Some Unsung Heroes Of The Struggle Against Police Murder

I have written elsewhere in praise of the heroism of the people of Ferguson and, more broadly, St. Louis. In a few short months, the ripple effect from their protests have created what is shaping up to be a new historical moment in this country. I have been half-joking for a while now that I have a second hero, the weedy tech who nervously approached his boss and said, "Mr. Jobs, sir, you know we could put a video camera in our iPhones and charge an extra seventy bucks or so for them. People would take videos of their sweethearts and their pets and their kids' school play and then they'd send them around! What do you think?"

Today, there's been an enormous amount of commentary, online and in the press, on the national wave of demonstrations protesting the Staten Island Grand Jury process that walked killer cop Daniel Pantaleo. It is crystal-clear that that much of the outrage is fueled by the readily available cell phone video shot by Ramsey Orta as his friend Eric Garner was choked to death by police. There is no way to deny or spin what you are seeing. And what you are hearing: "I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe…"

So instead of my mythical nerd, I decided to see if I could find out who my hero really is. Credit where credit is due. An hour or so spent with Comrade Google has given me some good candidates at least. Dr. Eric Fossum headed the NASA team that developed the CMOS ASP, the camera-on-a-chip, in the early '90s. A gent named Kazumi Saburi developed the first peer–to-peer video-sharing phone for Kyocera, a Japanese firm in 1997. Doubtless there were others. J-Phone, a Kyocera rival, produced the first commercially successful phone with still and video capability in 2002.

(Perhaps I ought to do some research on the originators of commercially available cloud computing too. Recent court rulings, even by the Roberts Supreme Court, have declared that citizens have the right to videotape police officers in the performance of their duties, that the contents of their cellphones cannot be inspected without a warrant and the police are completely prohibited from erasing any content on phones they have confiscated. This has been a boon to CopWatch programs. The Cloud enters into it because the po-po have repeatedly ignored these rulings. But if a video is automatically uploaded to the Cloud in real time, as in this very recent case, the record of police violence is preserved.)

Should any Alpha Geek deeply versed in this history wants to school me, I welcome corrections or additions. And meanwhile, I sincerely thank Dr. Fossum and Kazumi Saburi, their coworkers and others laboring in the dark satanic mills of the cellphone industry for letting us see, with our own eyes, what happened to Eric Garner.

And Kajieme Powell.

And Oscar Grant.

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WSJ on CEO Pay! Why They Hate The Truth, And Why We Should Spread It

[This article is by my friend John Lacny, a Pittsburgh-based activist. He possesses a pitiless eye for the mechanisms of domination employed by big capital, which make his pieces, like this one, a delight to read.]
 

By John Lacny

 
One of the first bitter lessons you learn as an activist is the fact that just because people know the truth does not mean that things are going to change. People have to actually do something about it -- and organizing them to do something about it is one of the toughest things in the world, not least because it requires you to inspire people to believe that it is possible to change things.

That said, our adversaries are well aware that mass-based knowledge is a dangerous thing for them, which is why they invest so much effort in obscuring the facts. An especially illuminating example of this can be found in an article that appeared in the house organ of capital, The Wall Street Journal, just before Thanksgiving. It is entitled "The Boss Makes How Much More Than You? Controversial New Rule Would Make Companies Disclose Data," and it is accompanied by an illustration in which the average CEO is represented as a gigantic pig. (The average worker is portrayed as a much smaller piggy bank, but what do you expect from the WSJ.)

The subject is a new rule by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would require US companies traded on Wall Street to disclose the ratio of pay between their CEO and their median employee. This rule has been a long time coming, and is the result of 2010's Dodd-Frank financial reform act. Dodd-Frank was a mild financial reform that has more than a few shortcomings, but much like the Affordable Care Act -- which is of similar vintage -- even its mildly progressive features have a way of causing vested interests to break out in hives.

The Wall Street Journal notes that the proposed rule about the CEO-worker pay ratio attracted more than 128,000 comments. Think about this for a minute. Do you know of the obscure website where people can comment on proposed SEC rules? Do your friends? How many of the people you know are even aware of the SEC's existence? Then think about the effort it takes to get someone to comment, and to get that to happen 128,000 times. Is this a grassroots movement that you're unaware of? Not likely, but it is an action encouraged by people who have a hell of a lot of money. And the usual suspects in Congress have responded to the demands of their constituency: Texas teabagger Jeb Hensarling, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter along with two other Republicans calling on the SEC to delay implementation of the rule.

The Journal writes: "Critics say such pay ratios matter little to investors and could make executives easy targets for populist anger or hostile shareholders." Note the explicit values here: These people are quite clear that the purpose of the SEC and the disclosures it requires of companies is to protect investors, not the public at large, and certainly not the people who actually do the work that makes the profits for publicly-traded companies.

Nevertheless, bosses are resigned to the likelihood that they'll have to comply with the rule, and with the desperate determination to mount a defense before they are carted away on the tumbrels, they are putting resources where it matters: into pure PR and HR bullshit artistry. Witness the Journal: "Some employers are taking steps to plan for the possibility of internal morale problems, negative press and an investor outcry over the sizable gulf in pay between the top and the bottom. Among other things, they intend to expand employee training and shareholder outreach efforts."

The first step is no doubt a lot of board room Power Point presentations, many of them prefaced with an icebreaking joke illustrated by a Dilbert cartoon. You won't see that part. The part you will see is the various company handouts and press releases in which they try to defend the indefensible. Your job as an organizer is to see to it that they fail.

The really funny thing about this is that we already know how much corporate CEOs get paid, because the SEC has required companies to disclose that for years. You can look that up any time you want. It is on a website called EDGAR, hosted by the SEC. Each year, every publicly-traded company files a DEF 14A form, more familiarly known as a proxy statement, and the SEC website has all of these. If you're on a fast food strike, and you want to know how much the CEO of McDonald's makes -- in salary, stock and stock options, bonus, and everything else -- you can look that up. (It was nearly $9.5 million last year, by the way.)

So they're not really worried about the disclosure of CEO pay. What they're really worried about is that we will learn how little the rest of us make: "'Half of your workforce is going to [ask], "Why am I paid below the median?"' said Jill Kanin-Lovers, a retired human-resources executive, at a National Association of Corporate Directors conference. 'That's going to be really explosive.'"

We have a perverse culture in this country where workers are not supposed to discuss their pay with one another. This actually starts in the schools. The very same people who like to complain because "kids these days" get participation trophies for sports -- when trophies should really only go to winners -- are the very same people who endorse the idea that a kid should be circumspect about discussing with peers what actually matters in school, which is academic achievement or the lack thereof. This is because if kids know how other kids are being graded, they will be able to figure out if the grading system is unfair and the teacher is playing favorites. Discouraging schoolchildren from discussing their grades is therefore not a salve to the self-confidence of the children who are not as academically proficient as others, but in fact quite the opposite. It is training for an adulthood in the workforce, and intended to inculcate a cringeing, submissive attitude toward one's social "betters" -- masked as American "rugged individualism," of course, when really it is an extreme form of social atomization that actually leads to the opposite of freedom, a life of diminished expectations reinforced by fear.

It is actually illegal for employers in the United States to fire or discipline workers for discussing their pay and working conditions, but most people don't know that, and it doesn't stop managers from doing it even if they know the law. Vindicating a worker's formal rights under the law can be a long and painful process, which is why most people shut up when they're told to do so -- unless they're in a union shop and can therefore count on their coworkers to back them up.

But the statement of Jill Kanin-Lovers is not the last of the revealing statements in this nutrient-rich Wall Street Journal article. Here is another:

"Companies with staff around the world 'worry their pay ratios will mean little because the median employee may be a part-timer in India making a few dollars a day compared with their U.S. CEO, who makes millions a year,' says James D.C. Barrall, a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP who specializes in executive compensation."

There you have it, India: you don't mean shit to corporate America.

But of course, pay ratios mean a lot in the cases of companies with large overseas workforces, perhaps even moreso than with firms whose workforces are mostly domestic. They demonstrate that all the "populist" campaigners are right when they say that US companies lay off domestic workers in order to further exploit workers in the Third World and thereby further enrich the CEOs.

"Populist" is the most terrifying all-purpose curse-word that the business press can affix to someone these days. So when they say that something could be used to stoke "populist anger," it means we should take advantage of the opportunity to prove them right.

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In Defense Of Snark

The recent announcement that Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), creator of the New Synthesis ™, and the only dude with the chops to save our species from collapsing into barbarism and lead it into the bright communist future would be making his first publicly announced appearance in the US in over 30 years has occasioned some comment.

After decades of exile, rumors of sightings, and long, long recorded speeches purportedly delivered in secret conclaves, it was hardly surprising that there would be skepticism and humorous commentary by that small section of the left that remembers him or has followed his career.

Then, though, his acolytes in the RCP advanced a bridge too far. Earlier this month, an anonymous article on their website promoting his upcoming talk at Riverside Church in Manhattan compared the chance to attend with a hypothetical opportunity to see Jimi Hendrix play live in his prime. (Read it here.) As TV Guide used to say: Hilarity ensues.

So brutal (and funny) has been the mockery that the online edition of RCP organ Revolution now contains a little slogan box proclaiming

Damn, can't these folks get anything right?

The culture of snark strikes me as a positive and transformative development in the youth culture of the 21^st century. The last couple decades of the 20^th century were dominated by cheap irony. Everything was equal because everything was worthless. You could do any stupid thing you wanted and simultaneously embrace it and proclaim your superiority to it. Wear a backwards gimme cap with a confederate flag on it and blast Public Enemy out of a boom box. Cheer, ironically, at ultra-patriotic films while stuff blew up. Or people. If you were around and paying attention then, you know what I mean. Irony's slogan is a world-weary "Whatever" with a knowing smirk.

Snark may share an evolutionary ancestry with pure irony, but the two occupy very different branches on the tree of worldviews. Its apostles in our era are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It is not a declaration of the equivalence of everything, because it has a place to stand—a standpoint, if you prefer. The snark stance carries with it the idea that things don't have to be as they are, and, further, that there are forces responsible for them being as they are or getting worse. Those forces should be mocked, be exposed and be opposed. They are the target of snark.

I'm not saying it's revolutionary. It's not. Hell, it's not like I've thought through this little exercise in cultural typology in any deep or systematic way. It may be entirely wrong-headed. But until argued out of it, this is where I stand.

And if that means being snarky about "the Jimi Hendrix of the Revolution," so be it.  At least I'm not wearing the peculiar little pin of Avakian the RCP made--the tiny featureless, text-less one which bears the image known as The Blob--trying to make some kind of contentless ironic statement.

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Now It's 400,000 Climate Marchers? Puh-leeze...

Okay, I'm going to keep this short.

I thought I was done with the topic last night when I posted a piece here pegging the crowd in yesterday's nifty People's Climate March at over 100,000, a very impressive turnout, and explaining how that figure was arrived at. Toward the end, I criticized an estimate attributed to March organizers of 310,000.

I woke up to discover my blogpost had generated a certain amount of interest and a bunch of Facebook comments They were even mainly favorable.

I also found that the organizers had jacked their "official" count up to 400,000. I thought, that’s just silly. Maybe they're counting all the folks who took part in demos around the world, like this one in Tromsø, Norway that my friend Jon-arne sent me shots of.

Nope, according to the NY Times. "Organizers, using data provided by 35 crowd spotters and analyzed by a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University, estimated that 311,000 people marched the route." So far, no indication of whether the unnamed numbers cruncher also bumped her figures up by 89,000 overnight.

400,000 "marched the route"? A convenient number, on account of the March took just a hair over 4 hours to pass our vantage point on 53^rd and 6^th. So call it 100,000 people an hour. That works out to--lessee, strike the last zeroes—1,666 people passing a given point every single minute that the March lasted. This simply did not happen. If you weren't there, look at the photos on the front cover of today's Times or browse around on Flickr. That kind of density isn't there, even if all the people had been sprinting. Which they weren't.

So what? It feels good to see Fox News saying 400,000 marched, right? (Of course I don't believe what they say about anything else, but still...) Where's the downside of inflating crowd figures, some friends ask. For a more rounded argument about this, check my blogpost from last year, "Let's Stop Inflating Crowd Counts, Eh?"

In practical terms, I'm inclined to think the blowback comes almost immediately. We want to take the momentum, the high spirits and determination of the People's Climate March and convert it into continued action. Of course only a certain percentage of those who marched will go home and plan local protests or build groups or  promote petitions or lobby Congresscritters or register green voters or sabotage pipelines anyhow. But it's not hard to predict with a high degree of precision how many of the 275,000 phantom marchers will be galvanized into action. That is bound to dishearten not only the people who make up the base of the movement, but even those organizers and leaders who go for the okey-doke. 

 It's Amilcar Cabral time again: 

Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.

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Once More on Counting Crowds at Demos

[UPDATE: This caused some controversy when it was first posted, so I wrote a shorter--and crankier--follow-up piece a day later, which has a few additional thoughts.]

What a splendid march!

Props first of all to the 100,000 plus people who came to NYC from around the US (hello, South Dakota Quakers!) and around the world to stand up against the carbon-burning—and not coincidentally, capitalist--economy that is destroying the habitability of the planet for an awful lot of the present biosphere, including humans. You tended a tad toward the white end of the spectrum to be sure and were perhaps a bit naive, but you were young, you were jazzed and you were mighty imaginative in your posters and costumes and slogans.

Props too to the organizers who turned out all these folks on a very tight time-line, who made excellent use of the Internet and social media to build the protest, and who organized a very smoothly run march.

But let's face facts, nobody is much interested my review of the People's Climate March. What you want to know from me is how many people were there. I will give you two answers:

1. There were well over 100,000 people, likely a bit upwards of 120,000 in the march.

2. No way in hell were there 310,000 people on that march.

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The War Over Gaza: A Battlefield Report from the Facebook Front

This title may seem snarky, but it is deadly serious. What the Israeli Defense Forces call Operation Protective Edge, the deadly assault on the population of Gaza, is the most important war so far in the social media era. And this is being forcefully brought to our attention in ways that are both political and personal, but in any case increasingly difficult to avoid.

And the part about a report from the battlefront? That's because I don't pretend this is a definitive or even a deep analysis. It is a quick battlefield bulletin that I hope will get other people to think about this and chip in their own thoughts and experiences.

From the personal

I have been in half a dozen conversations, actual voice to voice conversations, over the last two plus weeks which all centered around a single shared experience. Some friend--an old and dear comrade, or a high school classmate rediscovered in recent years through the magic of the intertubes, an in-law or maybe just some amusing Facebook "friend"--suddenly, unexpectedly, turns out to be a zionist, or perhaps an I’m-not-really-a-zionist equivocator who tut-tuts po-faced over Israel's slaughter of the innocents and suggests that it's really all Hamas's fault.

And how did we learn this? By a news story these friends share, a status report, a comment on a contentious thread. It's jarring, in some instances actually chilling, to find this deep difference. If we explore it, even tentatively, in an online thread or exchange of posts, we can feel the barriers going up. They may not be 20 feet high and made of concrete poured over rebar but they are real barriers, as real as bannings and unfriendings.

To the political

And these lost or damaged friendships, online or IRL, are, in one sense, casualties in one front in the war in Gaza. This not a front restricted to the Raleigh, NC-size, battered hellhole of a ghetto that is both home and prison camp to 1.8 million Palestinian men, women and children. It is a global battlefront, one in which many of us are, willy-nilly, combatants.

At the time Barack Obama took office and moved to ramp down the unjust and unjustifiable occupation of Iraq, there were about 50 million users registered on Facebook globally. Today there are a billion and a third! Twitter use wasn't even on the map.

Blogs, with few exceptions, have been correspondingly diminished as a locale for exchange of news and ideas, while Twitter seems less a replacement for and more of a compliment to Facebook-style social media. As for old skool broadcast news and dead-tree newspapers, they are pale shadows of their former selves. Breaking news comes to more and more people first through social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook.

I'm not saying this is the first war of the new era, Social media was how we tracked the Arab Spring. The continued catastrophic fighting on the Middle East and Ukraine are obvious recent examples.

But this war is one where the battle for public opinion is paramount. Israel is has been exceedingly nervous about social media for quite a while now and devotes considerable effort to promoting her foreign policy on it, though expending only a fraction of the total money it drops on other parts of its coordinated influence buying, lobbying and manifold other public relations (PR) efforts.

Still, those running Israeli social-media efforts, whether in the IDF, the foreign ministry or government-funded think tanks, are faced with a horrific problem. Israel's armed forces, among the largest and best equipped in the world, are engaged in a brutal assault on a poorly armed militia—and on everybody who lives in the same high-security prison camp with them. The photos of shattered children, mourning families, burning power plants, whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble tell a story very different from the one Israel has been promoting.

My neck of the FBosphere

I spend too much time on Facebook and I have a mess of FB "friends." True, many rarely post or even remember they are on. Others have been steered out of my line of sight by restrictive FB algorithms. As a result, most of the people whose stuff I see regularly tend to be folks who share my politics to one degree or another.

And I have found an intense spontaneous response to the assault on Gaza. Comrades and friends around the country have taken up the question in large numbers, posting and linking frequently. In fact, there have been more pleasant surprises, folk I hadn't really expected to see jump in on something like this choosing to stand up, than the disappointing moments I mentioned above.

I certainly have ramped it up, and, in doing so, have tried to develop a more systematic approach, which I will detail in another piece. A couple of my links to articles on the origins of this attack have been shared by dozens of people. And naturally I've tried to promote demonstrations and other protests, and share reports on them.

Israel's strategy

I mentioned the importance the Israeli state and establishment and allied organizations globally place on this battle. The Hebrew term "hasbara" means explanation, but has come to have connotations of PR or propaganda. The IDF maintains a Hasbara War Room (and has for over a year) where college students fluent in a variety of languages sit at 400 computers pretending to be something other than paid advocates of the official Israeli line. Trolls, in other words. Some argue points. Some seek to disrupt threads with ad hominem attacks and nonsensical claims. Some are "concern trolls" who express sympathy for the Gazans and go on to urge capitulation to Israel as the only practical option.

Of course, most of the defenders of Israel one finds on the net are not necessarily paid or sitting in a "war room." Rather they are individual zionists who feel their cause passionately and put it forward with varying degrees of coherence. The arguments do have a certain sameness to them, though. This was masterfully summed up six years ago, by the anti-zionist website Jews sans frontieres who lay out a four point template for  pro-Israel argument:

1. We rock
2. They suck

3. You suck
4. Everything sucks

Besides being extremely funny, in the "If you see me laughing, well, I'm laughing just to keep from crying" sense, it touches on something very profound. Israel's minimum program is to get people to turn their heads away from the suffering of the Palestinian people. Israel holds the military whip hand. If global public opinion doesn't bring pressure to bear on their government and on the US government, Israel's main enabler, they can keep committing these crimes indefinitely.

The Palestinian side

So in a sense our job is to keep the suffering of the Palestinians front and center. Supporters globally have been doing this in recent weeks, but let's not forget that we are functioning as allies of those who live on the real life battlefront.

There are no 400-computer war rooms under central government direction in Gaza (or anyplace else) but there are people with cell phones who can take pictures and post reports, and they have truth on their side. I was reminded of this by a courageous young woman from Ramallah with whom I've had several on-line exchanges on Facebook, We'am Hamdan has been promoting the Palestinian cause on the internet since long before the assault on Gaza, "because the conflict affects my being as a Palestinian living in the occupied territories of the West Bank."

We'am works with an informal crew in Gaza and the West Bank who had a brilliant idea. They started a Facebook page entitled Humans of Palestine. The name tells the story—it was based on the hugely popular internet phenomenon Humans of New York, which couples a snapshot of a person or two and a comment about their life in their own words.

The idea of the page was to reflect the dreams of Palestinian people and their daily lives. But since the offensive started, the page aims at restoring the humanity that is often stripped away when Palestinians are reduced to calculative deaths, forgettable names, and burned and mutilated bodies, rather than people who shared loved ones, stories, dreams and aspirations.

This is a goal that I, for one, intend to learn from and to promote in my little section of the battle front.

Is it worth it?

We'am Hamdan can have moments of self-doubt about the value of her efforts. "Sometimes I feel that it's a stupid virtual battle and it won't change much. Sometimes I feel, No! It's very important to raise awareness within the international community."

Like her, like many of us, I sometimes wonder how much is being accomplished. But until I find a better way of tackling the job, I plan to continue, just as I plan to continue going to demonstrations that the media and the political establishment do their level best to ignore.

One way I hope to do that is with two follow-up pieces to this, one on how I am currently approaching the battlefield in practical terms and one on what happens when, inevitably, the IDF pulls back, leaving ruins in its wake, and Palestinian suffering continues while the world's gaze drifts elsewhere…

I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

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Now That's What I Call A Young Adult Book!

It's a dream come true. You know how there's a book you know exists but somehow you can never find it? Well, I am thrilled to say that thanks to the magic of Teh Intertubes and the vagaries of US copyright law, I have finally been able to read The Boy Troopers On Strike Duty, and it's a corker.

Let me back up and take a running start. Have you ever read any of the old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books, the originals I mean, not the weak tea retreads from the '60s and later? You may recall that the villains were generally swarthy "Dagos" or perhaps sinister Slavs, and our plucky WASP protagonists would best them with grit, strength and ingenuity.

There were scads of similar series, some a bit more proletarian in flavor, I have before me here as I type a copy of one of the volumes in Allen Chapman's Railroad Series, which starts with the delightfully titled RALPH OF THE ROUNDHOUSE Or, Bound to Become a Railroad Man.

I read, back in my teen years, one of the Boy Troopers Series, by one Clair W. Hayes, about two fine young fellows who serve as valued allies of the Pennsylvania State Troopers, one of the first such forces. The other titles in the series were listed and one was The Boy Troopers On Strike Duty. Decades passed and I never came across a copy of this promising title, until last night. An idle search for one prompted Comrade Google to direct me to a very nice scan of the original 1922 edition, all set up for quick reading, full screen.

My heart sank when I saw on the cover and again on the title page The Boy Troopers On Duty. What happened to the Strike part?  Happily, when the story starts on page 3, the title is there again with the fateful word restored and the second paragraph takes us to the streets of a Pittsburgh suburb, Wilmercairn, streets crowded with "foreigners."

Until the day before, these men--or a good many of them, at least--had been apparently faithful employes of the Wilmercairn Steel Tube Company.

Today they were strikers--a small fraction of the steelworkers in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia Districts--who had joined a walkout for more money and shorter hours. The total number of men on strike in these districts ran into the millions.

I doubt I'm spoiling anything for potential readers when I say, with regret, that despite this promising start, the working class does not seize state power in the region by the end of the book.

However, the strikers make a good run at it, planning an armed attack to seize the main mill and deploying a couple of machine guns in carrying it out. Not, mind you, that these foreigners could have come up with this on their own. (And generic foreigners is what they remain until page 123, where we finally learn that the "firebrands" are "composed entirely of Hungarians, Slovaks and other foreigners.") No indeed, they were stirred up by homegrown American "professional agitators":

These walking delegates were enlarging on the supposed grievances of the foreign strikers.

Alas, we are introduced to only one of these splendid gents and get no idea of his organizational affiliation or political views.

The factory managers, however, come up with a strategy better than their initially planned army of strikebreakers with the help of the heroes, Dick and Ralph: pitting true blue American workers against the foreigners by promising them much better pay and benefits. Although "there are a hundred 'Hunkies' in the mill to every American," the lads succeed in breaking the strike, with the aid of their state trooper buddies, after any number of fist fights, gun fights and narrow escapes. And the boss's daughter for romantic interest.

Even so, it is a close thing and one can dream (even if one is not among the "Boys 12-16 Years of Age," who were the author's target audience).

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A Black Dyke Reflects on the Panthers

[It's Pride, at least here in NYC. In honor of that fact, I am posting here an article that Comrade Google suggests is not otherwise available on the Internet. It appeared as one of a stunning roundup of pieces by Black LGBTQ writers in The Advocate in one issue in the 1990s, under the irresistible title "Black Out."

By me, they should all be online, but I am posting this one for obvious reasons. It is by Alycee Lane, then a grad student at UCLA. In it she discusses what the Black Panther Party had meant to her—as an elementary school "baby dyke" in Buffalo and then later as she learned about Huey Newton's famous speech in which he welcomed the women's and gay liberation movements and called on the BPP to work with them. That was in 1970 when the modern queer movement was first erupting in all its Stonewall-fueled glory—and when many other self-styled revolutionary and socialist organizations shied away from it, or adopted appallingly homophobic stances. 

There's a lot about our history to be learned from this short piece, and there's always a chance that it won't be up at Fire on the Mountain forever, so if you agree with me on its importance, I encourage you to save it and to make sure others have access.]

The Black Panther Party And Gay Liberation

By Alycee Lane

I really wanted to be a member of the Black Panther Party when I was younger. I imagined myself one day galvanizing the other kids in my neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., and conducting a righteous raid on that one house I passed on the way to my integrated school—that horrifying white house that donned, hatefully, a sprawling banner stained with the curse WHITE POWER. Yeah, I was going to conduct a righteous raid. I figured this was the Panther thing to do, especially since I had seen the brothers walking proudly with their guns, policing the police, who were, in my young opinion, somehow connected to the curse.

In spite of their guns and "baaad black man" attitudes, it never occurred to me to feel intimidated by or afraid of the Panthers. For they never failed to greet me with love—"Good morning, little sister" and "How are you doing in school? Making those grades? Learning about your history?" I simply wanted to be with and be like them. I didn't know about the Panther

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For My 'rades in Jackson, A Poem of Mississippi Summer

[Some comrades of mine are among those gathered this weekend in Jackson MS for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, or Mississippi Summer as we called it then. I post this poem for them.

I wasn't in Mississippi that summer. I was fourteen, not what the organizers were looking for, and my mother didn't think much of the idea either. So I followed it in the news.

When James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman disappeared on the night of June 21, we all pretty much knew what had happened. By a week later, 50 years ago tonight, there was no doubt.

This poem by John Beecher, a white southerner, a communist and a people's poet, locates Summer, 1964 in the long battle for freedom. For me the closing stanza conjures up 1964 as little else can, save only the civil rights anthems we sang, North and South, as the freedom struggle advanced.]

A COMMEMORATIVE ODE

For the 60^th Anniversary of the Beecher Memorial

United Church of Christ in New Orleans, Louisiana,

October 25, 1964

Old church with the same name as my own

you and I were born in the same year

It has taken two generations to bring us together

Now here we are in New Orleans

meeting for the first time

I hope I can say the right thing

what the man you are named for

might have said on one of his better days

He was my great-great-uncle

but come to think of it

he was instrumental in my founding too

Rolled in a tube at home I have a certificate

signed by Henry Ward Beecher

after he had united my grandfather and grandmother

in the holy bonds of matrimony

at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn

The year was 1858

and James Buchanan was President

The South was riding high

making the North catch and send back its escaped Negroes

and it looked to most people

as if slavery was going to last forever

but not to Henry Ward Beecher

which I suppose is why you named your church for him

He certainly helped change all that

together with his brother Edward and his sister

whose name was Harriet

and Mr. Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant

and a large number of young men

who wound up under the long rows of crosses

at Gettysburg Chickamauga Cold Harbor and such places

Nineteen hundred and four was a better year

than 1858

and the building of this church was a sign of it

It was no longer a crime to meet and worship by yourselves

with your own preacher

your own beautiful songs

with no grim-lipped regulators to stand guard over you

nobody breaking up your services with a bull-whip

Yes this was some better

Booker T. Washington was in his hey-day

the apostle of segregation

"We can be in all things social as separate as the fingers"

he said and Mr. Henry Grady the Atlanta editor

applauded him to the echo

as did all the other good white folks around

and they said

"This boy Booker has a head on his shoulders

even if it is a nappy one."

Dr. Washington was 48 years old at the time

but you know how southern whites talk

a man is a boy all his life if he's black

Dr. Washington was a pragmatist

And settled for what he could get

When they announced that dinner was served in the dining car

he ate his cindery biscuits out of a paper bag

and when George the porter made up berths in the Pullman

he sat up all night in the Jim Crow coach

Because of his eminently practical attitude

Dr. Washington was successful in shaking down

The big white philanthropists

Like C.P. Huntington the railroad shark

or was it octopus

and Negro education was on its way.

Old church

since 1904

you and I have seen some changes

slow at first

now picking up speed

I have just come from Mississippi

where I saw churches like this one

burned to the ground

or smashed flat with bombs

almost like Germany when I was there in 1945

only these Negroes were not beaten people

They sang in the ashes and wreckage

such songs as We Shall Overcome

and Let My Little Light Shine

O Freedom! they sang
Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave

And go home to my Lord and be free

They sang I'm going to sit at the welcome table

I'm going to live in the Governor's mansion

one of these days

I heard three mothers speak

who had made the President listen

and "almost cry, or he made like he was about to cry"

when they told him how their homes had been dynamited

"It's not hard to be brave"

one of these mothers said
"but it's awful hard to be scared"

I expect see her statue on a column in the square

in place of the Confederate soldier's

one of these days

Remember

Slavery looked pretty permanent in 1858

when it had just five years to go

and now in 1964

the White Citizens' Councils and the Ku Klux Klan

think they can keep their kind of half-slave South forever

Their South isn't on the way out

It's already dead and gone

only they don't know it

They buried it themselves

in that earthwork dam near Philadelphia Mississippi

when they thought they were getting rid of the bodies

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SDS "Red Guards" Sum Up the Battle of People's Park, 1969

I am posting today a document from 1969, a summation of the Battle of People's Park in Berkeley, CA. It is one very cool document, for several reasons:

1. It reclaims another bit of the history of people's struggle from the Great American Memory Hole. Those who came up in the '60s will find their memories jogged, while younger folk will get a glimpse of a different period in our long battle to smash exploitation and oppression.

People's Park was created by radical students and community residents in Berkeley, CA on a trashed and abandoned lot on the University of California campus there. It embodied many of the strains of what we think of as The Sixties—a radical critique of the corporate multiversity and of capitalist property relations, a turn to "natural" rather than built environments, do-it-yourself approach to social change, direct action tactics. After a period of community meetings and articles in the local underground press, construction began on April 20, 1969. Residents donated tools, sod, plants, time and sweat.

California governor Ronald Reagan had run pledging to crack down on UC Berkeley students, whom he had called "communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants." Here was his chance. Overriding ongoing local negotiations involving activists, the U and the city, he sent cops in on May 15 to trash the park and erect an 8' chain link fence around the site.

A campus rally produced a march of thousands to liberate the park. Cops fought them off while Reagan's chief of staff Ed Meese ordered in hundreds of reinforcements from all over the Bay Area. The pigs used shotguns and rifles, killing student James Rector, who was watching from a roof and wounding over 100. Meese nrought in the National Guard, days of freeform street protest followed, and the park was eventually reclaimed.

2. The document is an impressive early attempt at summation in Marxist (and Maoist, to be more exact) terms of a major struggle by Red participants. In this case folks who had helped build the Park, and took part in the action summed it up, using the method of analyzing strengths and weaknesses, and looking at the class forces and political lines involved in the way the battle played out.

3. It is a glimpse at the birth pangs of new communist movement of the '70s. This can be seen most clearly in the polemics are delivered against other tendencies. Least effective (in retrospect) is the section targeting a Jim Mellon article on People's Park in New Left Notes (the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society). Mellon was an early theorist for the trend that became the Weather Underground, while this paper is clearly aligned with the emerging RYM II trend. The authors of the article critique

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How Hip Hop Prefigured "The New Jim Crow"

[Welcome to the first article in a while FotM has posted by old friend Mark Naison, activist, organizer, educator, scholar, novelist, Bad Ass Teacher and, on occasion, MC (as The Notorious PhD). This essay draws on various of his skills to make an argument so clear that it may strike folks who never thought about it as obvious. The incisive work of Michelle Alexander in her 2010 The New Jim Crow has been transformative in its effects, but many whose view of the world it so bluntly readjusted might not have found it so surprising had they been listening carefully to many of the hip hop cuts of two decades ago.      Jimmy Higgins]


Hip Hop Commentary on the Prison System:
An Unrecognized Antecedent to The New Jim Crow

by Mark Naison

"You ain't gotta be locked up to be in prison
Look how we livin, thirty thousand niggas a day
Up in the bing, standard routineThey put us in a box just like our life on the block"

Dead Prez  “Behind Enemy Lines”

When Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow several years ago, many people were shocked to discover the devastating impact that the drug war and mass incarceration had on Black communities throughout the nation.  The narrative her book contained was not one which had wide dissemination in commercial media, and was certainly never presented with the power, authority and mixture of statistical evidence and storytelling that The New Jim Crow displayed

However, there was one place where the story Michelle Alexander presented was highlighted with equal eloquence, and at times, even greater vividness and that was Hip Hop. From the late 1980’s through the beginning of the 20^th Century, as the crack epidemic and the drug war it triggered led the number of incarcerated people to exceed 2 million and the number of people it indirectly affected by it to reach at least 10 times that number, a number of the most talented hip hop artists in the country, some commercially successful, some not, told heartbreaking stories in their music about what the prison system and the drug war were doing to individuals and whole communities.

Hip Hop artists, on the ground in the most affected communities, coming from the generation of young people who gravitated to the drug business as the legal economy in their communities produced only low-paying service jobs, began spinning out prison narratives in great profusion, some of them filled with political commentary, some of them offering personal stories in grim detail.

In the first category is Brand Nubian’s “Claimin’ I’m a Criminal” which sees the police apparatus developed during the drug war as something used to crush dissent in the Black community and  views prison as a place filled with rebels against mass impoverishment

I know the game so I just roll with the procedure
Illegal search and seizure, somethin that they're doin at their leisure
Down at the station, interrogation is takin place
Overcrowded jails but for me they're makin space
Tell the devil to his face he can suck my dick
It's the whole Black race that they're fuckin with

But even amidst their rage at the incarceration of a generation of Black youth, Brand Nubian offers this heartrending portrait of what jail feels like to any inmate, activist or not- when you are alone with desperate angry men, separated from your crew, your children, your wife or girlfriend, fearful for your life, afraid you are going to losing everything you had on the outside.

I was frustrated, I can't do no more push-ups
Niggas be swole up, locked down cos of a hold-up
"The devil made me do it" is what I say
Got some bad news on my one phone call the other day
"I love the kids and I teach em to love their father
I'll get you some kicks and try to send some flicks
But it's over, baby, yes it's over"
Ain't much you can do when you're holdin a phone
A million inmates but ya still alone
You're not cryin but inside ya dyin
You might cry in the night when ya safe and outta sight
Damn I miss my peeps and the rides in the jeeps
And my casual freedom, where's my crew when I need em?

An even more detailed look at prison life, without the explicit political commentary , is presented what most think is the greatest hip hop prison narrative ever written, Nas’s “One Love.’ which appeared on his landmark album “Illmatic,”  which appeared when he was only 19 years old. Nas (Nasir Jones) who grew up in the Queensbridge Houses in New York creates a narrative in which prison, along with early death, has become the fate of an entire generation of Black youth living in the inner city in the late 1980’s to mid 90’s. The conversational intimacy of Nas's account, which juxtaposes portraits of prison life to those of street life, is the stuff of great literature, presenting an alternate reality which middle class Americans, Black as well as white, had little direct exposure to:

What's up kid? I know shit is rough doing your bid
When the cops came you should've slid to my crib
Fuck it, Black, no time for looking back, it's done
Plus congratulations you know you got a son
I heard he looks like you, why don't your lady write you?
Told her she should visit, that's when she got hyper
Flippin, talk about he acts too rough
He didn't listen he be riffin' while I'm telling him stuff
I was like yeah, shorty don't care, she a snake too
Fucking with the niggas from that fake crew that hate you
But yo, guess who got shot in the dome-piece?
Jerome's niece, on her way home from Jones Beach - it's bugged
Plus little Rob is selling drugs on the dime
Hangin out with young thugs that all carry 9's

Nas’s intimacy with the dangers on the inside, of rapes and beatings and deadly beefs, whether on Rikers Island or in upstate prisons (Elmira) gives the song a chilling quality. Here is a 19 year old artist who lives in a world where death and humiliation lurk around every corner:

But I heard you blew a nigga with a ox for the phone piece
Wildin on the Island, but now in Elmira
Better chill cause them niggas will put that ass on fire
Last time you wrote you said they tried you in the showers
But maintainwhen you come home the corner's ours

In the final verse, Nas acknowledges that nothing he has ever learned in school, or read, prepared him for the realities he and his friends face, and  proclaims writing them down in verse as his personal mission:

Sometimes I sit back with a Buddha sack
Mind's in another world thinking how can we exist through the facts
Written in school text books, bibles, et cetera
Fuck a school lecture, the lies get me vexed-er
So I be ghost from my projects
I take my pen and pad for the weekend

Nas was Michelle Alexander before The New Jim Crow, warning anyone who would listen of the tragedy befalling his generation. But it was 1994, and no one much outside of the hip hop audience  listened.

The combination of intimate details of prison life and acute consciousness of tragedy, which Nas's song highlights, appears in a great many Hip Hop prison narratives which followed “One Love” including those which were circulated only locally in various cities. Rawcotics, a Dominican Hip Hop group from Washington Heights, displays these features in a song widely circulated in NY called “Going All Out.” First the duo describes the virtual inevitability of incarceration among young men in their neighborhood:

Whats all my niggas is getting rich by breaking the law
Going through banded walls
Soothing the pain up with alcohol
Living the criminal tradition of organized crime and cooking mines
Playing with nickles and dimes
And then millions civilians is still snitching
Dangerous for legal living that is caused by the ammunition
Uncle Sam is mad win again
Every time we get locked up we feel somebody's throwing the coffins

That done, they move on to a fear filled narrative of what awaits them in prison:

Ayo my drug infected sections got me infected what a selection direction
Department of corrections. Check though I left my castle unprotected
On a bus with these addicts stressing my necklace bullpens full of hooligans bull
Many vipers and mad syphers for the phone you get blown to the bone
. . . .
Me that body be in the infirmary emergency look at the shit that I got
Into for the American Currency Guliani got new laws got me looking at
Great walls bangs are being made in the mess hall

There is no pretense that this is anything but normal reality for young men in Washington Heights, as it was for those in the Queensbridge Houses. Did anyone outside this world notice, or care? Not much--at least in the 1990’s.

At the end of the decade, some politically conscious hip hop artists began to directly address the indifference towards the mass incarceration of young men in inner city communities on the part of the vast majority of the American population. Some artists came together on an album called No More Prisons and one of the most powerful contributions was a song by Chubb Rock, and Lil Dap, Ed O.G. and Paw Duke  “Rich Get Rich” with a chorus that presents a chilling view of life in the “hood”:

Because life ain't shit, you got to work for yours
Got to hustle from the bottom just to feed the poor
Niggas think shit is funny, got to work for yours
See the rich get, rich, the poor get poor

But the most powerful lyric is Chubb Rock’s enumeration of major New York and New Jersey prisons along with matter of fact references to the things that happen to people in them, along with a cry of rage at the rich who profit from crime and somehow never end up behind bars;

The JFK niggas died in cellblock 9
From the crack lackeys, hold your asshole in Coxsackie
Green Haven nigs in pens sweatin like pigs
Niggas get clockwork for five to ten blockwork
Then cry for balance, then toss the salads
Of the long wrong life, beaten knife, wound cabbage
Greenvale niggas at night, for bail adage
.....
The Guilianis, Armanis, who launder
The ducats from the Mexicans sweatin niggz from Rahway
How the fuck can street crack rule the NASDAQ?
That's like a rap nigga getting a check from ASCAP --
Can't happen, after Attica rule the Richter
The poor went raw and the rich got richer

The song, which in some way prefigures Michelle Alexander’s entire argument, ends with a passionate shout out by Chubb Rock to people he knows behind bars:

D-Rock, peace peace and one time peace
Freeze Love, peace peace and peace peace
Cocksachie, Greenvale, Greenwald
Attica, one more time, hold on
Rahway, come back cell block H
And everybody in Riker's, one love
One love..

At around the same time, Dead Prez came out with a song called “Behind Enemy Lines” that may be the most powerful direct indictment of mass incarceration and its impact on the Black community ever recorded  As you review the lyrics I quote, please remember that this song appeared at least ten years before the appearance of  The New Jim Crow:

The song begins with an invented dialogue between  a guard and prisoners that goes as follows:

Let's go fellas, shower time's in five minutes

Get those feet off the table, whaddyou think this is, home?

(This is bullshit - yo son let me get a cigarette)
(I'ma go.. back to my cell and read)
That's it - five more minutes and that's it
Back to work fellas, back to work!

The song then moves on to a narrative of someone who Dead Prez describes as a political prisoner, Fred Hampton Jr,, setting the stage for their analysis of mass incarceration as a form of political repression:

Yo, lil' Kadeija pops his locks, he wanna pop the lock
But prison ain't nuttin but a private stock
And she be dreamin bout his date of release, she hate the police
But loved by her grandma who hugs and kisses her
Her father's a political prisoner, Free Fred 
Son of a Panther that the government shot dead
Back in 12/4, 1969
Four o'clock in the mornin, it's terrible but it's fine, cause
Fred Hampton Jr. looks just like him
Walks just like him, talks just like him
And it might be frightenin the Feds and the snitches
To see him organize the gang brothers and sisters
So he had to be framed yo, you know how the game go
Eighteen years, because the five-oh said so
They said he set a fire to a a-rab store
But he ignited the minds of the young black and poor

Dead Prez then produces the first of two incredible choruses where they present their political analysis:

Behind enemy lines, my niggas is cellmates
Most of the youths never escape the jail fates
Super maximum camps will advance they gameplan
To keep us in the hands of the man, locked up

Their next verse presents a devastating portrait of a Black youth abandoned, growing up in a devastated neighborhood, who ends up with a gun in his hand and a life behind bars, viewing his story as a metaphor for several generations  of Black youth discarded, their potential squandered, their passion directed into a struggle for survival that leaves many casualties. Or, as Dead Prez puts it, “another ghetto child turned into a killer”:

Lord can't even smoke a loosey since he was twelve
Now he's 25 locked up with a L
hey call him triple K, cause he killed three niggas
Another ghetto child got turned into a killer
His pops was a Vietnam veteran on heroin
Used like a pawn by these white North Americans

Momma couldn't handle the stress and went crazy
Grandmomma had to raise the baby
Just a young boy, born to a life of poverty
Hustlin, robbery, whatever brung
The paper home
Carried the chrome like a blind man holdin cane
Tattoes all over his chest, so you can know his name
But y'all know how the game go
Ds kicked in the front door, and guess who
They came fo'?
A young nigga headed for the pen,
Coulda been
Shoulda been
Never see the hood again 

Their final chorus presents a simple concept: Prison has become a metaphor for Black life in inner city neighborhoods throughout the nation. Never has their been a more elegant description of what sociologist  Loiq Waquant has called “ The Prison/Hood Symbiosis,” than this chorus from Dead Prez:

You ain't gotta be locked up to be in prison
Look how we livin, thirty thousand niggas a day
Up in the bing, standard routine

They put us in a box just like our life on the blocks
(behind enemy lines)
You ain't gotta be locked up to be in prison
Look how we livin, thirty thousand niggas a day
Up in the bing, standard routine
They put us in a box just like our life on the blocks
(behind enemy lines)

What I hope to have shown here is that almost every important component of Michelle Alexander’s argument was presented by hip hop artists from 10 to 20 years before her book appeared. And in forms that were deeply familiar to the hip hop audience, and touched powerful emotions. That this discourse was neglected, and at times mocked, in virtually every mainstream venue of mass communication does not negate its power and importance.  It only shows how easily our society renders whole sections of the population invisible.

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Comrade Valentine's Day Slogans--An Historical Compendium

February is the month in which we celebrate one of the great holidays of the international working class. And it is a fine thing indeed that the Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2014 have been released by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad.

As it has done for over a decade, Freedom Road has commendably undertaken to give scientific guidance to comrades celebrating this great day, taking into account the exact conjuncture of the class struggle at the present time. Because our movement is rooted firmly in the method and world outlook of dialectical and historical materialism, Fire on the Mountain has compiled in this post links to as much of the recent history of CVD as is available at present. (Inexplicably, the generally valuable Marxist Internet Archives and Encyclopedia of anti-Revisionism On-Line do not contain this crucial archival material.)

We are aware of the dangers that revisionists and "left" sectarians alike may rummage around in this compendium, seeking to nit-pick or posit, a-historically, contradictions between one year and another. but FotM has confidence in the experience of veteran comrades and the perspicacity of the rising generation of class warriors alike. May they draw inspiration from the past and carry the observation of Comrade Valentine's Day into the bright future!

First, this year's slogans, from the FRSO/OSCL website:

Toilers! Tillers! All who yearn and fight for a better world!

Let us surge forward together, wave on wave, illumined by the bright red rays of Comrade Valentine's revolutionary romanticism. 

Decisively demolish the saccharine commodity fetishism with which the bourgeoisie attempts to smother the proletarian character of Comrade Valentine's Day. 

 Joyously celebrate the deepening rejection of heteropatriarchal homophobia by the masses in their millions, a victory for Comrade Valentine's Communist line!

Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian

Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian

Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian

A new graphic illustrates the slogans.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2013 can be found on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translations were supplied in Spanish, Filipino, Mandarin, Irish, Malayalam, Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian, Swedish, German and Norwegian. A new graphic appeared as well. Research indicates it was created by a professional artist, Magaly Ohika of Puerto Rico.

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

Toilers! Tillers! All who yearn and fight for a better world!
Let us surge forward together, wave on wave, illumined by the bright red rays of Comrade Valentine’s revolutionary romanticism.
Decisively demolish the saccharine commodity fetishism with which the bourgeoisie attempts to smother the proletarian character of Comrade Valentine’s Day!!
Joyously celebrate the deepening rejection of heteropatriarchal homophobia by the masses in their millions, a victory for Comrade Valentine’s Communist line!!!
- See more at: http://freedomroad.org/2014/02/official-slogans-for-comrade-valentines-day-2014/#sthash.Vs0z5xrF.dpuf

Toilers! Tillers! All who yearn and fight for a better world!
Let us surge forward together, wave on wave, illumined by the bright red rays of Comrade Valentine’s revolutionary romanticism.
Decisively demolish the saccharine commodity fetishism with which the bourgeoisie attempts to smother the proletarian character of Comrade Valentine’s Day!!
Joyously celebrate the deepening rejection of heteropatriarchal homophobia by the masses in their millions, a victory for Comrade Valentine’s Communist line!!!
- See more at: http://freedomroad.org/2014/02/official-slogans-for-comrade-valentines-day-2014/#sthash.Vs0z5xrF.dpuf

Toilers! Tillers! All who yearn and fight for a better world!
Let us surge forward together, wave on wave, illumined by the bright red rays of Comrade Valentine’s revolutionary romanticism.
Decisively demolish the saccharine commodity fetishism with which the bourgeoisie attempts to smother the proletarian character of Comrade Valentine’s Day!!
Joyously celebrate the deepening rejection of heteropatriarchal homophobia by the masses in their millions, a victory for Comrade Valentine’s Communist line!!!
- See more at: http://freedomroad.org/2014/02/official-slogans-for-comrade-valentines-day-2014/#sthash.Vs0z5xrF.dpuf

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2012 can be found on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translations were supplied in Mandarin, Spanish, Irish, German, Italian, Indonesian, Swedish and Norwegian. 2012 marked the first time the Official Slogans were credited to the Freedom Road Line Development Commission, as they have been since. An experimental  CVD Slogans From Below feature was introduced but evidently did not catch on.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2011 can be found on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translations were supplied in English and Mandarin.

Freedom Road Line Development Commission

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day, 2010 can be found on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translations were supplied in German, Spanish and Swedish.

The Comrade Valentine's Day slogans for 2009 appeared only here at Fire on the Mountain.
Translations were supplied in Swedish, German and Spanish (2 versions). This may be the first appearance of the CVD "rising heart" version of Freedom Road's official rising star logo.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day, 2008 appear on the FRSO/OSCL website.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day, 2007 appear on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translation was supplied in Spanish.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2006 appear on the FRSO/OSCL website.
Translation was supplied in Spanish. This appears to have been the first occasion upon which the Official Slogans appeared in a language other than English.

The Official Slogans for Comrade Valentine's Day 2005 are to be found in a comment on a thread in an FotM reposting of the 2011 Official Slogans. They were:

Workers and Oppressed People, Hold Aloft the Bright Red, Heart-Shaped Banner of Comrade Valentine's Day!

Hail the Trailblazing Revolutionary Gay Marriage of Ka Andres and Ka Jose of the Compostela Valley Province Front of the New People's Army of the Philippines!

Resolutely Repudiate All Attacks by the Reactionaries of the Monopolist Ruling Class and Their Joyless, Puritanical Running Dogs on Women's Reproductive Freedom, on the Democratic Rights of LGBTQ People, and on Progress toward Genuine Equality between Women and Men!

And before 2005? All that exists is the following section of  Fire on the Mountain's 2011 repost of  the Official Slogans for that year:

The 2004 Official Slogans, thought lost, have been retrieved by Comrade Google as they were preserved by the far-sighted Scott McLemee. Here they are:

Workers and Oppressed People, Unite to Make Comrade Valentine's Day a Joyous Holiday of Proletarian Class Love and Militant Struggle!

Decisively Defeat the Sinister Schemes of the Bush/Cheney Gangster Clique to Thwart the Romantic Aspirations of the L/G/B/T/Q masses!

Eternal Glory to Comrade Valentine!

Secondary sources--the legendary Leftist Trainspotters listserv--indicate that Comrade Valentine's Day Official Slogans were also released in 2002 and 2003. Further archival work will, it is to be hoped, make them accessible to future generations of proletarian fighters.

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Dave Marsh on Pete Seeger

[I think I'm gonna ditch the piece on Pete Seeger I've been writing. Dave Marsh doesn't make several of the points I was going to, but those he does, he does better than I could and he's got some that never occurred to me. This is reprinted with permission from RRC, Rock & Rap Confidential. The permission reads, in Pete's spirit:

Please feel free to forward or post this RRC Extra widely. We only ask that you include the information that anyone can subscribe free of charge to Rock & Rap Confidentialby sending their email address to rockrap@aol.com.

So do it.]

A GOLDEN THREAD, A NEEDLE….
by Dave Marsh

I met Pete Seeger about 40 years ago on the Clearwater, a refurbished 19th century sloop which had begun its then seemingly hopeless task of cleaning up the shores and waters of the Hudson River. Like a lot of the things that Pete got involved in, it was a hopeless task until it turned out to be common sense.

That day, we cruised Long Island Sound, if I remember right, from Port Jefferson to Oyster Bay, which is not very far, and back, which is still not very far. It was worth every minute, and would have been if only for the chance to spend time aboard the 106 foot, single-masted Clearwater, a gorgeous vessel, stable even in Long Island Sound’s considerable chop and carrying as cargo volumes of lore and lessons about the costs of environmental neglect.

You could say that those early Clearwater voyages were the precursors of the present-day celebrity cruise, but with fewer celebrities. No more were needed. Pete Seeger was not only the enduring star of American folk music, he was its leading evangelist and one of the greatest singer/musicians this part of the planet has produced. I remember Pete singing though not what songs, and some lectures about the important work of the ship and the ecology of the Sound and the Hudson River region, though not their specific content. The presentation did its best to be as folkie as a much-darned pair of wool socks, and unmistakably also an event with a star and a crew and an audience, never exactly commingled. It was also a strong, healthy political event, by which I mean that each of us left with a sense of mission and some ideas about how to execute it.

I wasn’t there to clean up the Sound, though I was glad to be part of the movement, or to hear Pete perform, though I knew the importance of his music. I was there to write a story for Newsday, the Long Island daily. I did what you do in those situations, where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you, which mostly means I watched and listened and took mostly the kind of sensory notes that you don’t write down on the spot.

When we docked everyone headed for the parking lot. Pete and his wife Toshi had several bags. I introduced myself, not only because we were meant to talk for a few minutes, but as a prelude to asking if I could help carry their stuff.

I got no further than, “Hi, I’m Dave Marsh from Newsday,” before Pete turned to me and snapped—and I mean snapped, like he was already booking me for malingering—“Grab a couple of those bags. It’s good for white collar workers to do physical labor.” Thus spoke the Harvard gentleman to the brakeman’s son who’d never owned a necktie. And no, I didn’t come up with my usual smartass retort. He was Pete Seeger, who had changed not only my life but the world, and the alternative to silence was insulting him as much as he’d just insulted me, and…well, for once it was not in me.

That incident was one of the best lessons I ever had several times over. I learned lessons I’d chew on for, apparently, the rest of my life: The relation between stardom and shyness, between changing the world and retaining your self, and between trusting your perceptions and remembering not to suppose anything until you’ve made sure the person about whom you’ve just supposed it is not a cartoon.

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