Why millions march in France but not the US

Rick Wolff examines why millions march in France (and other European countries), while no-one marches in the USA. The difference between Europe and the US is interesting to those like me who have lived in both places. The degree of brainwashing is less in Europe, and there has historically been more heightened social and political awareness and more mass mobilisation. Or to put it briefly, more class consciousness -- with all that that entails of understanding who's the oppressor, who the oppressed, what the various subtle mechanisms of oppression that are being employed, and how to fight back on a collective basis.

The Fire Next Time

"Fire on the Mountain" - by Terry Bisson, 1992, republished 2009

This rare and legendary science fiction book is about the triumph of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and how it sparked a slave uprising in the South to create the independent black nation of Nova-Africa. The nation started by Brown and Harriet Tubman, and joined by Frederick Douglass, eventually spreads to the north, where a revolution in the 1940s extends Nova Africa's socialism across north America – forming the USSA – the United Socialist States of America.

Against a background of visits to Mars, hydrogen and plasma-drive dirigible airships and cars, porcelain engines and a ‘living’ pair of shoes, Bisson tells a story of deep history – a what-if Brown had not been surrounded and hung. The story starts in the present as a black woman communist, Yasmin, comes north from Charleston to visit her dead husband’s mother, get her daughter Harriet, and deliver the journal of a long-dead relative who joined Brown. Bisson weaves a powerful story combining 3 sources. The first is a diary narrative of that relative, a black boy that becomes "Mr. Abraham," who eventually joins Brown and Tubman’s army “up the mountain.” The second are letters from a southern Tidewater doctor who turns against slavery, and meets the black boy, becoming one of the Army of the North Star’s doctors, and training Abraham to be a doctor himself. The third is the present-day story of the boy’s modern relatives, Yasmin and Harriet.

Of course this never happened. Bisson makes it seem real. The key here is that Tubman was not sick and instead joined Brown, and made the correct tactical decision to blow up the bridge that Lee’s troops would use to cross the river, and so evade capture in Harper’s Ferry. (Bisson points out that Brown was not so good at tactics.) The rebels instead escaped up the mountain next to town, along the present-day path of the Appalachian Trail, which Bisson here re-christens the “The North Star Trail.” At the top, they start the first “fire on the mountain’ for all the slaves to see – a sign of deliverance.

Brown, Tubman and Kagi eventually use the tactics of guerilla and political warfare up and down the Shenandoah Valley, the Cumberlands, the Smokies and other ranges to confuse and militarily defeat Robert E Lee, who resorts to terror and hanging of suspect blacks. Male slaves start to join the army in droves as it begins to evade capture and win battles. The war then becomes internationalized, sort of a Spain of the 1860s. Garibaldi’s Italian revolutionaries arrive through Mexico to fight the ‘Mericans who had seized it from Mexico, backed by Mexican republicans, then move north. A Haitian mule cavalry brigade from Toussaint L’Overture’s free Haiti land surreptitiously in the south. German volunteers from the 1948 Commune; a brigade from London organized by Marx; Molly Maquires from the Appalachian coal-fields and Cherokee Indian allies filter into the mountains to help the North Star Army fight Lee. Irish dockers lend a hand against English supply to the slave states. Independence for California is declared by Chinese and Irish railroad workers and an uprising in New Orleans against slavery succeeds. Philadelphia becomes the early Barcelona of the Americas; Whitman joins Brown in the mountains; Emerson and Thoreau argue about the ‘Cause.’ And the “Cause’ succeeds, through guts, blood and fire - not through speeches alone.

Bisson includes a hilarious aside about a book kept by an old white lady who lives near Harper’s Ferry, who gives it to Yasmin as an insult. It is called “John Brown’s Body.” It is a right-wing fantasy about Brown’s defeat at Harper’s Ferry, and his hanging. In this book, the war eventually starts, but it is not for an independent black nation, but to keep the South in the Union. After the war, the ex-slaves are treated like chattel and denied all their rights. The ex-slave owners keep all the land and political power. There is no socialist revolution in the North - the world continues to be run by the same ruling class of people. Yasmin is appalled by this white-supremacist fantasy. She eventually throws the book out the window of the car.

‘Fire on the Mountain’ can be seen as a counter-point to Newt Gingrich’s book on Gettysburg – a reactionary fantasy about Lee winning at Gettysburg. Instead, in ‘Fire’, Lincoln leads a failed Whig invasion of Nova-Africa, and is celebrated by Copperheads and slavery advocates, not the slaves. The Bible is described as being loved by ‘bloodthirsty crackers’ for being an ‘encyclopedia of torments’ - a phrase I love. Bisson, a former member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, specializes in progressive science-fiction. He has many other sci-fi novels to his credit, and this certainly augurs well for the others.

And I bought it at Mayday Books.
Red Frog, 9/6/10, Labor Day (Because American Labor didn’t want to celebrate May Day.)

William Upski Wimmsatt, Author visit

Monday, September 6 (Labor Day) · 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location Mayday Bookstore, 301 Cedar Ave, West Bank, Minneapolis (enter down stairs at side of building)




IN PLEASE DON'T BOMB THE SUBURBS, Wimsatt weaves a first-person tour of America's cultural and political movements from 1985-2010. It's a story about love, growing up, a generation coming of age, and a vision for the movement young people will create in the new decade. With humor, storytelling, and historical insight, Wimsatt lays out a provocative vision for the next twenty-five years of personal and historical transformation. Never heard of Billy Wimsatt before? Your life just got better.

Akashic Books site: http://www.akashicbooks.com/pleasedont.htm

Social networking sites

I was talking earlier today to the mysterious "Red Frog," whose true identity -- like the Phantom -- remains shrouded in mystery. He expressed surprise that I use a social networking site like Faceboook to discuss politics. But there's no injunction against using it for this purpose; among my Facebook "friends" I have people like Alex Callinicos, Doug Henwood, Michael Yates, Norman Solomon, and Gopal Balakrishnan, scattered on four continents. We can trade information, stories and discussions almost instantly. This is a link I posted a couple of hours ago on Facebook, which has been subsequently picked up and reposted by at least three other people; an excerpt below:

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money." (Robin Cook, ex-British foreign secretary)

Survival +

One book I'd warmly recommend -- based on both the excerpts available on Amazon and the author's online essays -- is Charles Hugh Smith's "Survival +." This is the kind of book Mayday tends to stock and Craig should definitely look at acquiring at least half a dozen copies. The author maintains his own site.

Rasmus's "Epic Recession"

Mayday has in stock Jack Rasmus's "The Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression" (I bought my own copy at Mayday). For some weeks I've been thinking of writing my own amateurish and bungling review of this important book but have been saved from the effort by this one here, written by Suzi Weissman, which is far superior to any pathetic effort on my part. As a caveat, the book is heavy going and not for the faint of heart. I may yet write something on another important book along (roughly) the same lines: "The Great Credit Crash," edited by Martijn Konings, with contributions, inter alia, from the likes of Peter Gowan, Thomas Ferguson, Michael Hudson, Walden Bello, and Leo Panitch. This, too, I bought at Mayday. And this, too, is a taxing book that makes demands on the reader. In defence of the two books above it has to be said that economic and political reality is complex, and to acquire perspective and insight -- historical or otherwise -- into the present quagmire takes careful study.

An excerpt from Weissman's review:

Rasmus recognizes the theoretical debt he owes to three economic thinkers: John Maynard Keynes, whose work is more about how to recover than what produced the crisis; Irving Fischer, who identified debt and deflation as the main mechanisms that drive a downturn into a depression; and Hyman Minsky, the theorist who wrote about the role of speculative investment, showing how the accumulation of debt can destabilize the entire financial system and provoke the kind of financial meltdown we have just experienced. Although Minsky died in 1996, his thinking is so pertinent to the crises of 2007-10 that financial journalists and academics have called it a "Minsky moment."

Rasmus tries to take the work of these theorists further in order to understand the nature of the current crisis and he pledges to do this more fully in subsequent volumes as this crisis unfolds. His analysis is also aided by a thorough grounding in Marxist economic theory. Missing in Keynes, Fischer, and Minsky, he writes, is "...the consideration of the price for labor and its relationship to product and asset pieces: how wage deflation is related to product and asset deflation."

It's a pity there's no book club in the Twin Cities to discuss worthwhile books like this. There was a Marxist book club, organised by Dean Gunderson; that, however, seemingly folded about a year or so back.

Jimmy Johns workers strike today in Minneapolis:

Fast Food Chain Rocked by Work Stoppages in Sign of Mounting Economic Frustration among US Workers

Press Conference and Rally: 4pm September 2, Block E Jimmy Johns, Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS- Service was anything but 'freaky fast' at Jimmy Johns today as workers walked off the kitchen floor in an unprecedented move to demand improved wages and working conditions at nine Minneapolis franchise locations. Announcing the formation of the IWW Jimmy Johns Workers Union, the workers are seeking a pay increase to above minimum wage, consistent scheduling and minimum shift lengths, regularly scheduled breaks, sick days, no-nonsense workers compensation for job-related injuries, an end to sexual harassment at work, and basic fairness on the job.

“I have been working at Jimmy Johns for over two years and they still pay me minimum wage and schedule me one-hour shifts,” said Rikki Olsen, a union member at the Block E location. “I'm working my way through school and can barely make ends meet. I'd get another job, but things are just as bad across the service industry. Companies like Jimmy John's are profitable and growing, they need to provide quality jobs for the community.”

Source

Interesting essay at wsws. I'm reluctant to paste an excerpt as it deserves to be read and digested in its totality. I'll get a printout for myself.

The Counter-Revolution Cometh

"Den of Thieves," by James Stewart, 1991

The 1980s were a pivotal decade in the development of American capitalism. It was during the last two years of Carter, and the two Reagan presidencies, that the American labor movement was soundly defeated in a series of strikes. During the 80s, jobs disappeared to Mexico and overseas, factories closed, and the U.S. successfully beat-up a number of small countries. Finance-dominated capital began to spread over the whole world economy. Two recessions occurred, one as deep as a mine-shaft. The markets fell off a cliff twice. The S&L industry collapsed, and had to be rescued by tax-payers. The decade ended with the destruction of the degenerated Soviet workers’ state – finishing this decade of the global class war with a massive victory for capital. It was an ugly fucking time. I remember it well.

It is upon the success of this mini counter-revolution against Roosevelt, so to speak, that the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies are built, and the consequences of which we are living today.

James B Stewart was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and represents the best of that paper’s reporters. In this meticulously-researched history, Stewart has dug out of the 80s dust-bin the financial creatures of that time - specifically Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky – the junk bond kings. Stewart judges Milken to be the most prominent financier of the 1980s, who was treated as a ‘national treasure’ by the finance industry. What is significant about that is that Milken ended up going to jail for 10 years for 6 felonies, and paying a fine the size of Guatemala. The most prominent financier? Tells you something. Boesky is now mostly remembered for being the model for Gordon Gekko, and actually making a defense of greed a part of a 1986 talk he gave at Drexel’s annual event, the “Predators Ball.”

‘Junk” bonds (now politely called ‘high yield’ bonds) are risky corporate bonds issued by companies with weak finances. Miliken bet that the companies would not go bankrupt, and so created their debt to be bought by others. He convinced so many other people and companies to issue and to buy junk bonds that his firm, Drexel (Burnham Lambert) became a power-house on Wall Street. Using that financial base, he began to buy or ‘raid’ companies in mostly hostile takeovers, thus initiating a wave of mergers across the United States. In the process, Drexel made millions in corporate finance fees. People like Henry Kravis, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, Rupert Murdoch, Irwin Jacobs, Kirk Kerkorian, Ted Turner and Felix Rohatyn became famous ‘arbitrageurs’ during this time, who also rolled companies for profit. They paid no heed to the consequences – to the real economy, or to the working class.

What is consistent across the junk bond/takeover/S&L 80s, the ‘tech wreck’ of the 90s, the Enron/World Com pyramid schemes, and the real-estate/CDO bubble of the Oughts is that someone on Wall Street convinces others that their product has more value than it does, and the bubble cometh. It is basically a con-job, and this repetitive con-job is the real foundation of American finance capital at this point.

The 'den of thieves’ was a large circle of people on Wall Street – principally Martin Siegel, first at Kidder Peabody; Dennis Levine at Drexel-NY; Milken at Drexel-Beverly Hills and Boesky at his own corporation- who traded inside information, which allowed them to make bets on the market or coerce companies into acting they way they wanted. Along with paying for and profiting off inside information, they arranged ‘parking’ schemes to keep assets off companies books, created dummy companies to hide losses or assets, hid profits in order to pay no taxes, evaded net capital rules, bribed and black-mailed companies to buy bonds, and made deliberately false statements. These are more colloquially called ‘lies.’

Levine, a greedy and lazy fatty, eventually gets caught by the SEC in insider trading through a bank in the Caribbean, Bank Leu, based on his profitable bets on stocks. Levine traded right before certain announcements that would drive the price up, and then sold. The SEC started to notice the pattern. Levine pleads guilty, spilling the beans on others, and the whole den unravels, though it takes years – from the lowest, Levine, to the highest, Milken. Rudi Giuliani makes an appearance as the head of the New York DA’s office, who prosecutes the insider-trading schemes in a hot or cold way, depending on his political fortunes. Milken is defended by Drexel, which pays his monthly millions-of-dollars legal bills and his monthly millions-of-dollars public relations bills, until the chairman, Fred Joseph, sees enough evidence to pull the plug. Far too late, of course. The firm doing Milken’s PR work, Robinson Lake, had worked on the Reagan campaign, and were a forerunner of the ‘dirty’ politics propaganda we are now so familiar with from the Republican Right. All of the ring goes to jail, and the government collects almost a billion in fines. Only one – Siegel- seems to regret what he did, and works for the government to help the prosecution case. In October 1989, the junk bond market itself collapses, sending the DOW into a 200-point decline, as companies over-leveraged on junk bonds finally do declare bankruptcy. And finally Drexel itself declares bankruptcy for the same reason, in February 1990.

Stewart’s analysis of the events showed that all the S&Ls that Milken convinced to buy junk bonds, like Columbia Savings, were taken over by the government, and then rescued by tax-payers for billions of dollars. The law that allowed S&L’s to invest in risky investments was passed during the Reagan administration. The S&L crisis was the other, interconnected nightmare during the 80s and early 90s that is supposed to be part of our collective Lady Gaga amnesia.

At the end, the returns on junk bonds were about equal to a low-risk money market fund – directly contradicting Milken’s siren song of mega-cash, even on his own terms. Only the firms made money off the boom. Companies merged and went out of existence, factories closed and workers were sent home, while assets were swapped like whores at a drunken billionaires’ yacht party – all to enrich individuals on Wall Street.

The lesson of this book is that the recent real estate bubble and CDO boom weren't born yesterday, but are rooted in the domination of the economy, the press and the political machines by the finance industry over the last 30 years. Stewart’s story reads more like a financial detective story, structured by the rise and fall of some shitheads, and its natural structure provides a plot with which few potboilers can compete. Reality many times trumps fiction.

And I bought it at Mayday Books used book section.
Red Frog, 9/1/2010

Dick Taylor's Outline for his August 21 Talk

The Limits of Keynesian Economics:

A. Central Themes to be discussed:
1. The Apologetics of capitalist economics after Ricardo
2. Idol Worship: Neo-classical equilibrium theory and Say’s Law
3. Equilibrium? The depression explodes the ruling model
4. Keynes explanation for the breakdown
5. Keynes’s goal: restoring capitalism
6. Keynes’s political goal: Reviving the Liberal Party
7. Keynes’s policy prescription: the central government supplements private investment
8. The Mechanics of Keynes’s policy prescriptions
9. Flaws: Keynes’s utopian capitalism
10. Keynes versus Marx on stagnation and crisis
B. Questions and Discussion

See the Mayday Site for further details,
By FellowCommodityDooley

Adventures in GringoLandia

"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver, 2009

Barbara Kingsolver is one of the best authors in the United States. What this means is that any story she writes, even ones with certain flaws, has more resonance than works by lesser writers. This is also true of certain film directors, like Altman, Kurosawa or Penn, and certain playwrights, like Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner or August Wilson.

A ‘lacuna” means a ‘hole’ or ‘gap.’ The first lacuna we meet is a long dangerous tunnel off the ocean full of water, that surfaces in a possibly ceremonial pool or ‘cenote’ in-land. The lacuna is off Yucatan on Isla Pixol in Mexico in the 1920s. A half-American/half-Mexican boy is taught to roll soft tortilla flour into sweet concoctions called ‘blandas.’ The boy’s name is Harrison William Shepherd, and his seemingly true story is told in the forms of a first-person diary; by a southern friend, Mrs. Brown; by an ‘archivist;’ in letters; through newspaper clippings and in standard, third-person narrative. This gives the story the feel of a documentary reconstruction of Harrison’s life. However, the construction itself makes the story somewhat hard to follow at times. The boy Harrison, later christened ‘Insolito' or 'Soli' by Frida Kahlo, swims into the lacuna, holds his breath for a long time and survives to come out on the other side in the pool.

Harrison moves to Mexico City in 1930 with his gold-digger mother, Salome (!) and, using his blanda-making skills, becomes the plaster-maker for a certain muralist, Diego Rivera. He meets Frida, becomes one of the cooks, and then the typist for the Rivera’s, lives in their odd square box houses, then moves to the Kahlo family’s ‘Blue House’ in Coyoacan. Insolito wants to become a writer, and keeps his diary through this whole time. There, eventually, arrives Lev Trotsky and his wife, Natalya in 1937. Harrison details the time that Trotsky lives in the Blue House, then moves out to another house down the street after a legendary but perhaps inaccurate infidelity is discovered. Shepherd works for Trotsky as a typist too, taking dictation of the various articles and books Trotsky never stops writing. Shepherd accidentally leaves a certain document lying around that leads to a fight between Trotsky and Rivera, and feels very bad about it. He details the first assassination attempt against Trotsky, and then the successful one by a ‘friend’ of friends – the GPU agent Jacson. The death of Trotsky is the second ‘lacuna’ of the book – and in a way, the deepest.

Harrison eventually moves back to the United States. He becomes employed by the US government to preserve paintings from U.S. federal galleries, which are being hidden in Asheville, North Carolina. They are being hidden because of threats of invasion during World War II. He gets the job through the good offices of Rivera’s gallery friends in New York. Frida carefully rescues an early story of his about the conflict between the Aztecs and Cortes from the Mexican police, who had confiscated it at the time of the assassination, and sends it to him. Shepherd finally opens the package, finishes the story, and becomes a famous writer in the United States. He continues writing books that indict militarism and government lying, while hiding the politics in coded fictional stories about Mexico’s history.

Shepherd tries to stay as invisible as possible, and his long-term homosexuality is also kept hidden. He never gives interviews and rarely leaves his house. However, the McCarthy period comes calling. Shepherd is eventually denounced in Asheville as a Communist, being accused of being an associate of notorious people like Rivera, Kahlo and Trotsky. As they say, guilt by association. He becomes a ‘non-person’ in Asheville, except for his older female friend and typist, Mrs. Brown. It is she that gathers his documents and tries to tell the story of his life. Due to the anti-communist hysteria, Shepherd’s last book contract is finally turned down by the publisher after they try to get him to put out the book under someone else’s name. As such, he can no longer earn a living. This is the third lacuna.

Insolito eventually returns to Isla Pixol, intentionally swims into the same ‘lacuna’ again … and drowns.

What I find interesting is that Barbara Kingsolver, a normally liberal or perhaps leftish writer, would retell this iconic story of Kahlo, Rivera and Trotsky, and in not unfriendly terms. In certain ways, the death of Trotsky is the emotional center of the book. Liberals are not known for their friendliness to communists. A similar story was also delineated in the film “Frida,” based on the biography of Frida Kahlo, a flim by director Julie Taymor. Kahlo’s paintings have toured the United States, and were recently shown here at the Walker. (See review below.) As someone who tracks ‘memes’ – ideas that spread through culture – the fact that Trotsky is not seen as some kind of crazed devil by some liberals and progressives, but a martyr to true communism and the working-class, is significant.

Kingsolver does have a long record of progressive political writing. Kingsolver wrote the non-fiction “Holding the Line” about the failed Phelps-Dodge strike of the 80s, especially highlighting the role of women. She is a clear environmentalist, whose non-fiction “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life” is a contribution to the anti-corporate organic food movement. The excellent “The Poisonwood Bible” is a clever demolition of religious fundamentalism. “The Bean Trees’ is about the violence done to Central American immigrants, along with its sequel, “Pigs in Heaven.” “Animal Dreams” is about fighting pollution in some Arizona orchards.

Kingsolver is a writer who does not tell stories just to ‘entertain’ the middle class –the hallmark of American bourgeois literature. The recent spate of navel-gazing ‘memoirs’ written by dysfunctional individuals and their 12-step miseries is an example of the middle-class attempting to give their writing some significance – and failing. Run with these scissors, fuckhead! Kingsolver writes about the actual events of the wider world – a usually taboo preoccupation in bourgeois fiction, except as a ‘backdrop’ to some more important individual drama. As Kingsolver would point out, we are really more than ourselves.

And I bought this at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 8/14/2010

A sympthetic essay in today's FT, comparing unions in Asia and the "developed" West:

Workers at a garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, went on strike at the end of last month in protest against the dismissal of one of their union officials. The factory produces for Gap, Benetton and Adidas, whose customers have long benefited from low-cost Asian labour. But union militancy in Cambodia’s textile sector can now count some successes: the minimum wage went up by $11 a month in July – less than the unions wanted, but enough to end the wave of strikes.

The large, even heroic, tasks of protecting rights might be declining sharply in developed nations. But they are increasingly common in the catch-up world – especially in China and south east Asia. In many recently (or still) communist countries, labour remains exploited and union activism is badly needed.

is the most eye-catching example. Strikes swept through foreign-owned companies – including Honda, Hyundai, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Toyota – in the south of the country in June, in spite of heavy attention by police. Unofficial as they were, they worked. Party leaders, including Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, called for improved wages and conditions, especially for the low paid and precarious migrant workers, who have formed much of the work force in areas such as Guangdong.

Mr Wen told an audience in Beijing that migrants’ work “is glorious and should be respected by society at large. Migrant workers should be cared for, protected and respected.” However, as Simon Clarke of Warwick University, who studies unions in Russia and China, stresses, independent unions in China and south east Asia are often fleeting, while membership remains hazardous. Official unions, unused to militancy, even try to suppress activism.

A similar problem is true in Russia, where the legacy of unions wholly dominated – indeed, created – by the Communist party lingers. In post-communist Russia, control by the party has been replaced by control by the state. Established unions suffer from a pervasive culture of poor civic and political activism. As Simon Clarke puts it, Russia’s labour movement “is completely under the thumb of [prime minister] Vladimir Putin.”

Yet even if Russia isn’t following suit, the growing strength of unions in Asia is a welcome move; one which will put pressure on the regimes to increase domestic consumption, raise skill levels and develop social and welfare services, especially for migrant workers. True, neither the remaining Communist parties (as in China and Vietnam) nor the old official unions will want to relinquish control that has served them well. Even so, bolstered by newer campaigning unions, the economic struggle can be waged hopefully.

Success is a much fainter hope in the west, where unions suffer from a past seen as noble and a present seen as irrelevant. But now with austerity as the posture of choice, unions scramble to reassert themselves. British unions are planning an autumn of discontent with demonstrations, special conferences and possible strikes. That said, French public sector workers, British Airways cabin crew and Greek workers in any sector – all have tested the resolve of their governments and none have succeeded.

Indeed, in rich countries unions continue to weaken, especially in the private sector. Even in Germany, where co-operation with employers has ensured power at corporate level, they have been helpless to stop loss of income, to cancel cuts, or to change the government’s mind on raising the retirement age to 67. At the conference in June of the federal unions (DGB) delegates seemed to agree with the centre-right chancellor Angela Merkel – who addressed the union to mild applause rather than catcalls – that “very hard years lie ahead”. Michael Sommer, the DGB chairman, lauded the government’s commitment to social equilibrium – which has meant, in practice, acceptance of layoffs and wage cuts.

Yet they might also raise their sights: for if they are unlikely to succeed in their traditional search for better wages they might fare better by returning to the moral force they mobilised in early years. Vast discrepancies in earnings between the bulk of salary earners and those at the top of the corporate sectors can unite ethics and polemics. Labour movements have a chance to sway public opinion and in so doing regain a status they lost with their draining of members and shrinking of ambitions.

If not, the declining unions of the developed world may begin to look jealously at the achievements of their less privileged equivalents. “The union makes us strong” was ever the slogan of workers’ movements. But the contrasting strengths of unions east and west illuminate one basic fact: unions do well for their members in rising economies, but in more austere times, moral suasion is their best – and perhaps only – card.

Rick Wolff explaining the dynamics of the global class war, where the rich have "recovered" during the last couple of years -- while everyone else is getting shafted hard and brutally.

The European people are at least resisting:

Across Europe, coalitions of trade unions, socialist, communist, and some green
parties, and many social, religious, and community organizations are organizing
growing mass demonstrations and general strikes. These oppose austerity and
demand alternative ways to deal with economic crisis. In France, mobilization
focuses on a nationwide general strike September 7. Plans are underway for an
all-European day of public actions on September 29. National actions like this
have already happened in Greece, Portugal, and other countries.

The business and political leaders generated by the last 30 years of neoliberal
capitalism simply assumed that they could impose the costs of their crisis on
their countries' people. That assumption is now being contested. The European
people are beginning to fight back. And here, in the US?

Well, here in the US the sheeple are placidly grazing away. The masses have to be constituted as a public before public action becomes possible. In Europe there is a public; in the USA there's just an amorphous mass of mutually alienated strangers. And the pox on liberals, "progressives," and Obummer.

White House Fax

Fax to White House: 202 456 2461

Pfc Bradley Manning who helped release the classified war documents, should be awarded the Medal of Freedom and given an honorable discharge. The troops should be brought home. These wars are undeclared therefore not legal.

Tom R. Dooley
1176 Ashland Ave
Saint Paul, MN 55104
651-645-0295
Email: fellowcommoditydooley@gmail.com

Warm Slovenian Beer

Living in the End Times, Slavoj Zizek, 2010

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian professor, who still calls himself a small ‘c’ communist. Slovenia was at one time part of Yugoslavia until it was vivisected by German and US imperialism in the '90s during their war on Serbia. Living in a former central European workers state could lead to invaluable insights relevant to Marxism. That life combined the real experience of a non-commodity economy with the flaws of bureaucracy. You’d think Zizek would have a great storehouse of information to draw on. However, you’d be hard-put to find any of that concrete experience here. Because, if you assert these are ‘end times’ then we must know to which direction we are going – to barbarism or into something more humane. And that recent experience seems relevant.

Zizek himself was a critic of Titoism, and ran for president of Yugoslavia on the platform of the “Liberal Democratic” party in 1990. It is unknown what the class character of this organization was. However, there is very little in this book about his experiences. He mentions how the Slovenian Communists, at the end of their rule, tried to please everyone - because even they knew their rule was undemocratic. He understood that the CP made every concession to capitalism that they could, except the essential one – giving up the power of the Party. He thinks China at present is doing precisely that – a sort of massive New Economic Policy that still retains power in the hands of the Party.

I think the reason Zizek does not use his own actual history is because Zizek is basically a film/philosophy professor – actually a professor at several different universities – those in Ljubljana and London. He has given renewed intellectual credibility to Marxism – and not just the warmed-over, tired kind, but Leninism as well. He has even spoken of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ without wincing. Zizek quotes at one point Lenin worrying about what would happen to the Bolsheviks if they lost their attempt at Revolution. Trotsky responded by saying he was more worried about what would happen if they succeeded. Zizek contrasts this discussion of the ‘revolutionary act’ with the petit-bourgeois socialists who would put revolution to a vote. Revolution, in toto, is actually the most democratic event in human history, involving at it does far more than a passive visit to the ballot box. Zizek, like Lukacs, knew that human intervention and even human viewing actually changes history … and reality.

Zizek’s wide-ranging classical European intelligence and erudition, his humorous and sharp analysis, and his shaggy-dog hipster ambience have given Marxism something of a shot in the arm – at least with some youth and the mainstream Euro media. In the US he is relatively unknown - certainly not a new Marcuse in reputation as yet.

However, for those Marxists trying to find some new meat on the bone, it is a struggle just to distill some jewels from the heaps of verbiage. Zizek veers between archaic Freudian/Lacanian ‘psycho-analysis’ to traditional Marxism, to the categories of Hegel’s big “Other,” to de-constructionist film criticism, and back – all in one article. It is Attention Deficit Disorder philosophy. If you were wondering what ‘Living in End Times’ means, it seems to mean that we do not fulfill our promises. It actually means publishing various short academic pieces into a book length volume, and mostly ignoring your topic – the 4 horseman of the capitalist apocalypse which you mention in your introduction. One of his four horseman – the “biogenic revolution’ – does not even have an index entry. Instead, just pick a title that might sell books.

Zizek is really a philosopher – which to him means an ‘idea generator’ - and not primarily a social activist or a Marxist revolutionary. And indeed, the reason anyone reads Zizek is because we activists and humble thinkers seek these ‘new’ ideas - but alas, it is in vain. I will renew my call for anyone to state one idea Zizek has that will help the proletarian revolutionary movement in some significant way, and not merely enrich the discussion at a philosophy seminar. A good Slovenian beer, or even 6, is yours, as well as a bottle of “Leninade,” if you can come up with one. I certainly hope you can.

For instance, Freud. In the U.S. actual Freudian psycho-analysis is limited to monied narcissists in New York city. Years-long talk therapy is not covered by health plans. Precise Freudian diagnoses and methods – the Oeidipus and Electra complexes, oral/anal/genital stages of development, dream analysis, id/ego/superego, Freudian ‘slips,’ etc. all have become categories of marginal or no psychoanalytic value among practicing workers in the field. The more general value of unconscious emotions and sexual repression as it affects our thinking HAS been absorbed into modern thought and psycho-analytic training. Freud himself actually discovered child abuse, but because he could not believe that proper Viennese men would sexually abuse their daughters, he called it female ‘hysteria’ and the Electra complex. This is because Freud’s conclusions were not based on general scientific tests, but anecdotal cases brought to him by happenstance. And even an analysis of this small sample was saturated with the culture of the time.

German Communist Party member Wilhelm Reich actually did make a valuable contribution to revolutionary thinking with his “Mass Psychology of Fascism,” which showed how some of the roots of fascist thinking were in sexual repression. This work does owe a debt to Freud. Dealing with fascists, reactionaries or conservatives cannot be through a strictly ‘logical’ discussion, as anyone will tell you. Nor can recruiting youth, or most anyone to a revolutionary movement and society. However, most of Zizek’s references to Freud fall flat, or seem like strained analogies of the sexually obsessed. At which point, after several seemingly innocuous mentions of sexuality and little boys, I have to ask, what is this?

Or Hegel. Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well as other Marxists, distilled the most progressive aspects of Hegelianism many years ago. The dialectic is the great gift that Hegel gave to philosophic thought. So for the life of me I can’t understand why someone would re-till these fields again – unless, indeed, there is something actually new here. Again, see my offer, above.

I saw Zizek on a recent DVD of 12 recent philosophers called “The Examined Life” – wandering around a garbage dump talking about environmentalism. He ended the meditation by saying that man should “increase” his alienation to nature. In this book, Zizek mentions the straw man of ‘zero waste’ to remind us that we must appreciate that the ‘aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist’ is ‘to accept waste.’ Ok, how kinky!

Yet Zizek is sometimes a Marxist environmentalist, as this book also shows. At one point, he discusses the natural age we live in as the “Anthropocene” – an era in which the natural world is materially affected by human activity. Human activity has become like the tides, or volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, or solar flares. So how would ‘increasing’ alienation to nature actually help the environment? Isn’t the real problem that society and capital are already thoroughly alienated from the environment? And isn’t that what Marx himself said? Marx actually discussed recycling London’s shit, which should send any Freudian into an anal-baiting tizzy. Which makes one wonder if Zizek says some things just for provocation. Sort of like biting the head off of a bat. In another take on wobbling, he sounds for all the world like a Christian socialist in this book in several chapters, then reasserts his strong atheism. Some socialists at the turn of the century in the U.S. combined Christian and socialist themes, and were immensely popular. Is this what Zizek is trying to get at? We will never know.

He delights in being contrarian and counter-intuitive. At one point he accuses Venezuela of exploiting other countries through high oil prices - thus cleverly smashing a leftist shibboleth. What an idea generator, he! However, the fact that Venezuelan oil was formerly owned by various imperialist oil concerns, exploiting Venezuela’s resources and labor, certainly fits anyone’s definition of economic imperialism. The fact that Venezuela has seized the oil fields and put them under public ownership, and then gone the next step and actually used the proceeds to help the poor is a great gain. Does the Venezuelan nation still ‘exploit’ the buyer of Cities Service gas? Of course - but I would rather be exploited by the Venezuelan nation than by British Petroleum – and so would Zizek. Marxists know that exploitation will not completely end until we have a world economy based on use-values. .

Zizek is still an exponent of revolution and the proletariat – even though he understands the reduced role of physical work in advanced capitalist society. This point raises significant issues for the Marxist revolutionary movement in the advanced capitalist countries, and really demands much study, because it disappears the traditional commodity-producing proletariat, making material products with absolute use-values. At one point he speaks of the ‘hegemonic role’ of 'intellectual / immaterial labor’ in late capitalism. Now professors tend to understand the reduced role of physical work in advanced capitalist societies intuitively. However, Zizek has nothing to say about the out-sourcing of physical/blue-collar work to second and third world economies. Could you make the same claim about China, the still fastest growing economy in the world? Of course not. So this insight – which is not that uncommon – actually HIDES the actual displacement of manual labor in a world division of labor. It works to give an anti-working class sparkle to his thinking – even though that is not his intention.

I have distilled a grab-bag of nuggets that Zizek has dug up – some quite interesting:

1. Haiti. Zizek points out that the heroic revolution by black slaves in Haiti against colonialism and slavery lead by Toussaint L’Overture was punished by France for 125 years. France only established diplomatic relations with Haiti in 1825, and in response, Haiti had to pay reparations to France for expropriating the slave plantations until 1947, consuming a great part of the Haitian national budget, and permanently under-developing Haiti. This is a crime of historic proportions that is greater than the recent earthquake – because it is man-made.
2. He, like Sam Harris, reminds the white hipsters that the Zen Buddhists backed the Emperor and the Japanese role in World War II. No detachment there.
3. In comparing the atomizing ‘cash’ nexus with ‘potlach,’ Zizek shows the superiority of the latter in creating human and social bonds. A transaction consisting of presenting a credit card over a minute in time is far more distancing than people trading services or goods, and which happen over a period of time. A human debt is created, but not one solely economic.
4. Zizek praises various historians like Bryan Ward-Perkins, who studied ancient Rome. Perkins pointed out that history is not just a gradual transformation towards the ‘good,’ as the positivist liberals believe. Instead, real history is replete with periods of stagnation, back-sliding, regression and collapse within and between various societies. Luxemburg’s phrase ‘Socialism or barbarism’ puts it quite succinctly.
5. As a Marxist, Zizek pokes at the liberals who always talk about racism and sexism, not class. He quotes Walter Benn Michaels: “Why do American liberals carry on about racism and sexism when they should be worrying about capitalism?” Zizek points out that “they carry on … in order to avoid doing so about capitalism.”
6. Zizek compares upper middle-class Dutch gays and poor Muslim immigrants, who view the former as privileged. He feels any discussion of Muslim ‘anti-homosexual’ attitudes in the Netherlands has to include this dimension, or it is inadequate.
7. Zizek, like Minqi Li, also thinks capital is unable to create a stable world political order.
8. Zizek believes that “a resuscitation of a critique of political economy is the sine qua non of contemporary communist politics.” He points to Moishe Postpone who analyzes the present after the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1990 as one of the leaders in this regard. And he is right – the collapse of the worker’s states is one of the key scientific events that need to be studied to rebuild a new communist movement.
9. The perfect capitalist product would be a “pure signifier” – “a brand name alone.”
10. The capitalist health industry treats our life, including death, as a “stressful experience to be cured.”
11. Zizek thinks that the “Left’s only original economic idea of the last few decades” is “basic citizen income.” That is a stipend paid to any citizen of a country as a floor of income. He praises Brazil for passing such a law in 2004 guaranteeing a minimum income for all Brazilians – which goes beyond the ‘minimum wage,’ which requires working.
12. Eric Satie, the experimental classical composer, was a member of the French Communist Party’s Central Committee in the early 1920s. Both John Cage and Frank Zappa were great admirers of Satie.

Bon appetit.

Red Frog
July 26, 2010

There was a meeting a few days ago at the bookshop to discuss the current financial crisis. It left me dissatisfied as no real insight was present on the dynamics that caused it and on the possible future trajectory as this latest crisis of capitalism plays itself out. An acquaintance of mine -- and a professor at my alma mater (King's College London) -- has written a new book, titled "Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World" (published by Polity Press), which goes into the dynamics of this financial crisis in a bit more depth. A review of the book can be found here. There seems to be a consensus among writers such as Callincos, Harvey, and J.B. Foster that a crisis of profitability in the mid - '70s led to the establishment of the neoliberal order -- an order with its own inherent contradictions, which have exploded over the last two years.

Mayday stocked Callinicos's earlier book, "Imperialism and Global Political Economy." So I daresay they will in the fullness of time stock "Bonfire of Illusions" as well.

Gear-Heads Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Cubicles!

“Shop Class as Soulcraft – an Inquiry into the Value of Work,” by Mathew B Crawford, 2009

This book can be seen as a continuation and addition to Robert Pirsig’s odd but memorable book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which was, at bottom, a meditation on quality. Pirsig wrote that book in the 60s over Robert’s Shoes on Lake and Chicago here in Minneapolis, and it went on to make millions of dollars. Crawford’s title however is misleading – it is not the value of ‘work’ that is at issue in this book, but the value of blue-collar, or physical / mechanical work, over paperwork. Crawford is also concerned primarily with motorcycles – and at present owns an antique motorcycle repair shop. He’s been in various other roles as a car gear-head, philosophy Ph.D at the U of Chicago, think-tank employee, carpenter and now, motorcycle mechanic. Brought up by a hippie mother in a commune and a mathematician father, both imprinted themselves on him as something ‘not’ to do. He has an odd antipathy to ‘hippies’ (always a conservative red flag…) and also combats his father’s purely theoretical relation to reality.

Crawford is a materialist – and someone conversant in Marxism will have no trouble following his arguments against various forms of idealism. He points out that the shutting down of shop classes in high school in the 60s and 70s was a huge mistake, because it meant that everyone was being funneled into colleges to get white-collar jobs in the ‘post-industrial’ society, as Daniel Bell so badly put it. Crawford makes the point that someone doing blue-collar tradesman work – skilled labor – can make more money than a paperwork drone in a corporate HR department, or an actual clerk in a law firm. He also points out that the blue-collar work that cannot be digitized will survive. And while many people are not suited for the deadening work experience of corporate life, they are still shuffled into colleges!

The cube versus the shop – that is the topic here, and Crawford does a great job of showing the value of ordinary mechanical work as an intellectual discipline. Why this needs to be done is probably for the benefit of academics or middle class people who don't believe it. Of course we know the shutting-down of shop classes was not only an attack on the working-class through de-skilling, but also was preparing the population for the out-sourcing of blue-collar work to other countries.

Crawford, however, is really an advocate of skilled labor, and more specifically, small entrepreneurship. He finds Marx’s position that labor under capitalism can be alienating to be partly untrue, as he, as an antique bike mechanic and small businessmen, wants to give people their bikes back, so to speak, to further the thrill of the ride. I think he misreads Marx here, as he insists Marx’s alienated workers do not want others to ‘use’ their products. This, or course, is not really what alienation is all about or even what use-value is about.  He does find paper-shuffling and semi-skilled / unskilled labor to be alienating though. He calls his time as a tie-wearing cube denizen to be more proletarianizing that almost anything else he’d done. Crawford uses Pirsig’s story of the idiot worker who did not care about what he was doing, and who damaged Prisig’s motorcycle as a result, as another example of alienation. Beware of the repair shop where the radio is louder than the thinking.

The book is full of funny stories about what it takes to do real things – and the superiority of actual experience and practical knowledge to poorly written maintenance manuals (written by technical writers, not people who actually do the work), erroneous electronic systems on cars and purely theoretical ‘scientific’ knowledge. He praises thinking as doing, and various older workers he learned from. Those who do, think, those who don’t, do not.

This brings to mind a story a co-worker of mine told me. She bought a GPS unit for her car, and on a trip to Colorado, she put it on the ‘shortest route’ setting, which she thought would get her there the quickest. It took her about 6 hours longer to get to Denver by this method, as the ‘shortest route’ setting will take you down dirt roads, through virtual alleys and around many tiny corners. Instead of applying practical experience – is a shorter route always the fastest? - she trusted the GPS unit. Workers with practical experience know when the computer or the manual or the ‘advice’ is wrong. Those who don’t, don’t. The word ‘bullshit’ describes that moment. As Crawford points out, reality is far more complicated than that. His favorite example is having to drill out a broken bolt from a metal head, or drill out a broken tap. Or dealing with rusted parts, dirt, poor fits or metal fatigue. None of which are provided for in manuals but all quite common.

Crawford makes the ridiculous point that the slogan for the new international capitalists is “workers of the world, unite!” because the capitalists are not ‘nationalists’ anymore. He bases this on an analogy of Rolls Royce workers having pride in their ‘national’ work or BMW workers in theirs. However, more carefully, the real slogan should read: “Capitalists of the world, unite! - except they can't.” Capitalists, while international, always base themselves on a national unit to protect their interests, or a fake ‘international’ unit like the IMF, run by the US and Wall Street. Their ‘internationalism’ is only of the exploitative kind. Of course, a proponent of local small business has no need for internationalism anyway. Which is why he looks down his nose at 'elite' Marxism.

Crawford’s book is a valuable contribution to the debate over class and over-work. He wants people to overcome their alienation towards their own ‘stuff’ and to become self-reliant in the physical world, instead of hiring someone else to do everything for them. While marred by his small businessman view, (after all, is the low-end motorcycle mechanic at the factory shop who’s in charge of oil changes and tire replacements as thrilled as Crawford as a profit-oriented owner-operator?) he still gets to the heart of the matter over the deceptive lies of the white-collar world and society's propagation of it.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, June 30, 2010

Oil Booms - protection or just public relations?

Things heating up in Europe

Things heating up in Europe according to this piece:

Workers in Greece today stand in the forefront of the converging European class
struggles against big capital's attempt to make working people pay the costs of
its crisis.

Mobilizations against this austerity drive are spreading
across Europe. In France, strikes and demonstrations were held on May 27 and a
day of actions is planned for June 24. In Portugal, 300,000 working people
demonstrated in the streets of Lisbon on May 30 to express their rejection of
the socialist government's austerity plan. In Spain, public employees took to
the streets on June 2. In Italy, a national demonstration was held in Rome on
June 5, with strikes and other actions planned up to June 14. In Great Britain,
the unions and left-wing organizations are organizing a day of demonstrations on
June 22. In Romania public employees took to the streets on June 4.

Meanwhile the drugged and hypnotised American population continues placidly grazing away. And the idle breed of liberals and progressives is congenitally incapable of doing anything save chattering away.

Zizek Also Predicts End of World

I'm going on a 'summer hiatus' for several weeks - that is if I don't get fired first. In keeping with the creeping 'apocalypse now' theme of this blog, I'm reading Zizek's new book, "Living in the End Times," new at May Day. Essentially, he too predicts that capital is reaching a dead end.

His intro talks about the 'four riders of the apocalypse' (sound familiar - see my 2007 review on American Theocracy, below) -- "comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (struggles over intellectual property, raw materials, food and water) and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions."

What the 'biogenic' revolution is is anyone's guess, but it could be some weird Freudian episode of a famous TV show, maybe. Stay tuned.

Red Frog
6/6/10 (D Day)

A Grim Memorial Day

Tombstone

I don't know about you, but this Memorial Day is a grim event. It coincides with our remembrance of the continuing dead and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan - 6,000 dead soldiers and contractors and over 30,000 wounded - now presided over by a Democratic President.

Memorial Day was preceded by the failure of British Petroleum's macho "Top Kill." The perspective for the Gulf now is at least 3 more months of an underwater oil volcano. Some even say Christmas.

We were also greeted with the news that Likudnik soldiers stormed unarmed Gaza relief ships in international waters, killing perhaps up to 20, wounding more, and seizing these ships and their passengers. Many were beaten after being captured. The Israeli government blamed 'violent' Palestinians and Turks, because they defended themselves from descending pirates.

And prior to this day, the Arizona government overplayed its bias card, and made 'walking while Hispanic' a dangerous occupation.

4 events - covering war, the environment, Israel and immigration - all failures or attacks by the Right. And what does the Obama administration do? The 'Congenital Compromiser?" Well, they are certainly 'sorry' about the war dead, sorry about that 'spill', sorry about the Israeli's, sorry about events in Arizona.

The capitalist plan for the world is falling apart. Large working class organizations could take these opportunities and run with them. These failures piled on failure show that imperialism, its policies and leaders, are unable to solve any problems. They are reaching that 'dead end' in which societies cannot function in the 'old way.'

But failure and being replaced are two different things. It is only hoped that more and more people see the dead-end is being reached.

Red Frog, 6/1/10

An exceedingly perceptively written review and overview of E.P.Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" can be read here.

For those interested in the origin, development, and reproduction of class consciousness. Capital fights this class consciousness tooth and claw. And in the US it seems to have attained a great measure of success in this endeavor.

For the past year or so I've been reading increasingly negative and bitter diatribes against Obama. Like other informed observers I didn't bother voting for the bum and had no expectations of him. In fact I didn't bother voting at all since I don't want my participation to legitimise a farcical system that is corrupt to its core. As Emma Goldman said a century back, if voting could change anything, they'd have abolished the ballot box a long time ago.

In area after area -- military policy in Afghanistan, a bellicose stance towards Iran, the carte blanche afforded to the financial sector, the sluggish and ineffectual response to the environmental disaster in the Mexican Gulf -- commentators are recording their dismay and bitterness with the Obama administration. So just to clarify what this buffoon's job description really is:

1) Look sombre (GWB could never quite manage it, always threatening to break into a smirk).
2) Make grave speeches full of hot air.
3) Express righteous anger when required.
4) Dance to the tune of the financial overlords, who are the real permanent government of both the US and the Western world.

Next time you vote for a president, remember it's akin to betting on a fight where both boxers are owned by Don King.

It looks like the book, "The Global Economic Crisis," edited by Chossudovsky and Marshall, has just been released. Mayday should order eight or ten copies of this title. I'll take one myself when I pop into the store next month.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19321

I Hear You ‘Knockin’ But You Can’t Come In!

FBI Secrets – An Agent’s Expose, M Wesley Swearingen, 1995

It has been awhile since some internal source in the FBI spilled the beans. The COINTELPRO exposures in the ‘80s were the last time our very own KGB got their pants pulled down. M. Wesley Swearingen was part of this take-down. The retarded fucks in the FBI didn’t know that someone among their own number was taking notes. And he was not alone, as other agents helped him with his story. They too were repelled by the dishonesty, laziness and criminality of the FBI leadership and their local sycophants. Swearingen considers this a story of the Hoover FBI. However, any activist will tell you that the story did not stop at the COINTELPRO hearings.

The FBI has the money, guns and legal backing to pull almost anything they desire. And they did, for many years. Hoover got his start deporting communists and anarchists during the Palmer raids in 1919, right after the Bolshevik Revolution. As he become ensconced in permanent power, he made a deal with the Mob/Costa Nostra to leave them alone, because they had evidence he was a cross-dresser and homosexual. Swearington says this was common knowledge in the FBI. While this seems hysterically stupid – remember – this is J Edgar Hoover we’re talking about here. The Roy Cohn of the FBI. In a sense, Hoover left the Mob alone to build cities like Vegas, until the advent of that ‘do gooder,’ Robert Kennedy. Of course, we know what happened to Robert Kennedy – and his brother, the one who appointed him. CIA and FBI finger-prints were all over those assassinations.

Swearingen comes into the story in the 50s, following members of the Communist Party in Chicago. At the time, he was a straight-laced, honest, “good American.” He made the arrest of Claude Lightfoot on violation of the Smith Act, which shows you he was no clerk. His secret job, however, was to tail Communists and then conduct hundreds of ‘black bag’ jobs on Communists and other activists. These ‘jobs’ were illegal under US law. The existence of black bag jobs was first covered up, then undercounted by FBI representatives testifying before Congress. After all, when has the FBI ever told the truth? They actually are incapable of it. Lying is part of the modus operandi. They were hiding their own illegal activities, directly authorized by Hoover.

Swearingen began to have doubts about the FBI in Chicago, but his questions and comments were ignored by local FBI bureaucrats. Later he found out from a friend that the FBI had helped kill Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Black Panther leaders in Chicago, in the 60s. The FBI informant gave the Chicago police a map of Hampton’s apartment, and the Chicago police did the rest, lead by States Attorney Ed Hanrahan. The FBI rarely gets their hands directly dirty. They hire or ‘lead’ other people to do the hits.

Swearingen ended up in Los Angeles in the 60s, and heard about numerous continuing black bag jobs in that city, against the Black Panther Party, the Weatherman, and any local activists Hoover didn’t like. The FBI was above all a political police, and Swearingen makes this very clear. One dodge of the FBI was to claim they had informants that they did not. Each FBI agent was supposed to have 5 informants, but most were so lazy they just made the informants up. They also spent massive amounts of tax-payer dollars on bogus stake-outs that went nowhere. One informant they did have testified against Panther Geronimo Pratt. Pratt was sent to jail for a life sentence on the frame-up testimony of the FBI informant. Swearingen saw this agent’s informant file, while even today the FBI denies the testimony was by an FBI informant. The FBI technically dropped him as an ‘informant’ during the trial, in order to say he was ‘not’ an informant. Then he returned to work.

Swearingen has hard evidence that FBI informers in the “Slaves” gang killed a number of key members of the Black Panther Party. He has successfully testified for the SWP in their suit against the FBI; for a suit brought by victims of Chicago black bag jobs against the FBI and Chicago Red Squad; with Charles Gerry in his lawsuits against the “Agency,” and for Geronimo Pratt. Only the latter testimony was unsuccessful in freeing Pratt. The FBI claimed it destroyed surveillance files related to some of these organizations, but Swearingen saw the same files ‘renamed’ and still in existence.

The lesson here is that the FBI was totally without scruple regarding law and action. They lie with impunity. In fact, anything they say must be considered a lie. While the image of the present FBI is different, it has only gone into deeper hiding. A new mass movement which results in a rejection of the American ruling class and the rich will bring the FBI right back into the thick of things. Every single activist group is under surveillance right now, and agents and police continue to infiltrate activist organizations. Welcome to ‘democratic’ America.

And I bought it at Arise Books at their final sale.
Red Frog, 5/19/2010