Saturday, May 31, 2014

In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

Boston's International Workers Day 2013

BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)

To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)

Other May Day events:

Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm

BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally

Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston

******* Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions -This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class-Take The Offensive!-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

http://www.bostonmayday.org

Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website to find out about actions planned in the Greater Boston area. Google May Day and your city for actions in other locales.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington beating back the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.

Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on that afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings by many newly radicalized militants about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement to winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands

******

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!

******

Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!

*******

Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,”and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,”effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing, where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml

Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for winning the class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say to us now. Read on.

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..The Midnight Angel

I'll Get By-Paul and Doris Riley's "forever" song.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, you will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent by fellow classmates via the class website. So I have taken on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. That is no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as computer savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Of course not everybody who graduated with me in that baby-boomer time class of over five hundred students had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way. But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever they want. As I have mentioned before in other sketches I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion. (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest. Other stuff defies simple classification, like here where a fellow classmate, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie, the leader, no, the king hell king, of my high school corner boy existence “up the Downs (local expression)” at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor pays homage, I think, to his mother who while she lived was both his main nemesis and his main angel if that makes sense. Here something he put on his personal profile page which I picked up on and we exchanged e-mails about since I knew her in the old days and knew what heartache he brought her and what anguish she brought him as he fought for his place in the sun:

[Frankie and I met up in seventh grade in the junior high school over at Adamsville North where he, after I had moved from the Adamsville projects on the other side of town, took me under his wing and told me what was what. What was what about, well, obviously about girls since Frankie, a good-looking guy and a smooth-talker, always had a bevy of them around him until his “forever” main squeeze, Joanne Murphy, pulled the hammer down in tenth grade (and even then he would sneak around after they had one of their ten thousand break-up fights and he took advantage of his “freedom” to, well, “look around”). Told me too what was what about hygiene and sex (the hygiene part was helpful since my mother neglected to give her children the word on this but the sex part reflected the hard fact that we good Catholic boys learned about the whys and wherefores of sex on the streets and in the locker-rooms and so got a ton of misinformation only corrected years later). And told me also about the ways of the world and not to be a chump (advice I mercifully did not always follow). In return I (and later others when we graduated to hanging our feet on the wall in front of Salducci’s) I was his scribe, his flack-catcher, his “press agent,” his confidant (especially when mother hells reared their ugly head after some Frankie sin, usually venial), his best friend (sometimes in dispute on both sides) and his midnight creeper when we were short of dough. So, yeah, I knew Frankie for a long time until after high school graduation when he went his way a little and I went mine. He eventually to lawyering, I told you he was a smooth talker, and me to political public service (chump stuff in his vocabulary). We kept in touch for a while, drifted apart, got back together drifted, now back, well, e-mail back together since he lives in another state. But mostly for our purposes here I know his mother, or knew her, so what he says here is aces. (I wasn’t his “press agent” for nothing.)]

Doris Margaret Riley (nee Kelly), NAHS Class of 1942, 50 Newbury Street -1925-2007 by Frankie Riley

[Frankie mother (and his grand and great grandparents) had been born in North Adamsville, lived on the street listed above, and she went to the high school there before her marriage to Paul Riley whom she met while working at the Hullsville Naval Depot where she was a clerk and he, after seeing bloody service with the Marines in the Pacific wars, had been stationed there waiting demobilization. They, Frankie and his three sisters, lived with her parents for a while before the moved to Elm Street on the “wrong side of the tracks” (wrong side according to grand-mother Kelly and others) where they lived when I first met Frankie and all through school.

By the beauties of computer technology and the Internet Frankie was able to place his mother’s photo on his personal profile page. The Thomas Parker Public Library, the town library, had several years ago placed all of the Magnet class yearbooks on-line and he had linked and downloaded that photo to his profile page. That photo is what he is referring in his tribute.]

…you cannot tell from this class photograph that this young woman would have more sorrows in her life than she deserved. And created some sorrows too. She had a hard life, had married young, a teenage bride, certainly too young by today’s norms, somewhat sickly with one hungry growing boy and three whining daughters born close together, and an eternally loving husband who however was hampered by his inability to give her whatever he had promised her after he left the Marines at the end of World War II. And the sorrows started early as the four children overwhelmed her capacity to deal with them as they strayed from some worthy paths. (I am being kind to myself and my sisters here.) And so she brought sorrows to them as well. Home life was a series of screams, shouts, verbal fights, an occasional truce, years of estrangement, and in the end bewilderment. Not a pretty picture, not at all, and it never really did get better before the end. I wish it had because now I realize that she did deserve better, whatever her incapacities. Every once in a while I fret over that “deserved better” fact but I am okay with the idea that she did the best she could. Yeah, sometimes a picture isn’t better than one thousand words.

[Enough said, enough said, brother.]

***When The Literary Titians Roared-Hemingway and Gellhorn-A Film Review

Gellhorn and Hemingway in China
DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman, Clive Owen, HBO, 2012

A long time ago when after I had come of age, come of political age in my early twenties, an old socialist I knew and sought personal and political consul from told me after I had ended a fiery affair with a fellow women political activist that that combination did not mix. Meaning that between ego, the stress of high-wire political activity, and just the likelihood of long separations portended doom to two highly political types surviving together for long. (He did not mention the sexual temptations of being away a lot although if I had asked he probably would have added that as well, or as he well should have). Well, apparently, no, obviously, two literary types like Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn the subjects of this film under review, Hemingway and Gellhorn, are under the same constraints. From a long look (almost two and one half hours) at the film it sure looked that way.

When you think about it the above comment makes sense. Take one high-powered manly man (from all appearances, inclinations, life-style and his own bravado) and a top-rated 20^th century author, Ernest Hemingway (played by Clive Owen), and one fetching fearless and feisty journalist, Martha Gellhorn(played by Nicole Kidman), and while sparks may fly in the bedroom they almost surely would fly when careers and other issues came up as well, and they did. From the first meeting in Hemingway watering hole Key West (among many others) when they began that dance that eventually led to the bedroom there was always a one-ups-manship (oops personship) relationship between them from drinking each other under the table to vying for interesting and dangerous war assignments. War assignments that Gellhorn carried out for the rest of her long journalistic career well as the first women to do so, and do it well, after she split with Hemingway in 1945.

Of course meeting in 1936, meeting at time that the Spanish Civil War was breaking out, a time when people, political people had to take sides, so they did her gathering an assignment as a war correspondent and he working on the film Spanish Earth which was produced to raise money for the Republican side. As a longtime interested party in the Spanish Civil, having written many pieces about the struggle, I will add here what I have expressed elsewhere-those who fought and defended the Republican side whatever else our political perspectives from the International Brigades to writer like Gellhorn, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, and the like are kindred spirits. Kudos for Spain.

Naturally in a modern romance-centered drama the romance part (okay, okay the sex part) eventually gained center stage and while in Spain for important political business they were able to finally stop dancing around each other and ruffle up the sheets. Hemingway had a little problem though he was still married his second wife. Eventually that problem got resolved by his divorce and subsequent marriage to Gellhorn. That marriage (rather than living together. let’s say) proved to be a big mistake since Gellhorn had justified big ambitions to cover the impeding wars ahead in Europe and elsewhere after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain and that was a bone of contention throughout their five-year marriage. So, yes, my old socialist friend’s advice applies as well to the literati as well. Enough said.

Note: There are many steamy scenes (oaky, okay sex scenes) in the film between the pair (and why not with a fetching Nicole Kidman) as one would expect in a film using some cinematic license with the true story line. A recent Gellhorn biography and some of her own later comments on the men she had loved and her feelings about sex though would belie some of that torrid sexually displayed. Just so you know if you watch the film. But like I said that’s what cinematic license is all about.

Veterans For Peace In The Boston Pride Parade June 14^th Say Free Chelsea Manning Now!

Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea Manning, now having been held in prison for four years by the United States Government for the simple act of telling the truth, will be honored and remembered as the Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace, long time Manning supporters march in the 44^th Annual Boston Pride Parade on June 14, 2014. We will not leave our sister behind. We will not let President Obama hide behind his cowardly legal screen in this case and will continue to call on him to pardon Chelsea Manning now!

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Daniel Ellsberg Speaks Truth To Power- Hands Off Edward Snowden!

Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong

Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice

- Daniel Ellsberg
- theguardian.com, Friday 30 May 2014 07.45 EDT
- Jump to comments (492)

snowden nbc interview — As the author knows from direct chat-log conversations with him over the past year, Snowden acted in full knowledge of the constitutionally questionable efforts of the Obama administration, in particular, to use the Espionage Act in a way it was never intended by Congress. (Video still via NBC News)

John Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New York Times – "US Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016" – with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam and were to remain for another two years: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
I wondered how a 70-year-old Kerry would relate to that question as he looked at that picture and that headline. And then there he was on MSNBC an hour later, thinking about me, too, during a round of interviews about Afghanistan that inevitably turned to Edward Snowden ahead of my fellow whistleblower’s own primetime interview that night:

There are many a patriot – you can go back to the Pentagon Papers with Dan Ellsberg and others who stood and went to the court system of America and made their case. Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.

On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden "should man up and come back to the United States" to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that's not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers.
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.
Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment).
More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they're saying.
As I know from my own case, even Snowden's own testimony on the stand would be gagged by government objections and the (arguably unconstitutional) nature of his charges. That was my own experience in court, as the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act – or any other statute – for giving information to the American people.
I had looked forward to offering a fuller account in my trial than I had given previously to any journalist – any Glenn Greenwald or Brian Williams of my time – as to the considerations that led me to copy and distribute thousands of pages of top-secret documents. I had saved many details until I could present them on the stand, under oath, just as a young John Kerry had delivered his strongest lines in sworn testimony.
But when I finally heard my lawyer ask the prearranged question in direct examination – Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers? – I was silenced before I could begin to answer. The government prosecutor objected – irrelevant – and the judge sustained. My lawyer, exasperated, said he "had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did." The judge responded: well, you're hearing one now.
And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment, and so it would be if Edward Snowden was on trial in an American courtroom now.
Indeed, in recent years, the silencing effect of the Espionage Act has only become worse. The other NSA whistleblower prosecuted, Thomas Drake, was barred from uttering the words "whistleblowing" and "overclassification" in his trial. (Thankfully, the Justice Department's case fell apart one day before it was to begin). In the recent case of the State Department contractor Stephen Kim, the presiding judge ruled the prosecution "need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage US national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially."
We saw this entire scenario play out last summer in the trial of Chelsea Manning. The military judge in that case did not let Manning or her lawyer argue her intent, the lack of damage to the US, overclassification of the cables or the benefits of the leaks ... until she was already found guilty.
Without reform to the Espionage Act that lets a court hear a public interest defense – or a challenge to the appropriateness of government secrecy in each particular case – Snowden and future Snowdens can and will only be able to "make their case" from outside the United States.
As I know from direct chat-log conversations with him over the past year, Snowden acted in full knowledge of the constitutionally questionable efforts of the Obama administration, in particular, to use the Espionage Act in a way it was never intended by Congress: as the equivalent of a British-type Official Secrets Act criminalizing any and all unauthorized release of classified information. (Congress has repeatedly rejected proposals for such an act as violating the First Amendment protections of free speech and a free press; the one exception to that was vetoed by President Clinton in November 2000, on constitutional grounds.)
John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Speaking Truth To Power- John Kerry Hands Off Edward Snowden!

Friday, May 30, 2014

In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

http://www.bostonmayday.org

Markin comment:

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing, where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..A Running Guy

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Of course not everybody who graduated with me in that baby-boomer times class of over five hundred students had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way. But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever they want. As I have mentioned before in other sketches I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion. (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren mentioned above, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest. Other stuff as here defies simple classification such as this unsolicited contribution on my part to a neglected track man from my era (okay, okay friend too).

On The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner -For The Great Runner Of Our Class of 1964, Bill Cadger

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

This sketch started life a few years ago as a question about why my schoolboy friend the great cross-country runner and trackman, Bill Cadger, had not been inducted into the North Adamsville Sports Hall of Fame. Well that question was summarily answered for me in passing-except for football there is not such organization. Nevertheless, if for no other reason than to get Mr. Cadger to come out of his lair over in Newton and join this site, the following appreciation of his skills stands the test of time.

Funny how things come back to haunt you, although maybe haunt is not just the right word but will do for now. I, probably like you, was over the top in high school about the school teams, especially football. On any given autumn Saturday the big weekday issues were like tissue in the wind when the question of third down and six, pass or run, held the world on its axis. Many a granite grey, frost-tinged, leaves-changing afternoon I spent (or maybe misspent) yelling myself hoarse cheering on our gridiron goliaths, the North Adamsville Red Raiders, to another victory. Cheering for guys I knew, some of whom I knew personally.

Those guys, those brawny guys, who held our humbles fates, our spiritual fates in their hands if you must know because many of us took the occasional defeats just slightly less hard than the team, deserved plenty of attention and applause, no question. Today though I don’t want to speak of them, but of those kindred in the lesser sports, specifically my own high school sports, cross country, winter track and spring track. Running, running in shorts, in all seasons to be exact. I will mention my own checkered career only in passing. You need not hold your breath waiting for thundering- hoofed grand exploits, or Greek mythical olive branch glory on my account.

What you should give your attention to is my aim below to give, or rather to get, some long overdue recognition for the outstanding runner of our high school days, Bill Cadger. Arguably the best all-around trackman of the era, the era of the “geek” runner, the runner scorned and abused by motorist and pedestrian alike, before the avalanche of honors fell to any half-baked runner when “running for your life” later had some cache. Christ, even the guys on the just so-so tennis team got more school recognition, and more importantly, girl recognition, the boffo, beehive-haired, Capri-pants-wearing, cashmere sweater-wearing, tight sweater-wearing girls and even I went over to the courts on Billings Road when the team had competitions to check out the, uh, volleys and serves.

Needless to say no such fanfare tarnished our lonely pursuits, our lonely, desolate pursuits, running out in all weathers. Even the female track scorer was nothing but the girlfriend of one of the shot-putters, and she served only because no other girl would do it, and she loved her shot-putter. Here is how bad it was- a true story I swear. I spent considerable time talking up one female fellow classmate whom I noticed was looking my way one day. That went on for a while and we got friendly. One day she asked me if I played any sports and so I used that opening to pad up my various meager exploits figuring that would impress her. Her response- “Oh, do they have a track team here?”

Yes sad indeed, but so that such an injustice will not fall on Bill Cadger’s eternal exploits I, a few years back, determined to pursue a campaign to get him recognition in the North Adamsville Sports Hall of Fame. To that end I wrote up the following simple plea for justice, the superbly- reasoned argument for Mr. Cadger’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame:

Why is the great 1960s cross country and track runner, Bill Cadger, not in the North Adamsville Sports Hall Of Fame?

“Okay, okay I am a “homer” (or to be more contemporary, a “homeboy”) on this question. In the interest of full disclosure the fleet-footed Mr. Cadger and I have known each other since the mist of time. We go all the way back to being schoolmates down at Snug Harbor Elementary School in one of the old town’s housing projects, the notorious Adamsville “projects” that devoured many a boy, including my two brothers and almost, within an inch, got me. Bill and I survived that experience and lived to tell the tale. What I want to discuss today though is the fact that this road warrior's accomplishments, as a cross-country runner and trackman (both indoors and out), have never been truly recognized by the North Adamsville High School sports community. (See below for a youthful photograph of the “splendid speedster” in full racing regalia.).

And what were those accomplishments? Starting as a wiry, but determined, sophomore Bill began to make his mark as a harrier beating seniors, top men from other teams on occasion, and other mere mortals. Junior year he began to stake out his claim on the path to Olympus by winning road races on a regular basis. In his senior year Bill broke many cross-country course records, including a very fast time on the storied North Adamsville course. A time, by the way, that held up as the course record for many years afterward. Moreover, in winter track that senior year Bill was the State Class B 1000-yard champion, pulling out a heart-stopping victory. His anchor of the decisive relay in a dual meet against Somerville's highly-touted state sprint champion is the stuff of legends.

Bill also qualified to run with the “big boys” at the fabled schoolboy National Indoor Championships at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His outdoor track seasons speak for themselves. I will not detain you here with the grandeur of his efforts for I would be merely repetitive. Needless to say he was captain of all three teams in his senior year. No one questioned the aptness of those decisions.

Bill and I have just recently re-united [2008], the details which need not detain us here, after some thirty years. After finding him, one of the first things that I commented on during one of our “bull sessions” was that he was really about ten years before his time. In the 1960s runners were “geeks.” You know-the guys, and then it was mainly guys, who ran in shorts on the roads and mainly got honked at, yelled at, and threatened with mayhem by irate motorists. And the pedestrians were worse, throwing an occasional body- block at runners coming down the sidewalk outside of school. That was the girls, those “fragile” girls of blessed memory. The boys shouted out catcalls, whistles, and trash talk about maleness, male unworthiness, and their standards for it that did not include what we were doing. Admit it. That is what you thought, and maybe acted on then too.

In the 1970's and 1980's runners of both sexes became living gods and goddesses to a significant segment of the population. Money, school scholarships, endorsements, soft-touch “self-help” clinics, you name it. Then you were more than willing to “share the road with a runner.” Friendly waves, crazed schoolgirl-like hanging around locker rooms for the autograph of some 10,000 meter champion whose name you couldn’t pronounce, crazed school boy-like droolings when some foxy woman runner with a tee-shirt that said “if you can catch me, you can have me” passed you by on the fly, and shrieking automobile stops to let, who knows, maybe the next Olympic champion, do his or her stuff on the road. Admit that too.

And as the religion spread you, suddenly hitting thirty-something, went crazy for fitness stuff, especially after Bobby, Sue, Millie, and some friend’s grandmother hit the sidewalks looking trim and fit. And that friend’s grandma beating you, beating you badly, that first time out only added fuel to the fire. And even if you didn’t get out on the roads yourself you loaded up with your spiffy designer jogging attire, one for each day of the week, and high-tech footwear. Jesus, what new aerodynamically-styled, what guaranteed to take thirteen seconds off your average mile time, what color- coordinated, well- padded sneaker you wouldn’t try, and relegate to the back closet. But it was better if you ran. And you did for a while. I saw you, and Bill did too. You ran Adamsville Beach, Castle Island, the Charles River, Falmouth, LaJolla, and Golden Gate Park. Wherever. Until the old knees gave out, or the hips, or some such combination “war story” stuff. But see, by then, Bill had missed his time.

Now there is no question that a legendary football player like Bill Curran from our class should be in the North Adamsville Sports Hall of Fame. On many a granite gray autumn afternoon old "Bull Winkle" thrilled us with his gridiron prowess running over opponents at will. But on other days, as the sun went down highlighting the brightly-colored falling leaves, did you see that skinny kid running down East Squantum Street toward Adamsville Beach for another five mile jaunt? No, I did not think so. I have now, frankly, run out of my store of sports spiel in making my case. Know this though; friendship aside, Bill belongs in the Hall. What about making a place in the Hall for the kid with the silky stride who worked his heart out, rain or shine, not only for his own glory but North's.