Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! To be included in next week’s FMJRA, and you’re using Blogger or some other blogware that WordPress hates, please e-mail your links to me by October 14 with “FMJRA” and/or “Shameless Blogwhoring” in the subject line.
In the Spirit of Troy Davis:
“Dismantle this unjust system”
The struggle to build a fight back against capitalism and for a socialist future is the theme of the Workers World Party conference this weekend in the South Bronx. Many of the participants have also been part of Occupy Wall Street.
This revolutionary conference will take up: understanding the global capitalist crisis from a Marxist perspective, fighting racism and imperialist wars, as well as a tribute to death row hero Troy Davis.
Conference organizers have enthusiastically shifted plans to include taking time to go to Wall Street to join the occupation Saturday night and Sunday when the conference adjourns. WWP strongly operates under the firm conviction that revolutionary theory is part of the living struggle in order to pose a real challenge to the capitalist system.
Workers World organizers are urging conference participants coming in from around the country as well as New Yorkers to join the Friday, Oct 7, 5 p.m. March across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street, organized by the Haitian Community under the slogan Don’t Occupy Haiti! Occupy Wall Street!
The Conference is scheduled to open at 9 a.m. in the South Bronx at the Paul Robeson Auditorium at East 140th St and Morris Ave. A day of discussing the global crisis and how to fight for peoples immediate needs will be mixed with understanding the fight for a socialist future in workshops and panels.
On Saturday evening at 7 p.m., participants will take the #4 train directly to the Wall Street subway stop to again join in Solidarity with the Occupation.
The conference will reconvene on Sunday morning at 9:30. It will close at 1:30 in order to enable activists from around the county to join the Wall Street Occupation. A Socialist Solidarity delegation will head to the #4 train down to Wall Street with food and materials.
The WWP National conference is dedicated to the revolutionary internationalist Che Guevara, who was martyred on Oct 8, 1967. Besides paying tribute to Guevara and Troy Davis, the conference will also honor the great actor and activist, Paul Robeson and WWP founding member and chairperson, Sam Marcy.
Updates on the Workers World Party Conference schedule and program will be found at: WorkersWorld.net
Read more at workers.org
Register Online Here for 2011 WWP Conference
Breakfast, lunch and snacks are all available at the auditorium.
Take the # 4, 5 trains to East 138th St. & Grand Concourse or the #6 train to East 138th St and Third Ave.
Walk 3 blocks to East 140th St and Morris Ave. to Paul Robeson Center.
Free Parking on the streets in the location of the conference is easily available.
Here is the link for a promotional video for the Workers World conference. Please distribute widely.
55 W 17th St
New York, NY 10011
212-627-2994
Fax 212-675-7869
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: workersworld.net/wwp
Workers World Newspaper: www.workers.org
Contact a Workers World branch near you!
So, you worthless Commie thugs, which is it? Are the “Occupy Wall Street” protests a thoroughly mainstream event — for so the liberal media has repeatedly assured us — or is it a revolutionary movement? Because I know all about the history of the WWP, and they are the furthest thing in the world from a “mainstream” organization.
Ever since the Tea Party movement began in 2009, the media have relentlessly used guilt-by-association smears to portray the Tea Party as dangerous and disreputable extremists. How many hundreds of thousands of words have liberal journalists expended on this theme? How often have we seen the Tea Party depicted as a tool of the Koch Brothers?
And yet you — you unwashed punks of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement — get no such scrutiny from the press. Are the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press and the major TV networks doing stories about how a Marxist-Leninist organization like the WWP is calling for “solidarity” with your protests as part of their “the fight for a socialist future”?
While the President, liberal Democrats, union leaders and some in the media have tried to convince Americans that this is a grassroots movement that is raging against corporate greed on Wall Street and is being led by disenfranchised Americans, the truth of the matter is that this is the usual bunch of suspects on the far left such as International ANSWER, Code Pink, the Communist Party USA, and the Workers World Party, to name a few — a loose coalition of anarchist groups and angry trust-fund babies looking for their lot in life.
UPDATE: Just in case some liberal network types (who haven’t reported a word about the WWP’s call for “solidarity” with “Occupy Wall Street”) are reading this, here’s the WWP’s YouTube video announcement:
They’re making it easy for you, see? But you’re too lazy and/or dishonest to tell the American people what “Occupy Wall Street” is really about.
After Thursday evening’s “interview” on MSNBC, Professor William Jacobson and others were outraged by Lawrence O’Donnell’s self-righteous and disrespectful hectoring of Herman Cain.
So when the surging GOP presidential candidate agreed to take questions from reporters at his book-signing Friday at the Pentagon City Costco in Arlington, Virginia, I asked the question that many others were asking:
My question comes at about the one-minute mark of the video.
RSM: Mr. Cain, who is Lawrence O’Donnell to tell you how to be a black man?
CAIN: “It’s an absurd thing to try and do, isn’t it? I mean, for Lawrence O’Donnell to try and challenge me on what was I doing during the civil rights movement, that’s about as ridiculous as me asking him, ‘What were you doing when you were in kindergarten?’ The two things don’t even relate to one another. So, you’re right — his attempt to do that failed, in my opinion.”
While I certainly do not wish to accuse O’Donnell of raaaaacism, the way he treated Cain on MSNBC was typical of the let-me-tell-you-what-to-think attitude of elite liberalism. In the minds of liberals, anyone who disputes their pre-conceived narrative — whether about history, economics, foreign policy, race relations or anything else — is not merely wrong, but evil.
That is to say, on any issue that liberals care about, there is exactly one point of view that all people of good faith must share, and anyone who expresses skepticism toward the Official Liberal Viewpoint is presumed to be acting on secret motives of bad faith (mala fides).
So if you dispute, for example, the Official Liberal Viewpoint on “climate change” (anthropogenic global warming), their certainty of your wrongness leads them immediately to provide an explanation for why you are wrong. You may be merely too stupid to grasp the “consensus,” but it’s also possible that you have hidden motives — corporate greed! religious extremism! — that inspire your opposition to the Official Liberal Viewpoint.
This intolerance of dissent is especially characteristic of those liberals who, like O’Donnell, come from privileged upbringings where liberalism functions as a sort of noblesse oblige, and who therefore pre-emptively condemn conservatives as guilty of an indifference to the suffering and hardship of the downtrodden.
For a Boston Democrat of the My-Daddy’s-a-Lawyer variety like Lawrence O’Donnell, Herman Cain’s refusal to accept the Civil Rights Victimhood narrative — the only template for race relations that liberals understand — is a personal insult.
Marooned in Marin has lots more photos of the Costco event. Such was the reaction to O’Donnell’s insultingly high-handed lecture to Cain that O’Donnell spent a good chunk of his Friday show trying to un-dig the hole he’d put himself into. And in this video from Friday, you’ll hear a familiar voice at the 2:48 mark:
With the benefit of hindsight, O’Donnell told Melissa Harris-Perry that he didn’t “want to oversimplify the menu of choice that existed for black families in the South at that time,” although that’s exactly what he had done when he suggested that Cain “sat on the sidelines” rather than participating in demonstrations.
Harris-Perry wisely identified the problem with the manner of O’Donnell’s questions. She said that she was “squirming with discomfort” while watching the interview, and in explaining that discomfort, kindly employed the “royal we,” rather than point the finger directly at her colleague. “When we are not facing the lynchers’ noose,” she said, ”when we are not facing that imminent violence, ourselves, we have to be extremely careful about even the implication that those who did not participate were necessarily cowards.”
She pointed out that “it was always simply a minority of African-Americans who were engaged at any point in the civil rights movement because it was a life and death question.” . . .
Harris-Perry also nailed the inherently racist double-standard embedded in the Civil Rights line of questioning. “I can`t remember anyone ever asking a white politician who is of the same age where they were during the sit ins. As you pointed out in your interview, there were white students who came down to be part of freedom summer. There were white allies at every point.”
“Yet we don’t consider it a litmus test for white politicians to have had enough moral courage, ethical vision and American value to have participated actively in the civil rights movement,” she continued, pointing out that military service is a common such litmus test. “I”m worried when we don’t ask white politicians about their patriotism related to how they have or have not stood up for racial equality.”
Like Herman Cain, I am a native of Atlanta, where Henry Grady’s post-Reconstruction “New South” message of economic growth was first proclaimed, and where Booker T. Washington famously urged American businessmen not to rely on immigrant labor, but rather to “cast down your bucket where you are” by employing black workers. During the civil rights era, Atlanta was proud to be “The City Too Busy to Hate.”
Having been quite literally in kindergarten the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, my personal memories of that era are necessarily limited. However, it has always seemed to me that decent law-abiding people — working hard to support their families and do the right thing in their everyday lives — need make no apologies to anyone.
Politics isn’t the entirety of our existence and we should keep in mind Eric Vogelin’s warning not to immanentize the eschaton. Quiet acts of Christian goodwill done by such ordinary Americans are not recorded in the pages of history books, and were not front-page headlines in 1964, but nevertheless it should be obvious to anyone with common sense that Rosa Parks and Bull Connor are not the whole story of the civil rights era.
If you’re a Mitt supporter, this is an opportunity for him to respond with a speech that puts the question to bed.
Advice to Mitt: go Tea Party in a big way here. If the base considers you a Ruling Class tool, you’re not going to get the support you need. Restated: perfect hair and National Greatness conservativism are a variation on the theme of Progressivism that has put us in this toilet bowl. You need to distance yourself from that.
Paraphrasing, Crowley: How is it possible that you succeeded on your own merit, when African Americans so disadvantaged and have a high unemployment rate? Cain: I wasn’t expecting the Raaaaacist Inquisition! Crowley: No one expects the Raaaaacist Inquisition! Our number one weapon is division and envy. Two! Two main weapons are division, envy, and inculcating a preening sense of entitlement. Three! Oh, wait: this is our private, not-for-release list intended for the Ruling Class Indoctrination. One moment, while they load the correct list on the prompter. Cain: Are you sane? Crowley: With the proper chemical assistance, sure. *Ahem*. No one expects the Raaaaacist Inquisition! Our number one weapon is social justice and guilt. Two! Two main weapons are social justice, guilt, and a little hand-up from the government. I’m not sure who was handling your case, Mr. Cain, but you have to admit that, without the government on your side, and a bit of media cheerleading, you’d still be delivering pizza in a ‘hope tie’? Cain: That’s a hooptie, and, no, your mind is polluted. Crowley: [sobbing] But you can’t become independent, Mr. Cain! It there isn’t a large, captive base of voters to keep big government programs in place, then propaganda jobs like mine will vanish! Cain: I’m sorry, Ms. Crowley, but economic truth, like sobriety, can only be avoided for so long by those staying drunk on other peoples’ money.
“Herman Cain has bottomed out, but still can’t find momentum to get in the air again. …
“If Cain cannot do well in Iowa, he is finished. And with six months to go, Iowa caucus goers are referring to him as a ‘supernova;’ i.e. a great flash of brightness soon to go dark. There are only around 125,000 caucus goers in Iowa. And many of those who were going to go with Cain are now going to Bachmann or waiting for someone else. He’s losing staff in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“I no longer see a path to victory for Herman Cain.”
Karl over at Hot Air links some Scalia goodness on C-SPAN on the Constitutional role of judges. It got me to thinking, though: if federal over-reach is the problem, gridlock may be a powerful tool to limiting government overreach.
If it just hurts too bad to try to get the government federal government to do things for you, then, if you’re like 99% of the people, you’ll figure it out for yourself. The 1% of the #OccupyWallStreet crowd? Well, the brutality in this scene is wrong, but that doesn’t obviate the point: there are, in fact, unreachable people. . .And by unreachable, I mean, ain’t gonna change short of an overt Divine intervention.
Update: linking Hot Air again, let me respond to Tina:
What I find so hard to understand is why the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t actually want what Cain has. They’re jealous, yes, but jealous for all the wrong things.
Socialism is the ultimate form of passive aggression, and an easily described four step process:
Marx said: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
This means: “If I can’t have it, you can’t have it.”
You have; therefore, you stole.
Having branded you a thief, all attacks are moral.
