and racketeering, a former party employee facing prosecution for fraudulent receipt of relief checks, the manager of a restaurant who thought that Bridges was a party member because one of the people who frequently had lunch with Bridges and his wife may have been a communist, and a former official with another union who testified that Bridges was a communist because he introduced a resolution at a meeting of the Maritime Federation that urged all the member unions to join the CIO. The administrative judge ruled that the government had failed to prove its case.

The government made a second effort to deport Bridges in 1941. In this case the administrative judge found that the evidence supported the charges against Bridges, but the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed him. The US Attorney General, Francis Biddle, overruled the Board, only to be reversed in turn in 1945 by the Supreme Court, which found the evidence to be insufficient as a matter of law.

That was not, as it turns out, the end of the battle. In 1948, the federal government tried Bridges for perjuring himself when he stated in his application for naturalization that he was not a member of the Communist Party. The jury convicted Bridges and his two co-defendants; the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1953 on the ground that the prosecution was untimely.

While the Supreme Court's decision ended the criminal prosecution against Bridges and his co-defendants, the government's civil case to revoke his naturalization proceeded in federal court. The trial judge ruled in Bridges' favor in 1954; the government did not appeal.

Political battles

Bridges hewed to the Communist Party line throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed in 1939, the party attacked Roosevelt and Churchill as warmongers and adopted the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming", Bridges denounced Roosevelt for betraying labor and preparing for war. John L. Lewis, the head of the CIO, responded by abolishing the position of West Coast director of the CIO, limiting Bridges' authority to California, in October 1939.

Bridges continued opposing the Roosevelt Administration, belittling the value of the New Deal, and urging union voters to withhold their support from Roosevelt and to wait to see what Lewis, who had now also split with the Roosevelt administration, recommended. That position proved highly unpopular with the membership; many locals had already endorsed FDR for a third term and several locals passed motions calling for Bridges to resign. He declined to do so, noting that the union's constitution allowed for a recall election if fifteen percent of the membership petitioned for one. The ILWU executive board gave him a vote of confidence and the storm passed.

Bridges soon took the union in a wholly different direction after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Having opposed the United States' entry into the war, Bridges now urged employers to increase productivity in order to prepare for war. When the CIO later adopted a wartime no-strike pledge, Bridges not only supported the pledge, but even proposed at the highpoint of the Communist Party's enthusiasm for unity — immediately after the Teheran Conference in 1943 — that the pledge continue after the end of the war. The ILWU not only condemned the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees union for striking Montgomery Ward in 1943 — after management refused to sign a new contract, cut wages and fired union activists) — but also assisted it in breaking the strike, by ordering members in St. Paul, Minnesota to work overtime, to handle overflow from the struck Chicago plant.

Bridges also called for a speedup of the pace of work — which may not have been inconsistent with the ILWU's goal of controlling the way that work was done on the docks, but which sounded particularly strange coming from the leader of a union that had relentlessly fought employers on this issue and which was rejected by many ILWU members. Bridges later joined with Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, which represented sailors on the East Coast, and Julius Emspak of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to support a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944, to militarize some civilian workplaces.

Bridges' attitude changed sharply after the end of World War II. While Bridges still advocated the post-war plan for industrial peace that the Communist Party, along with the leaders of the CIO, the AFL and the Chamber of Commerce, were advocating, he differed sharply with CIO leadership on Cold War politics, from the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine's application in Greece and Turkey to participation in the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Those foreign policy issues became labor issues for the ILWU in 1948, when the employers claimed that the union was preparing to strike in order to cripple the Marshall Plan. Emboldened by the new provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, which required union officers to sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist Party, outlawed the closed shop and gave the President authority to seek an 80-day "cooling off" period before a strike that would imperil the national health or safety, the employers pushed for a strike, hoping to rid themselves of Bridges and reclaim control over the hiring hall. As it turned out, their strategy was a failure and the employer group reached a new agreement with the union after replacing their bargaining representatives and enduring a ninety-five day strike.

At the same time, Philip Murray, Lewis' successor as head of the CIO, had started reducing Bridges' power within the CIO, removing him from his position as the CIO's California Regional Director in 1948. In 1950, after an internal trial, the CIO expelled the ILWU due to its communist leadership.[citation needed]

Coping with change

Expulsion had no real effect, however, on either the ILWU or Bridges' power within it. The organization continued to negotiate agreements, with less strife than in the 1930s and 1940s, and Bridges continued to be reelected without serious opposition. The union negotiated a groundbreaking agreement in 1960, that permitted the extensive mechanization of the docks, significantly reducing the number of longshore workers in return for generous job guarantees and benefits for those displaced by the changes.

The agreement, however, highlighted the lesser status that less senior members, known as "B-men," enjoyed. Bridges reacted uncharacteristically defensively to these workers' complaints, which were given additional sting by the fact that many of the "B-men" were black. The additional longshore work produced by the Vietnam War allowed Bridges to meet the challenge by opening up more jobs and making determined efforts to recruit black applicants. The ILWU later faced similar challenges from women, who found it even harder to enter the industry and the union.

Bridges had difficulty giving up his position in the ILWU, even though he explored the possibility of merging it with the ILA or the Teamsters in the early 1970s. He finally retired in 1977, but only after ensuring that Louis Goldblatt, the long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the union and his logical successor, was denied the opportunity to replace him.

On July 28, 2001, on what would have been Bridges' 100th birthday, the ILWU organized a week-long event celebrating the life of Harry Bridges. This culminated in a march of over 8000 unionists and supporters across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Terminal Island to San Pedro, California. The longshoremen shut down the port for eight hours in honor of Bridges.

Marriage

Bridges met Noriko Sawada during a fund-raiser for Mine, Mill, and Smelter workers and the two became a couple thereafter. In 1958, the couple decided to marry. Although they could have married in California, they decided to travel to Reno, Nevada for their marriage license. However, Nevada had a law banning marriage between any white person and "any person of the Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or American Indian, or red race."[1] At the county courthouse, the clerk refused to give the couple a marriage license on account of Ms. Sawada's race being "yellow."[2]

Bridges and Sawada then sought a court order from District Judge Taylor Wines for issuance of the marriage license. Judge Wines granted the order, in direct contradiction to the law, and the couple married December 10, 1958. This order prompted the Nevada legislature to repeal all anti-miscegenation laws in the State on March 17, 1959. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared all such anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional in the decision Loving v. Virginia.[3]

Quotes

On his position as president: "I'm a working stiff. I just happened to be around at the right time and nobody else wanted the job."

"The most important word in the language of the working class is 'solidarity.'"

"Why should we take it upon ourselves to pick up the pieces after industry discards people for machines? Isn't it about time unions got in there before the fact to insist that there must be some obligation to people in all this?"

"It is a good union policy that officers shouldn't earn so much that they drift away from the members."

"Labor can not stand still. It must not retreat. It must go on, or go under." "Interfere with the foreign policy of the country?....Sure as hell! That's our job, that's our privilege, that's our right, that's our duty.'

'I would have worked with the devil himself if he'd been for the six hour day and worker control of the hiring hall."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bridges

http://workers.labor.net.au/pictures/125harry.gif

Are the protestors "bourgeois"? Nah, the bougies own the port.

Is the army a part of the working class? Sure... same as the cops (and I would put no more stock in that than in the class origins of the police).

Is it a shame that somebody blocked body armor for an occupation army? Nope.

Are the protestors confuzzed? Most certainly.

Could they use a little class-consciousness? Certainly.

Do the protestors who come from middle-class backgrounds necessarily take a less proletarian position than workers interwoven with imperialism? Not necessarily. The proletariat ain't "American".

Most of all, though... I love them anarcho-kids and don't give a shit if their heads are on straight or not... because they are willing to risk those very same heads – something rare in the current "culture".

http://home.earthlink.net/~jamiranda/aug13anarchists.JPEG



something rare in the current "culture".


http://i.a.cnn.net/si/2007/writers/dave_zirin/09/27/carlos/carlos.jpg

"bourgeois"?

http://www.northern.edu/wild/0708Season/Saigon/Kent_State_massacre.jpg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV1KUyPGaLM


Come, get out of the way, boys
Quick, get out of the way
You'd better watch what you say, boys
Better watch what you say
We've rammed in your harbor and tied to your port
And our pistols are hungry and our tempers are short
So bring your daughters around to the port

'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

We pick and choose as please, boys
Pick and choose as please
You'd best get down on your knees, boys
Best get down on your knees
We're hairy and horny and ready to shack
We don't care if you're yellow or black
Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

Our boots are needing a shine, boys
Boots are needing a shine
But our Coca-cola is fine, boys
Coca-cola is fine
We've got to protect all our citizens fair
So we'll send a battalion for everyone there
And maybe we'll leave in a couple of years
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

Dump the reds in a pile, boys
Dump the reds in a pile
You'd better wipe of that smile, boys
Better wipe off that smile
We'll spit through the streets of the cities we wreck
We'll find you a leader that you can't elect
Those treaties we sighned were a pain in the neck
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

Clean the johns with a rag, boys
Clean the johns with a rag
If you like you can use your flag, boys
If you like you can use your flag
We've got too much money we're looking for toys
And guns will be guns and boys will be boys
But we'll gladly pay for all we destroy
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

Please stay off of the grass, boys
Please stay off of the grass
Here's a kick in the ass, boys
Here's a kick in the ass
We'll smash down your doors, we don't bother to knock
We've done it before, so why all the shock?
We're the biggest and toughest kids on the block
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

When we butchered your son, boys
When we butchered your son
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our buble-gum
We own half the world, oh say can you see
The name for our profits is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrcyyGxWqWU

They got the situation, they got me facing
I can't live a normal life, I was raised by the state
So I gotta be down with the 'hood team
Too much television watching, got me chasing dreams
I'm an educated fool with money on my mind
Like a lemon in my hand and a gleam in my eye
I'm a loced out gangsta, set trippin banger
And my homies is down so am arouse my anger, fool
death ain't nothing but a heart beat away
I'm living life do or die, what can I say?
I'm twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?
The way things is going I don't know

Tell me why are we too blind to see
That the ones we hurt are you and me?

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I take a look at my life
And realize there's nuthin left
'Cause I've been blastin' and laughin' so long that,
Even my mama thinks that my mind is gone
But I ain't never crossed a man that didn't deserve it
He'd be treated like a punk, you know that's unheard of
You betta watch how ya talking
And where ya walking
Or you and your homies might be lined in chalk

I really hate to trip but I gotta lope
As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke, fool
I'm the kinda g that little homie's wanna be like
On my knees in the night
Saying prayers in the street light

Been spending all our lives
Living in gangsta's paradise
Been spending all our lives
Living in gangsta's paradise

Keep spending all your life
Living in gangsta's paradise
Keep spending all your life
Living in gangsta's paradise

They got the situation, they got me facing
I can't live a normal life, I was raised by the state
So I gotta be down with the 'hood team
Too much television watching, got me chasing dreams
I'm an educated fool with money on my mind
Like a lemon in my hand and a gleam in my eye
I'm a loced out gangsta, set trippin banger
And my homies is down so am arouse my anger, fool
death ain't nothing but a heart beat away
I'm living life do or die, what can I say?
I'm twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?
The way things is going I don't know

Tell me why are we too blind to see
That the ones we hurt are you and me?

Tell me why are we too blind to see
That the ones we hurt are you and me?

Power and the money, money and the power
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody's running, but half of them ain't looking
What's going on in the kitchen?
But I don't know what's cooking
They say I gotta learn
But nobody's here to teach me
If they can't understand , how can they reach me?
I guess they can't
I guess they won't, I guess they front
That's why I know my life is out of luck, fool!

Been spending all your life
Living in gangsta's paradise
Been spending all your life
Living in gangsta's paradise

Keep spending all your life
Living in gangsta's paradise
Keep spending all your life
Living in gangsta's

Tell me why are we too blind to see
That the ones we hurt, are you and me?
Tell me why are we too blind to see
That the ones we hurt, are you and me?

Ain't no gansta's living in paradise
Ain't no gansta's living in paradise
Ain't no gansta's living in paradise
Ain't no gansta's living in paradise
Ain't no gansta's living in paradise
Ain't no gansta's living in paradise...


Credits
Words and music Stevie Wonder, Lawrence Sanders, Doug Rasheed & L Artis Ivey Jr
Black Bull Music/Boo Daddy Publishing/Large Variety Music/Madcastle Muzic/Wb Music Corp

Anaxarchos wrote:


Are the protestors "bourgeois"? Nah, the bougies own the port.

Is the army a part of the working class? Sure... same as the cops (and I would put no more stock in that than in the class origins of the police).

Is it a shame that somebody blocked body armor for an occupation army? Nope.

Are the protestors confuzzed? Most certainly.

Could they use a little class-consciousness? Certainly.

Do the protestors who come from middle-class backgrounds necessarily take a less proletarian position than workers interwoven with imperialism? Not necessarily. The proletariat ain't "American".

Most of all, though... I love them anarcho-kids and don't give a shit if their heads are on straight or not... because they are willing to risk those very same heads – something rare in the current "culture".

Hatred of cops is wholly understandable -- as a former newspaperman I know all too well that far too many cops (in fact just about all cops back East) are corrupt sadistic pigs who took up the badge merely to enable their sadism and corruption.

But hatred of soldiers truly surprises me: most enlistees are forced into the military by economic reality (just as I was) and are reluctant imperialists at best: note the overwhelming incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Soldier-hating, by the way, is the same viciously bourgeois attitude the Eugene McCarthy supporters evidenced in 1968 -- the very opposite of the attitude that had turned so much of the Russian Army into the Red Army by 1917.

Your suddenly obvious contempt for organized labor's plans for peaceful demonstration at the WTO meeting -- plans deliberately ruined by "anarchist" hooligans -- astounds me even more. Organized labor suffered enormously for this, not the "anarchists" (whose familial wealth typically immunizes them from all suffering).

Most importantly though it seems you have implicitly disclosed a belief that an anti-war stance is the ultimate litmus test for whether one is truly radical or not. Which is a significant disclosure indeed...

And, by the way, the same bourgeoisie who own the port also control the colleges and their income-uber-alles admission standards, which means the only people in attendance are -- just as I said -- the bourgeoisie. (Bush has slashed student financial-aid programs, which became steadily more miserly since Carter, to the point of near non-existence.)

Seemslikeadream wrote:


"bourgeois"

followed by the famous photograph of the 14-year-old runaway girl shrieking in horror above the corpse of anti-war protestor Jeffrey Miller, murdered at Kent State on Monday 4 May 1970, shot from about 80 yards by an Ohio National Guardsman. The Guardsman's .30-'06 caliber M-2 Ball round shattered Miller's teeth, broke his neck and blew out the back of his head. (The posted version has been sanitized of the blood and gore that was obvious in the original.) The same rifle volley -- its "ready-aim-fire" sequence of commands clearly visible on films and videotapes -- also murdered protestor Allison Krause, who the day before had been placing daffodils in the muzzles of Guardsmen's rifles; the M-2 Ball round, a 150-grain steel-jacketed Spitzer bullet traveling at a muzzle velocity of 2770 feet per second and delivering an impact of 2560 foot pounds, shredded Allison’s heart and dropped her so suddenly she died with a piece of candy still melting in her mouth. The same volley killed two more students, both apoliticals whose names I do not recall, and permanently crippled a fifth student, also a non-protestor, whose life is so limited as a result, he might as well have been killed -- he is paralyzed and insensate from the sternum down and thus will never know love or sensuality or much else we take for granted, all of it essential if the normal miseries of this life are to be at least bearable.

I'm not certain what you meant by this posting, but it feels like an intended insult -- an especially vile one in which you flaunt some of the victims of U.S. fascism in defense of your arguments -- so let me, a former participant in the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent Counterculture (the originating New York “art scene,” the anti-Vietnam-War Movement and the Back-to-the-Land Movement), point out to you three facts:

(1)-College and university student bodies in those days were far less exclusively/definitively bourgeois than they are today. This is because of various student-aid programs (for instance the GI Bill without which I would have never been able to afford college) and student-loan programs (for example the National Defense Education Act and the National Direct Student Loan) that have all either expired or been methodically abolished. The runaway in the photo was an Italian Working-Class girl; Allison Krause and Jeff Miller were of Working Class origins also, Allison's family of such limited means she had to work in a Pittsburg retail sweatshop to pay her tuition, while Miller was raised by his mother, who did secretarial work. People of such backgrounds are not allowed to attend college in the United States today: no matter how bright they may be, the costs (deliberately) exclude them.

(2)-The real bourgeoisie at Kent State are not in this picture; they were in the National Guard -- the haven of wealthy, super-privileged draft-dodgers (like George Bush himself) who were also typically possessed of a murderous compulsion to compensate for their draft-dodging cowardice by shooting anything that moved: a compulsion intimately experienced by African-Americans in such wondrous domains of democracy as Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles.

(3)-But the bourgeoisie ultimately dominated the Nationl Guard’s victims too, to such a huge extent they soothed themselves with pacifist slogans rather than retaliating against their murderous oppressors -- which is precisely why (according to documents leaked after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the professional revolutionaries in the KGB and the far more unapologetically Trotskist/perpetual-revolution-radical GRU concluded that revolution in the United States was a lost cause. According to these leaks, the KGB and GRU analysts concluded African-Americans were ready; so were Hispanics; so were Aboriginal Peoples (especially at places like Pine Ridge), but the white majority was hopelessly reactionary: members of the anti-war movement were pretend revolutionaries at best, subject to precisely the bourgeois treachery Lenin railed against in 1905.

Lastly -- and I say this to both Anaxarchos and Seemslikeadream -- peaceful demonstrations accomplish nothing without the implicit threat of force. Gandhi and King succeeded only because the Soviet Union was waiting in the wings to foment violent revolution if peaceful protest failed; that threat prompted the Ruling Class to undertake reforms -- reforms which, in the U.S. (and since the death of the U.S.S.R.) are being methodically swept away: a bitter truth I assure you is no coincidence. Likewise the U.S. movement against the Vietnam War: it accomplished absolutely nothing -- U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was forced by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army with the aid of the Soviet Union.

Without that implicit threat of force -- without the message that says "respond now while we're being peaceful or things will surely get worse" -- demonstrations are of no consequence at all. In this day and age -- without any external force to frighten the Ruling Class into compliance -- demonstrations are nothing more than an opportunity for the secret and not-so-secret police to update their mug-shot files. The only exception is a union picket line, which sometimes can still frighten the Ruling Class enough to yield life-sustaining concessions. Until, of course, picket-lines and strikes are themselves outlawed, as the RATPOD Democrats and their ever-more-openly fascist Republican allies intend to do via HR1955 (already passed) and S1959 (pending).

Meanwhile, lest we forget, here are two excerpts from “Bullets and Flowers,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s eulogy for Allison Krause:

When, thin and open as the pulse
of conscience,
you put a flower in a rifle's mouth
and said,
"Flowers are better than bullets,"
that
was pure hope speaking…

Young America, tie up
the killer's hands.
Let there be an escalation of truth
to overwhelm the escalating lie
crushing people's lives!
Flowers, make war!
Defend what's beautiful!
Drown the city streets and country roads
like the flood of an army advancing
and in the ranks of people and flowers
arise, murdered Allison Krause,
Immortal of the age,
Thorn-Flower of protest!

The full work is here:

http://www.kudzumonthly.com/kudzu/may02/Bullets.html

Somehow the music I hear in the background of Yevtushenko’s powerful words is not John Lennon nor even Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young but an older more nameless chorus singing a song called Partizanska, a song none of us on this site have ever heard sung in its native habitat (though I have been blessed to know, in my earlier years, at least two who sang it thusly):

Nalivalisia znamiona
Kumachom poslednikh ran,
Shli likhie eskadrony…
Partizanskie otriady
Zanimali goroda.

Banners were filing by
Red color from the last wounds
It will never fade…
Partisan detachments
Were taking towns.

As those who mourned Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller never did.

_________
Edits: typos, clarity.

What is a shocking and noteworthy and significant event for white suburbanites is often much more common for the rest of the people in the country and the world.

Remember the Orangeburg Massacre

Thirty-five years ago, on Feb. 8, 1968, three black students were killed by South Carolina policemen in protests on the campus of the predominantly black South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C. Twenty-seven others were wounded. Nine policemen were indicted but all were ultimately set free. This tragedy became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Black students were protesting the segregation policies of the only bowling alley in town. The exclusionary policies of the establishment's owner had come to symbolize the racist color line that still ran through the South. The Black Awareness Coordinating Committee at South Carolina State University led the campaign. The group had already picketed and met with the mayor but had gotten nowhere. The authorities cordoned off the campus during one heated night of protest, and students built a bonfire and held a vigil.

In an effort to end the protest, police fired live ammunition into the crowd. At the end of the melee, three unarmed black men were dead: Henry Smith, 20; Samuel Hammond, 19; and high-school student Delano Middleton, 17. Their names are in very few history books, and they certainly did not set out to become martyrs, but their untimely deaths represent an important chapter in the untold story of the black freedom struggle in the United States.

When gunfire felled students again two years later at Kent State University in Ohio, banner headlines carried the news to every corner of the globe. But the Orangeburg tragedy prompted little news coverage in national media, and most of that was superficial and distorted. The victims at Kent State were white students protesting an unpopular war. At Orangeburg, the dead and wounded were black students seeking equal treatment and opportunity. Most reporters were willing to accept without question the official version peddled by state and federal authorities on the scene. The students, parents, the president of the college, and members of the faculty had a different story to tell, but no one wanted to hear. When most Americans think of violence during the social movements of the 1960s, they think of several specific incidents: the shooting of white students at Kent State University in 1970, the attacks on civil-rights protesters in Alabama (Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965) and the murder of three young civil-rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

The reality is that violence against the black freedom movement in the South throughout the 1960s was much more common than most people realize. The Orangeburg massacre—as it is known by victims and local activists—is just one of the lesser-known examples of such violence. By the late 1960s, beatings, shootings and the constant threat of violence were a part of life for Southern organizers.

full text here (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/644.html)

The Orangeburg Massacre
Jack Bass

The shootings occurred two nights after an effort by students at the then almost all-black college to bowl at the city’s only bowling alley. The owner refused. Tensions rose and violence erupted. When it ended, nine students and one city policeman received hospital treatment for injuries. Other students were treated at the college infirmary. College faculty and administrators at the scene witnessed at least two instances in which a female student was held by one officer and clubbed by another.

After two days of escalating tension, a fire truck was called to douse a bonfire lit by students on a street in front of the campus. State troopers—all of them white, with little training in crowd control—moved to protect the firemen. As more than 100 students retreated to the campus interior, a tossed banister rail struck one trooper in the face. He fell to the ground bleeding. Five minutes later, almost 70 law enforcement officers lined the edge of the campus. They were armed with carbines, pistols and riot guns—short-barreled shotguns that by dictionary definition are used “to disperse rioters rather than to inflict serious injury or death.” But theirs were loaded with lethal buckshot, which hunters use to kill deer. Each shell contained 9 to 12 pellets the size of a .32 caliber pistol slug.

As students began returning to the front to watch their bonfire go out, a patrolman suddenly squeezed several rounds from his carbine into the air—apparently intended as warning shots. As other officers began firing, students fled in panic or dived for cover, many getting shot in their backs and sides and even the soles of their feet.

Full text here (http://jackbass.com/work3.htm)

The Orangeburg Massacre

It was February 8, 1968 and Orangeburg, South Carolina was a night filled with anger and frustration. Patrolmen randomly fired on a crowd of student demonstrators. 27 students were shot and 3 young men died from the incident only in a matter of seconds. Henry Smith, a family oriented 20-year old college student at South Carolina State was shot in the side and back five times; Delano Middleton, a 17-year old high school student was shot in the hip, the thigh, the side of his chest, his heart and three times in the forearm; and Samuel Hammond, a promising 19-year-old high school student who attended a newly integrated school was killed by one shot in the back. What led to the massacre was a demonstration at a bowling alley that did not admit Blacks. 200 students gathered around a bonfire built on a campus street, only to find it to be smothered by the police. Some students retaliated by throwing rocks and bottles at the officers. The students eventually built another bonfire when the patrolmen left and that was when the trouble started. Police returned to the scene to put the fire out, only this time, someone hit a patrolman with a banister post and more objects were thrown. Fires rang and that was when the true chaos began. After the slaughter, news spread of a gun battle between the Black students and officers. The officers, with the support of the government blamed the students for what occurred yet it was later found out that none of the students held firearms and that not one of the patrolmen followed correct riot procedures. A number of those shot wounded were shot in the feet while laying on the ground. Though the patrolmen used unacceptable means to control the demonstration, they were eventually pardoned. This is a typical story of many challenges Blacks had to face in 1968 America. It was a cry for Civil Rights.

The Orangeburg Massacre (http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/mercier/hist419/Orangeburg.html)

Hatred of cops is wholly understandable -- as a former newspaperman I know all too well that far too many cops (in fact just about all cops back East) are corrupt sadistic pigs who took up the badge merely to enable their sadism and corruption.

But hatred of soldiers truly surprises me: most enlistees are forced into the military by economic reality (just as I was) and are reluctant imperialists at best: note the overwhelming incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Soldier-hating, by the way, is the same viciously bourgeois attitude the Eugene McCarthy supporters evidenced in 1968 -- the very opposite of the attitude that had turned so much of the Russian Army into the Red Army by 1917.

Your suddenly obvious contempt for organized labor's plans for peaceful demonstration at the WTO meeting -- plans deliberately ruined by "anarchist" hooligans -- astounds me even more. Organized labor suffered enormously for this, not the "anarchists" (whose familial wealth typically immunizes them from all suffering).

Most importantly though it seems you have implicitly disclosed a belief that an anti-war stance is the ultimate litmus test for whether one is truly radical or not. Which is a significant disclosure indeed...

And, by the way, the same bourgeoisie who own the port also control the colleges and their income-uber-alles admission standards, which means the only people in attendance are -- just as I said -- the bourgeoisie. (Bush has slashed student financial-aid programs, which became steadily more miserly since Carter, to the point of near non-existence.)

What you've written is way too strong Wolf. There is a duality to everything, including the cops.

1) Imperialist wars and imperialist armies do become a litmus test of sorts, particularly in the leading countries of empire. Is being in the Army just a job? Sure, but so is being a cop... The circumstances change things quite a bit. A volunteer Army in a time of agressive wars of occupation - that can't be dismissed with a phrase. That is very serious. Are people propelled in that direction by economic pressure and social ignorance? Of course. But what now? Should the Irish sympathize with the British "professionals" who enforced the death of a couple milllion and pushed 3 or 4 million here? When it comes to shove, its always which side are you on. The Russian Army in 1917 was conscript... and in revolt. What do we think of the Cossacks or the Czechs?

2) Everything in society is bourgeois... it is after all, "bourgeois society". It's tough though to declare that every college student is an agent of Capital, as a result. We ain't even talking about Stanford or Yale here. More likely, it is the standard confusion. They are not more "wrong" than anyone else here. Lay out your assumptions and it will become obvious. Go to actual roots and you won't find many "bourgeois"

3) Labor's "plans" for "peaceful demonstrations" were "ruined" by "hooligans". Gimme a break. That is in the nature of demonstrations. Again, if we go below the surface, it won't be so clear ("labor", "plans", "ruined", "hooligans").

I ain't "revealin'" a fuckin' thing. I'm just challenging your brimstone, preacher... Some of this stuff is complicated enough to discuss without pre-disposition, let alone bombast.

Are those poor anti-war folks really the problem? Is it their confusion or their loyalty that is bugging you? For the record, I don't much like them either but for me its mostly about their loyalties when they are not protesting wars.
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...its mostly about their loyalties when they are not protesting wars.
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That cannot be underestimated.

Does being anti-war lead toward or away from a deeper understanding of class struggle?

I say that for most people it leads away.

Seemslikeadream wrote:


"bourgeois"





You seemed to have excluded the most important question mark.



It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win.

Phil Ochs

Anaxarchos asks (very legitimately):


Are those poor anti-war folks really the problem? Is it their confusion or their loyalty that is bugging you? For the record, I don't much like them either but for me its mostly about their loyalties when they are not protesting wars.

Neither confusion nor loyalty (which ultimately is to themselves and none other) but hypocricy and xenophobia: their claim to be "progressive" or "radical" or "environmentally aware" when in fact they:

(1)-Viciously fought mass transit here for 38 years, killing four ballot measures and countencing the defeat of a would-be fifth such measure in the legislature and the methodical purge of pro-light-rail transit officials -- all because of their grotesquely bigoted belief light rail is "Manhattanization" that would turn the Puget Sound area into another "Jew York" and thus destroy their "Pacific Northwest lifestyle." The result of all this -- which includes the suicidally stubborn refusal to take advantage of the fact this region has the second cheapest, second most abundant electric power in the nation -- is that transit advocates have finally surrendered to the inevitable. There will be no more efforts to convince these xenophobic morons to build for themselves what all other peoples of the world recognize is indespensible. Which means this region -- already notorious for having the worst urban public transport in North America -- will continue to descend into Third World status, riding its herky-jerky buses into the ever-more-pollution-obscured sunset.

(2)-Imposed what the American Civil Liberties Union described as the harshest censorship measure ever passed in the United States, this in Bellingham in 1988 by a 65-35 majority: a law that not only purged the libraries and art galleries of most of the canon of Western literature and art (anything a feminist/fundamentalist coalition deemed obscene) but also opened private libraries and art collections to morals policing. It even forbade male participation in any university life drawing class that used female models, postulating (though not in the ordinance itself) the Dworkinoid position that it is an act of rape for a male to so much as look at a female. Thank the Goddess and all the gods that are, the law was thrown out by the Washington State Supreme Court before it could be enforced.

(3)-Defeated 60-40 in Oregon last month a program that would have provided universal health care to the state's children, financed by raising the tax on cigarettes. Less than 19 percent of Oregon's "overwhelmingly progressive" voters are smokers, but the vast majority of whites, smokers or not, could not abide the thought of the children of the poor -- especially African-American or Hispanic children -- having adequate health care. The measure was even defeated in Eugene -- where most of the WTO anarchists originated -- and it went down by nearly the same margin (56-44), proving once again the astounding hypocrisy of these people.

(4)-Spiked trees, threatening the lives of loggers and millworkers. In one instance I know of, a militant socialist attending an environmentalist meeting in Seattle was literally spat upon and physically ousted when she suggested that the timber barons and not the loggers themselves were to blame for the associated environmental outrages. Her ouster was provoked by her objection to the group's elitist consensus: that loggers are "just animals" and should be dealt with accordingly.

(5)-Viciously ostracize people from elsewhere as an expression of a truly infinite antagonism to new ideas. The xenophobia of coastal Pacific Northwesterners is legend, documented in a number of sociological studies -- a xenophobia far exceeding the gentle-by-comparison xenophobias of New England and the South; Seattlites for example routinely slash the tires of cars with New York plates and spray-paint "go back where you came from motherfucker" on the doors or windshields. I have lived here since 1970 and even though I have played central roles in politics and journalism I remain an "outland stranger" who should "go back to Jew York" -- and my story is in no way unique. Seattle is especially malevolent, every bit as outspokenly hateful as I have portrayed. So is Bellingham, Olympia and Eugene. Tacoma is actually a kind of haven, and I have heard the same about Portland.

But it is the huge hypocrisy of these people that offends me the most. Indeed I have never heard of such hypocrites -- such sneering, self-righteous, vindictive hypocrites at that. That and their xenophobia and its associated anti-intellectuality are their most defining regional characteristics. They are closet fascists, not progressives, certainly not leftists, and I will do everything within my power to tear off their disguise.

Seemslikeadream wrote:


You seemed to have excluded the most important question mark.

The obscurity of your assertion -- it's structural lack of any explicit or even implied point of reference -- (deliberately?) leaves me unable to respond. Please elaborate; hopefully all of us here are beyond taunting one another with Bob-Dylanesque riddles.

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Edit: clarity