It’s difficult to track the crimes of the Israeli state and Zionism against the Palestinian people. I don’t mean hard to keep count of, true though that may be, but painful. It hurts to keep focusing on them, because they are so unrelenting–another olive grove bulldozed, another protester shot in the head with a tear gas canister, another bombing raid on Gaza, another house demolished.

Sometimes, though, a small outrage jumps out at me and I feel I have to do something, even if it’s just share my anger.

The trigger for this piece is a new policy initiated by Israel Railways. In March, 2009, management moved to lay off 150 Israeli Arabs who worked as guards, monitoring and maintaining railroad crossings. A new policy was put in place–only those with permits to carry weapons could hold the job.

And only veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces, in which few Arabs serve. get these permits. In fact, management stated explicitly that the program is designed to give employment to young veterans in Israel’s shaky economy. The workers have a case before the Labor Board there, but Israel Railways has already started hiring for their positions.

I realized immediately why I grew so angry. This is a direct parallel to what happened to Black railroad workers again and again in the years from the civil war to the victory of the modern civil rights movement.

The issue was the fireman’s job, the backbreaking and filthy job of shoveling coal into the engines of old steam locomotives. Think of Blind Willie McTell, “Statesboro Blues”:

Big Eighty left Savannah, Lord, and did not stop

You ought to saw that colored fireman when he got that boiler hot.

Or the old country tune “Wreck of the Old 97”:

So he turned and he said to his Black greasy fireman

“Shovel on a little more coal…”

But when the economy got real bad, suddenly the “Black man’s jobs” started looking pretty good to Southern whites. In 1911, for instance, 10 Black railroad workers were shot on the New Orleans & Texas Pacific line because the railroad gave them equal seniority with whites. Climbing on the locomotives to pull the spout down from the water tower and position it to refill the boiler, they were sitting ducks for snipers.

In the Great Depression of the ’30s, the same thing happened again. A deadly one-sided war took place, with the all-white unions of the Railroad Brotherhoods complicit in the terror when they weren’t actually organizing it. On the Mississippi division of the Illinois Central from 1932 to 1933, Frank Kincaid, Ed Cole, Aaron Williams, Wilburn Anderson, Frank Johnson and Will Harvey were shotgunned to death. Elsewhere, mob action by “concerned citizens” living along the railroad lines stopped trains and savaged Black firemen and the few white railroad workers who took their backs. The companies filled these sudden “vacancies” with white workers.

Israel’s crimes draw a lot of comparisons. We talk about the “apartheid wall.” David Rovics, in an essay reprinted at Fire on the Mountain, drew a very careful but pointed set of connections with the Nazi regime in Germany. Well, by me, these folks are today’s segregationists, white supremacists, KKK, and they should be understood and dealt with as such.

Reposted from Fire on the Mountain.

In a few hours I’m going to the Pete Seeger 90th birthday concert, courtesy Lee and Alice (pbut). In my early teens, some who know me now will be surprised to learn, I was a folky. These days, not so much.

But I am proud to say, I have never once stopped defending Pete Seeger from criticisms aesthetic and political. His instrument is not and never was his voice, nor even his banjo. It was his audience. And he played his audience so brilliantly because he genuinely loved them and trusted them to help make his music, their music.

His politics? About the worst you could say about him is that he was a mush-minded humanist, but dammit, he was our mush-minded humanist. And that would a half-truth at best. It was from him that I first heard the song “I Hate The Capitalist System” by Sarah Ogan, who was active in the Harlan County coal-mining struggles in the ’30s (the strike in which Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On?” the song in the video above). And possibly his best instrumental composition for banjo, save only the incomparable “Goofing Off Suite,” is his arrangement of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s “Three Rules of Discipline and the Eight Rules of Attention.”

Here is a video that brings all these points together. It’s one of his greatest compositions, a hymn to optimism of the will and the continuity of the struggle called “Quite Early Morning.” It was recorded within the last couple of years in Beacon, NY, and Pete’s voice, as he’s been telling us for years, is shot. It’s freezing cold in the venue where they are taping this. Besides whoever’s behind the camera, there are two people in front of him, bundled up on metal folding chairs, and damned if he doesn’t get them to chime in on the chorus.

Many happy returns, Pete…

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

I had a thought-provoking May Day.

It started on teh Intertubes. The social networking space called Facebook, or at least the small self-created corner of it where I rattle around, was awash in May Day greetings, forwardings and comments. I clicked the li’l thumbs-up button to register my approval of every one that came my way. Literally dozens of my Facebook friends chipped in on the theme.

Some included snatches of poetry, verses to The Internationale, embedded YouTube videos or links to articles on the holiday, like this and others at Kasama and some Rowland Keshena Robinson posted at By Any Means Necessary.

Meanwhile, on Leftist Trainspotters, an oddball internet group for people whose hobby is following left organizations around the world (especially small and peculiar ones), the estimable David Walters, of the Marxist Internet Archives, encouraged everyone to report in on their local International Workers Day activities.

Thus prodded, I headed out to check out two rival May Day rallies called in downtown Manhattan yesterday afternoon. I can’t claim that it was altogether a heartening or uplifting trip.

17000–that’s the main number folks have been talking about lately–the number of additional young men and women the US government is presently sending into harm’s way in Afghanistan.

$2,080,000,000–that’s one that caught my eye recently. It was in a NY Times article entitled “U.S. Plans Afghan Effort to Thwart Road Bombs.”

Actually you had to do a little math to come up with it. Thom Shanker reports that

the Pentagon is planning to buy 2,080 heavily armored vehicles that are more maneuverable than the 2,000 larger models in place. Each costs about $1 million. The more unwieldy version of the troop transport, known as a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, or M-RAP, has trouble negotiating Afghanistan’s rough terrain.

2080 vehicles at a million per (before cost overruns, of course) is over 2 billion dollars. For armored trucks. Because the 2000 the brass already bought won’t work in Afghanistan. And that’s just one small line item in the tab that is being run up for the expanded and prolonged occupation it sure looks like that poor country has in store.

I know 2 billion can seem like chicken feed when we read how much is being shoveled into AIG’s trick or treat bag, but this is a damn wake-up call. As each day brings new signs that the depression we are spiraling into will be long and ugly, we should think very carefully about how smart it is to pump billions and billions into trying to dominate the country they call The Graveyard of Empires.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Having read rjones2828 recent post with Trotsky in the title and noting its deserved persistence on the rec list, I offer another Bolshevik-flavored item, this one cross-posted from Fire on the Mountain, where the Comrade Valentine’s logo is posted and the polyglots among you will also find translations into Swedish, German, and Spanish.

Proletarians! Peasants! Oppressed People!

Fighters For Freedom & Justice Everywhere!

1. Let Us March Resolutely Forward, Rank In Rank,

Under The Heart-Shaped Crimson Banner of Comrade

Valentine!

2. Thoroughly Repudiate All Right Idealist Lines

Which Mystify And Commodify Love And Desire!!

Thoroughly Repudiate All Undialectical

Ultra-“Left” Lines Which Claim That Love And

Desire Undermine Class Solidarity!!

3. Temporary Setbacks Like Proposition 8 in

California, US of A, Cannot And Will Not Stem The

Tide Of History And The Mighty Forward Motion Of

LGBTQ People Advancing Toward Equality And

Liberation!!!

Freedom Road Socialist Organization /

Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

This week marks 49 years since the Greensboro, NC, sit-ins, the historic protest which launched the Black Freedom Struggle in this country onto a new trajectory. Next year we will see a lot of celebration of the courage of the four students who first sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and of the chain reaction it set off. Or at least I sure hope we will.

I wrote such a tribute myself, yesterday. (You can read it directly below the fold.) In the course of refreshing my fading memory, via Google, to complete the task, I found another facet of the Greensboro story. It’s one I had never come across, and one that will, I think, resonate with anyone who has spent much time in the activist trenches.

Many of us know the story of how four students on February 1 became dozens and by February 4, hundreds, as students across North Carolina and the South girded to emulate them and launch the wave of struggles that finally killed Jim Crow.

The other side of the story has to do with the five months it took to crack the management at Woolworth’s and S.H. Kress and the rest of the Greensboro power structure.

The multiplication of protesters in that first week is now at the heart of the legend. But that level of activity was hard to sustain, especially as the students’ demands remained unmet and white hostility grew more intense.

Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil remained part of the organizing core from Day One. McCain recalls:

What people won’t talk (about), what people don’t like to remember is that the success of that movement in Greensboro is probably attributed to no more than eight or 10 people. I can say this: when the television cameras stopped rolling and we didn’t have eight or 10 reporters left, the folk left. I mean, there were just a very faithful few. McNeil and I can’t count the nights and evenings that we literally cried because we couldn’t get people to help us staff a picket line.

I don’t know about you, but I can recall lulls in more than one campaign for justice  when fatigue, frustration, setbacks and doubt had me in tears. When it happens again, and it will, I hope I remember to draw on this part of the lesson of Greensboro, not the audacity and the courage of the students, but the dogged persistence of the core they built.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain

1. Who won? In an immediate military sense, Israel. What do you expect? The Israeli Defense Forces made 2,500 plus F-16 and ‘copter air sorties against a densely populated urban area where the only opposing armed forces possessed no anti-aircraft guns, no surface to air missiles and no planes. It is estimated that repairing the damage suffered by the already desperate inhabitants of this colossal open air prison, the ones who survived, will run over $2 billion. 80% of the agricultural infrastructure of Gaza is reported to have been been destroyed.

Beyond the horrific destruction visited to the Palestinian people, though, the Israelis appear to have picked up a stone only to drop it on their own feet. They will have an uphill slog in the battle for summation, with direct political consequences in increased isolation as sympathy and even material support from people around the world flow to Gaza.

2. Despite careful timing–to take advantage of reduced attention to news during the Christian holiday season and to finish before administration change in the US–Israeli aggression caught world attention. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel dominated the “war of words,” banning foreign journalists from Gaza and working to see that discourse was laced with terms like terrorism, Islamic fundamentalists, security and the like. However, it decisively lost “the war of images” as photos and video provided by the Palestinian news agency Ramattan appeared on al-Jazeera and other news outlets, even CNN. This showed the people of the world the carnage, and the agony of those still living, and it documented IDF attacks on homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities.

3. At the level of international government, Israel pretty much got a free ride at first, due in part to splits among Palestinians and between Arab states, and in part to US intransigence in blocking meaningful action in the UN Security Council. But while governments started out largely sitting on their hands, an unprecedented outpouring of mass anger and protest in country after country forced institutions like the news media and the international  Red Cross and then governments to speak up in criticism of Israel. (Still, only Venezuela and Bolivia broke ties with Israel over the attack).

Three choice examples of the popular struggle, from Europe alone:

Norway, where over 85 pro-Palestinian protests and broader peace marches  took place in 59 towns (in a country of 4.5 million!), saw the most intense rioting in recent memory in central Oslo as police tried to repress militant young protestors. (See the nifty interactive map–in English–from Frontlinjer magazine here.)

In the United Kingdom, even after the truce/ceasefire, students at sixteen (16, count ’em, 16) universities seized campus buildings around a series of anti-Israel and pro-Palestine demands. Most are still on. Students at the London School of Economics and Oxford report victories in negotiations with administrators.

In Greece, a January 9 news story from Reuters sent Greek activists and bloggers into research mode. They were able to identify a contracted shipment of GBU-39 bunker buster bombs scheduled to go from Sunny Point, NC through the port of Astakos en route to Israel. They started organizing for an embargo of US and Israeli shipping including outreach to dockworkers. By the 16th, one week later, the contract was cancelled!

4. In the United States, the astonishing power of the Israel lobby once again gave it unchallenged sway in the media and government. The Senate passed by unanimous voice vote and the House with a total of 5 courageous Nays (Dennis Kucinich, Gwen Moore, Maxine Waters, Nick Rahall and Ron Paul) a resolution hailing the aggression and blaming Hamas for all the Palestinian deaths. Candidate Obama last July signaled his stance, saying, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” (No one in the media asked him about whether he had stolen his house at gunpoint and was keeping the former residents and their children in a concentration camp in his back yard.)

Considering the propaganda barrage and the “conventional wisdom” in the very air we breathe here, the fact that Americans generally (according to a Rasmussen poll) “are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip” (44-41%, with 15% undecided) and that non-Republicans oppose it solidly is a remarkable development.