Some Notes on The March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix

Disorganized.

Chaotic and frustrating.

A hot mess, let's call it.

One reason last Saturday's March on Washington was hot because it was a transformative experience for many, especially the majority who weren't old enough to really remember the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s. The march itself had been transformed, objectively, by two developments this summer. What had been shaping up as an exercise in nostalgia was reshaped by the "not guilty" verdict handed to the killer of Trayvon Martin and the Supreme Court's trashing of the Voting Rights Act.

The speeches, those I heard, tended to focus on the latter more than the former, but Trayvon Martin signs (both homemade and printed) were the most common single theme in the crowd. My friend Rahim on the Docks pointed out the most brilliant single expression of this, a tee-shirt being hawked with MLK photoshopped into a hoodie—the Two Martins!

The March itself was the biggest expression of Black solidarity since, perhaps, the exultant all-night street celebrations that followed the announcement that Obama had been elected in 2008. The crowd was at least 70% Black, and heavily working class, both among folks who came on their own and also those who were part of the substantial union contingents and of the community groups, civil rights organizations, sororities and frats, and church congregations spread throughout the crowd.

The Mess

The mess was twofold, political and organizational. We heard, those of us who could force our way toward the front, speaker after speaker, many cut off in mid-sentence. No two minute time limit was imposed on Attorney General Holder and House Minority leader Representative Pelosi, though. (A shameful shift from the 1963 March's ban on elected and appointed government officials speaking.) Nor were they heckled, although marchers from Newark booed their sleazy, ambitious mayor Cory "Hollywood" Booker.

Plenty of demonstrators wore shirts and buttons from Obama's campaigns, maybe a triumph of hope over experience, maybe a clear estimate that the alternative remains the greater evil. Interestingly, however, none of the speakers I heard, including a couple union bigs, particularly emphasized voting.
Instead, the constantly repeated theme was "This is not about commemoration, it's about

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The Climate Change Movement and Obama--Getting One Thing Very Right

[Like the piece I did last week about crowd estimates on steroids, this is a response to the Climate Change rally I attended in Washington DC earlier this month. Like that one, it is from the vantage point of a movement veteran so aged that my first DC demo was in 1965.

This one is primarily aimed at folks who, like me, are members (or sympathizers or exes) of revolutionary socialist organizations in the US. These have not generally covered themselves in glory when it comes to taking part in or even acknowledging, let alone building, the current crucial and vibrant incarnation of the decades-old environmental movement. I hope others will find it of some use as well.]


One thing that several old school lefties have commented on since the February 17 Climate Change rally in DC is how much the event revolved around Barack Obama. Among the main speakers was Van Jones, who spoke of having had the "honor of working with this president" in his first administration and addressed his remarks to his former boss.

Many hand-made signs and banners in the crowd featured Obama's picture and/or anodyne pro-environment quotes from his speeches. And the most widely distributed preprinted sign featured one of those Big Blue Marble shots of Earth from space on a black background—and on the other side had a big graphic based on Obama's 2012 campaign logo.

This certainly wasn't what you'd see at a rally of the remnants of the anti-war movement or, say, civil liberties activists. Generally the old heads I have spoken to or whose reflections I have read have felt this was a real problem and indicative of the low level of political understanding among the participants. I plan to argue in a later article that this misreads to some extent the dynamics and the strategic thrust of the movement.

What I want to deal with here is the fact that the environmental movement, and especially the struggle to stop the Keystone XL pipeline which is presently at the core of that movement, is doing exactly what a lot of leftists and socialists said they were going to be doing right about now.

I refer to those groups and individuals who argued in early 2012 (if not before) that revolutionaries and socialists should work hard for Obama's re-election or at the very least get out and vote against his opponent. Generally, their argument was based on the dangers posed by a possible Republican victory in the aftermath of the 2010 mid-terms (an argument which developed real weight as the GOP's racism and voter suppression efforts escalated).

"Of course," they would insist, "on the day after the election, we have to get back into the streets and organize against him, or at least his worst policies."

Well, you know who did that? The anti-Keystone XL people, that's who.

As the strong current of Obamoptimism at the rally shows, these are not exactly folks who were voting Romney. A few Green Party locals were present and the party's 2012 presidential candidate Jill Stein (who centered her candidacy on environmental issues, unlike Obama and Romney, neither of whom said a mumbling word about them the whole time). That hardly meant that the majority at the rally went third party last year, though.

Let's look at how this movement carried itself around the election and since. On Monday, November 5, the day before the election, several dozen activists barged into the Washington DC office of McKenna Long & Aldridge, the main law firm lobbying for TransCanada's pipeline project. They knew that this brief occupation, in solidarity with the ongoing Tar Sands Blockade, was not going to get major media coverage on the eve of the election. They were making a point--that the movement was going ahead no matter what happened the next day.

On Thursday, November 8, two days after the election, Bill McKibben, the most prominent anti-Keystone XL leader, kicked off a four-week Do The Math tour, speaking at an indoor rally/teach-in of 2,000 in Seattle. By early December, the tour had made 20 more stops in cities around the country, drawing similar numbers each time. This helped lay the groundwork for further development of the movement, including last week's Climate Change rally.

News kept coming in the weeks after the election. In early December two protesters chained themselves to 600 pound concrete barrels inside a section of pipe slated to be added to the section of the pipeline under construction near Winona TX. This was the latest, and riskiest, of a long series of civil disobedience actions that have been bedeviling companies trying to finish pipeline segments to create "facts on the ground" arguing for its completion.

A week later a Texas judge granted a temporary injunction to a Texas landowner whose property had been seized by eminent domain to build the same pipeline section. On college and university campuses across the country, scores of powerful student campaigns ramped up their demands that their schools' endowments divest all stockholdings in fossil fuel corporations. All this before Inauguration Day. Then the DC rally.

Obviously this is a powerful movement, with impressive organization and equally impressive room for initiative and a variety of tactics. I would suggest that one reason the movement is so strong and vibrant is that it didn't dissolve itself into the Obama campaign, but fought right up to the election and was fully prepared to hit the ground running the minute it was over.


[As I mentioned above, I hope to write one more piece, with observations on several aspects of the rally, and the movement that held it. Among those topics will be the thinking behind and problems with the movement's overall soft approach to Obama and how revolutionary socialists should respond to it.]

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The Music of OWS! DJ D vs. Detroit Red

With May Day upon us and the semi-official Occupy! Spring Offensive starting. the two of us--Detroit Red and DJ D--have teamed up to crank out this overview of the music of OWS! Occupy! has no single anthem, no “We Shall Overcome”, no defining musical voice of the movement. Instead there has been a flowering of DIY music videos, Joe Hill-esque re-writing of pop songs, spontaneous rap battles in the encampments, and a parade of established musicians showing up at protests unannounced to lend their songs and support. Hell, even Miley Cyrus made a music video for Occupy Wall Street!

The two of us are stone revolutionaries--and deep-fried music geeks. We are both longtime activists, though from different generations— DJ D is 62, Detroit Red 34. Both of us have been totally jazzed by the transformation that the eruption of Occupy Wall Street! has already wrought in the political life of this country and in the tired, aging US left. Each of us took five songs (with a bit of dickering to avoid duplication) from among scores of worthy possibilities, five which we found particularly deserving of attention and comment. Then we wrote a short introduction and made some comment on each.

[Note: for those unfamiliar with current musical culture, that "versus" in DJ D vs. Detroit Red doesn’t mean we are enemies—it is used to label collaborative projects and mash-ups as well as musical throw-downs.]

[Now crossposted at Solidarity and Daily Kos.]

DJ D drops his five

One of the things that has most pissed me off about the movement against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was all the folks, admittedly mainly ‘60s types like myself, always grousing about where are the anti-war songs. Damn, Neil Young started a page on his website which now has well over 3400 posted! (At, let's call it 4 minutes per song, that’s more’n two weeks of listening 24/7, just to hear ‘em all once.) 

At least anyone with the faintest actual acquaintance with Occupy Wall Street! and the Occupy! movement isn’t about to make that complaint! Even leaving aside the notorious drum circles, OWS! has been awash in music, with visits from famous artists and all kinds of playing and singing, planned and impromptu, at every encampment I know about. 

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OWS & the Hollis 99% Club Link Up To Rock Queens

[Just a few days ago I posted a piece here on the impact the eviction of Occupy Wall Street! from Zuccotti Park (and the attacks on other encampments around the country) has had on the Occupy movement. Here is another angle--long time Bronx activist Professor Mark Naison talks about Queens and some of the most exciting post-Zuccotti OWS! organizing in NYC.]

 

How Occupy Wall Street Has Revitalized Neighborhood Based Protest--The Hollis Example 

 by Mark Naison 

 In the Hollis Section of Queens, NY, a working class and lower middle class African American community, two blocks of apartment buildings owned by a multi-millionaire real estate operator named Rita Stark have sat vacant for more than 16 years on the community’s major commercial strip. Ugly and decayed, occasionally used by neighborhood drug dealers as a safe haven, they sit across the street from a junior high school and two churches. The local development corporation, elected officials, and ordinary citizens have tried to get these buildings fixed up for years by writing letters, filing petitions, organizing meetings with the owner, all to no avail--but now, all of a sudden, there is hope of action. Why? Because of the Occupy Movement and the example it has set.

 Let me explain. During January of 2012, education scholar and activist Ira Shor and I decided to try to create a support group for Occupy Wall Street at a predominantly African American Church in Queens where a dear friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Mark Chapman was the pastor. The idea was to create an organization for people who supported the general goals of Occupy Wall Street, but felt uncomfortable sleeping in a park or risking arrest on a regular basis. The congregation of Hollis Presbyterian Church, consisting largely of senior citizens who had been civil rights activists, and remained active in community affairs, seemed ideal for this purpose, so with Rev. Chapman’s help, we set up a first meeting. More than 25 people showed up, indicating how much Occupy Wall Street had captured the imagination of people in this Southeast Queens community, and after agreeing a club should be formed, the 99% Club, they began debating what local issues they should take up. After a short discussion, the group decided to take up the cause of the 2 blocks of abandoned buildings on Hollis Avenue whose wealthy landlord had stubbornly defied community pressure to sell them or fix them up.  

What gave these long time neighborhood activists hope that they could now finally make headway in solving a festering neighborhood problem was the prospect of bringing the young activists from Occupy Wall Street into the community to shake up the landlord and local elected officials. They saw Occupy Wall Street as a new and welcome force, that could strike fear in the hearts of the wealthy, not only through a language that held them responsible for monopolizing the nation’s resources at the expense of the majority of the nation’s people (the 99 percent), but because of its capacity to mobilize hundreds, sometimes thousands of young people to take to the streets in support of economic justice. 

They decided on a step by step strategy to build support for a major protest, beginning with research on the abandoned properties, complaints to the department of buildings to insure violations on the properties were up to date, and the filming of a short video explaining why neighborhood residents were determined to get the buildings fixed up. All of these actions were undertaken, but it was the last one which had the most effect. Someone from Occupy Queens saw the video on Facebook and immediately asked Rev Chapman if they could come to the next 99% Club meeting to support the initiative.

When Rev. Chapman said yes, 15 activists from Occupy Queens came to the meeting, The chemistry between the two groups was extraordinary. Though the Hollis group was mostly senior citizens and almost all Black, and the Occupy Queens groups was mostly young and middle aged, and majority white, they possessed a shared understanding that working class and middle class people were suffering terribly in the current economic crisis and something had to be done about it. When Occupy Queens described how they were blocking foreclosures in the local courts by “singing in the courts”(!) people from the Hollis Group saw an immediate connection to what was happening in their neighborhood, where many homes were foreclosed, as well as the sign of the re-emergence of an energy and courage and tactical flexibility that had marked the civil rights movement in its glory days. 

The two groups decided to create a coalition centered on the transformation of the Rita Stark buildings into community space, building up to an April 21 demonstration at the buildings which was aimed to attract Occupy activists from around the city as well as Hollis Residents. The April 21 event will begin with a Forum at Hollis Presbyterian Church, sponsored by Occupy Queens, where speakers will discuss local and national initiatives to transform foreclosed homes and abandoned commercial and residential spaces into housing for the homeless, and to defend tenants and homeowners from evictions by landlords and banks. The participants in the Forum will then join Hollis residents for a six block march to the Rita Stark properties where a rally and demonstration will take place which includes an “open mic” for members of the community to say how they think the properties should be developed. This protest, expected to attract several hundred people, will be the first of many actions taken till the issue has a positive resolution. 

What is occurring Saturday is an example of how Occupy Wall street has not only changed the conversation about economic inequality in the United States, but given people around the nation hope that they can do something about it! It has done that not only by popularizing a language that puts the onus for the nation’s economic difficulties squarely on the wealthy and the powerful, but by showing that innovative protests that link new groups of activists to existing ones can win victories large and small, in neighborhoods as well as states, and municipalities, and eventually in the entire nation.

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May ‘70: 3. May Day & Bobby Seale

Me, I don’t have much memory of Nixon’s April 30, 1970 speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia. It could have been because nothing the bastard did would have surprised me by that point, but more likely it’s just that I was already on my way to New Haven to see about Bobby.

That would be Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was facing trial in the case of some Connecticut Panthers accused of murdering a member they thought was a police informant. A national call had gone out for a May Day demonstration to defend Bobby, and thousands of young radicals from around the country and especially the Northeast were en route. We had a couple of dozen from NYU’s Uptown campus with us.

Lemme step back here to set a little context. NYU today is a bigtime, self-promoting academic powerhouse whose relentless pursuit of lower Manhattan real estate for expansion has earned them the hatred of all clear-thinking New Yorkers. Back then, NYU was a bit cheesier, with a campus in Greenwich Village and a satellite one in the Bronx. (The Uptown campus was abandoned by the racist NYU administration later in the 1970s when it found the West Bronx was becoming, let’s say, too colorful, and is now the home of Bronx Community College).

We had a pretty good SDS chapter at NYU Uptown and saw no reason to change anything just because the national organization had imploded the previous summer. (In fact, at one point we decided the chapter head, Lon E. Thud, must be National Secretary of SDS—nobody else was doing it, after all). NYU had given me a “compulsory leave of absence for academic reasons” at the endof the previous school year, a tactical mistake on their part. I was still a registered student and, as such, could not be excluded from the campus.

We began the school year with an orientation week packet and program we had put a lot of time into prepping and followed up with extensive dorm canvassing, picking up some fine new members. One of our fall activities was selling the Black Panther, the BPP’s weekly paper, to build support for the revolutionary group—a dynamic model of revolutionary organization, hugely popular in the Black community and under concerted and deadly attack by local police forces and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

In the early months, we could barely sell a dozen papers. The problem wasn’t their militant program or their guns. We were meeting particular resistance on a disproportionately Jewish campus. “Aren’t they anti-Semitic?” folks would ask, citing the BPP’s early support of the Palestinian struggle and Fatah.

But patient education and organizing would combine with the increasing radicalization of the times to create a more favorable climate. By mid-winter SDS took a contingent of over 100 from the Uptown campus to join a march from Manhattan to the Queens House of Detention in support of the Panther 21 (more political prisoners, victims of frame-up charges, whose long court case and trial, the most expensive in NY history, eventually resulted in complete exoneration).

When the call came to rally on May Day in New Haven to Free Bobby! (a slogan which had somehow mysteriously appeared writ large across various Uptown campus buildings), a couple dozen of the most active radicals at the school headed up there, to join 15,000 other protesters crashing in Yale dorms and rallying on the New Haven Green.

Friday, May 1 was a very tense day, which foreshadowed the month to come in its combination of repression and concession. The governor had persuaded Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, to airlift 4,000 Army paratroops and Marines from Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune for deployment in New Haven! Meanwhile, Connecticut National Guard troops in APCs and tanks were stationed around the city.

At the same time Yale University head Kingman Brewster, facing a substantial groundswell of support for Seale within his elite student body, famously set himself against the establishment, declaring at a mass faculty meeting, to the horror of many alumni:

“I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States."

Significantly, that faculty meeting was dealing with the threat of a student strike at Yale, endorsed at a 1500 student rally where a Panther spokesman declared “That Panther and that Bulldog gonna move together!" In a pre-emptive strike, the profs voted to suspend business as usual. Faculty members didn’t have to hold classes, and no students would be penalized academically for not attending.

Finally, Brewster had decided to open the campus to the protestors, so as to avoid making Yale an easy target for us. Meanwhile, he negotiated with established organizers and leaders from New Haven’s Black community and the upstart Panther chapter there to ensure that dangerous violence wouldn’t break out. Even New Haven’s police chief fought for authority over the military contingent, and they were kept out of sight for the most part.

It was still a close thing on May Day. The afternoon rally was, as rallies tend to be, peaceful and long and boring, even with the occasional whiff of tear gas. In the evening, there were running skirmishes in the campus area, some clearly the work of provocateurs, and tear gas aplenty. We were ready to rumble, but the tactical and political leadership, headed by the Panthers, directed us to keep things cool. New Haven didn’t blow.

Nothing I’ve read mentions the most important thing to come out of the rally. We voted to respond to Nixon’s Cambodia invasion with a national student strike (which, though we didn’t yet grasp it, was already underway). And we laid out three main demands for the strike:

US Out Of Southeast Asia

End Campus Complicity With The War Machine

Free Bobby Seale & All Political Prisoners

With no widely-recognized national student organization to provide direction to the forces already set in motion, this call did a lot to lay down the political terms on which the events of May ’70 would take place. Campus after campus took the three demands up. Indeed, they were just what the doctor ordered—very broad, revolutionary in fact, but still specific, and representing mass sentiment among a whole layer in every part of the country and every section of the people, millions who had been thrown into motion by the ferment of the ‘60s.

Click here to read this series from the beginning.

Click here to read the next installment.

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Good News Out Of Arizona!

You’ve got to hand it to the white supremacists running Arizona. As May 1 demonstrations are upon us coast to coast, with immigrants’ rights as a central demand, they’ve provided a crystal-clear example of what we are up against. They are also showing just why May Day, the international working class holiday, has taken on new layers of meaning here and deepened its roots in sections of the US working class since El Levantamiento, the huge immigrant uprising of 2006.

The issue is, of course, the new mandatory racial profiling bill just passed by both houses of the legislature and signed by Governor Jan Brewer. It will likely be declared unconstitutional by the courts, but is meanwhile serving to promote anti-immigrant sentiment and police state practices in Arizona and elsewhere.

While there has been heartening coverage of high school walk-outs and other protest inside Arizona itself, there are other aspects to the resistance which merit some attention. Thus, the first–hand report and the hip hop video I am posting here.

I asked a long-time ‘rade of mine, Ajagbe Adewole, a Brooklyn boy who has been working as an educator in the Phoenix suburbs for the last several years (poor fish) what he’s been seeing and hearing. His comments, slightly edited, follow:

The general mood out here is outrage. Those supporting the bill are silent. You just don't hear folks defend this in public. Even local rightwing radio is questioning the bill, an unheard-of development.

The Dems are split along political/ethnic lines. Some are calling for military at the border ("If we could stop them at the border that would solve the problem"), others, like Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva, are calling for a boycott of their own state and repeal of the law.

The anger among Chicana/os is palpable. This issue has really woken people up. I've never seen these folks react this way. This was a REALLY stupid move on the part of the Republicans. It has the potential to mobilize folks for May 1, and for the upcoming elections, including young Chicana/os.

Chicana/os out here are organizationally weak. Remember, this is a “right to work” state, so unions are not really a factor. I'm curious to see how the community is going to organize, but I don't see this issue going away. Folks I know, generally apolitical, are discussing and debating this. There's a lot of passion.

Now here’s another cut on things in AZ. Let’s start with Black rapper, Swindoe. A couple of years back he released a new cut called “Phony People” with a dramatic video. Based in his native Arizona, it features Swindoe and his posse helping undocumented immigrants deal with the deadly desert and the Border Patrol and it's moving as hell...



Okay, his persona is straight-up gangsta, his syzzurp-flavored, chopped and screwed chorus is druggy by definition, and he thinks rather highly of himself. Get past it, people. His production company is called BLK Boyz, standing for Black-Latino Konnection. The whole package is, to my way of thinking, a real-world example of the kind of Black/Brown alliance that revolutionary-minded folks have been advocating for years as the answer to ruling class efforts to pit the Black Nation and immigrants against each other.

And so is this comment, which is from the interesting and contentious Youtube comment thread when Swindoe’s “Phony People” video was retitled to mention SB 1070 ,the Arizona police state law:

i think its funny how yall argue over youtube.. lol Flash Virus is a fuckin dumbass.. I'm from eastside tuc town an we down wit grips_ of latinos. All me an my niggas date are latina girls.. it aint shit to us! we speak spanish! a REAL tuc town nigga who whats good wit tha 520 and tha black/latino connection.. if he wanna start shit, let him. cuz he'z dumb. bring his ass to irvington n park an let dem niggas get at him.. bet he wont eva diss a latino eva again!! Haha

Let’s see what the May Day marches this Saturday and the coming months bring. All this makes me optimistic.

And in that spirit, I think I’ll close with Tom Russell’s magnificent tune, “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?” which raises the musical question:

Now the government wants to build a barrier
Like ol' Berlin, 8 feet tall,
But if Uncle Sam sends the illegals home,
Who's gonna build the wall?

Who's gonna build your wall, boys,
Who's gonna mow your lawn,
Who's gonna cook your Mexican food
When your Mexican maid is gone,

Who's gonna wax the floors tonight
Down at the local mall,
Who's gonna wash your baby's face,
Who's gonna build your wall?

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Earth Day At 40!

(This post is a gift--an odd one, granted--to my sweetheart, Dody. Her birthday falls on April 22.)

The immediate trigger that got me writing this was a Facebook post by Koba Sounds, in which he waxed irritable about Earth Day: “Happy corporate-sponsored congratulatory self-back-patting removed from its contentious political roots on this Earth Day.” Initial comments, including mine, echoed or outdid his initial sarcasm.

Rereading the thread, though, I found myself slipping on my cranky, old, I-was-there-kiddies persona to lay out a little background.

Today is, of course, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. The first one came just eight days before the campuses of the US erupted into the May, 1970 storm of anti-war, anti-racist protest which virtually shut down higher education in the US, even before the murder of four students at Kent State University on May 4 turned up the heat.

In 1970, Earth Day was regarded with extreme suspicion by the large cohort of revolutionary-minded young people coming forward out of the struggles of the ‘60s. Its main advocate was a politican, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI). (I recommend Bill Christofferson’s excellent biography of Nelson, The Man From Clear Lake, for a deeper understanding of the importance and the limits of electoral politics in this country.)

Earth Day was pushed by national and local politicians, media pundits and school administrators alike. Many of them made no secret of the fact they saw it as a nice--and I use the word advisedly--alternative to all the political activism running like an underground fire through the country, erupting into open flames again and again.

And that first Earth Day seemed to prove our critique. In New York City alone, the mayor closed Fifth Avenue and opened Central Park to a crowd estimated at a million people for an event that was one part consciousness raising to two parts be-in to about zero percent actual protest.

We, the young revolutionaries and budding commies, saw Earth Day, and by association, the whole environmental movement which Earth Day helped unite and jell into a single force, as a diversion from the growing anti-imperialist struggle. We were right about what the ruling class was trying to do, but we missed some very important things (not the only things we missed in those heady days.)

We missed the fact that for all the establishment bucks and approval, this was a huge spontaneous movement far broader than its sponsors ever dreamed; hundreds, thousands, of Earth Day events took place across the country. We failed to acknowledge the varied threads of struggle that flowed into it, many of them sharply anti-corporate. We forgot that concern about the environment was an inherent part of the ‘60s upsurge, as captured in the very first verse of the Quicksilver Messenger Service’s 1970 indictment of the system, “What About Me?”



And because we missed all this, we couldn’t see what was about to happen. Among other things, thousands and thousands of those college and high school kids--not the street fighters--the nice ones who took part in Earth Day in 1970 and in the years that followed, became schoolteachers. And a new generation grew up hearing in class about clearcutting and toxic wastes and rainforests and endangered species and recycling and how indigenous peoples lived in harmony with land.

By the late ‘80s, the result was hard to miss: their elementary school students had themselves reached college age and the Student Environmental Action Coalition burst onto the scene to become, for several years, the largest radical student group since SDS in the ‘60s. Among other contributions, SEAC trained a cadre of young folks in organizing and struggle, a body of activists who helped create Seattle and the No Global movement, and who today people the environmental justice movement, the trade union movement, and a dozen others.

And a bunch of them became teachers! Right now, a whole new cohort of K-12 kids is learning about climate change and mountaintop removal and species interdependence and the dangers of factory farming and the huge sea of plastic in the Pacific.

Thus, the effort by the ruling class to divert the anti-war movement and other struggles of the ‘60s into the “safer” arena of Earth Day proved to be a case of what the great revolutionary thinker and fighter Mao Zedong called, “lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet.”

Like the Martin Luther King holiday, Earth Day was born of people’s struggles. Sure, the powers that be will try and denature and co-opt it. That’s what they always do, and in times when the struggle is at a low ebb, it may even seem like they have succeeded. Screw that! It’s up to us to claim and to reinforce and to build on the ineradicable kernel of revolutionary sentiment at the heart of the day--capitalism and a living planet are incompatible. One must die!

Or, as Koba Sounds put it later in the thread he started:

of course rather than just a bout of cynicism, celebrate Earth Day, every day, in every way that matters.

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The Anti-War Movement Seven Years After Shock & Awe

[This important piece first appeared at the website of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad. It is reposted here because Fire on the Mountain, as a blog, has the capacity to house a discussion of its content, which we are starting here by following the piece with five interesting comments which appeared on a Facebook thread.]

by Dennis O'Neil & Eric See

The war in Iraq is still on. It's already the second most expensive war in US history--only WWII cost more.

The war in Afghanistan is heating up. It's now the second longest war in US history--only Vietnam lasted longer.

So what the hell happened to the anti-war movement? Today, the movement that turned out millions around the world to try and stave off the invasion of Iraq, that created the conditions for Barack Obama's history-making electoral victory, is nearly invisible and in disarray.

How Come?

We can stipulate a few causes everybody will agree on.

* Mainstream media coverage of the wars has been criminal.


Pop quiz: How many US troops are still in Iraq? (Answer: 100,000, and that's not counting an equal number of "contractors," i.e. mercenaries and logistics people our tax dollars are paying for.)

In some cases we're better off when they don't cover it. Take the Battle of Marja in Afghanistan. After breathless news reports quoting Pentagon spokespeople about a week-long offensive against the Taliban for control of this key city of 80,000, the place turned out to be a rural crossroads with more goats than people.

* The military has become very good at holding down casualty figures among US troops. In Iraq, they are hunkered down in bases and avoid combat, while the escalation in Afghanistan is just now starting to produce a new spike in US casualties. But people in this country have an unfortunate tendency to care only about "our" deaths, even as the super-expensive remote-controlled drone aircraft blow up schools and kill non-combatants in Afghanistan. (This, we are told, is okay, because the military wasn't actually trying to kill those kids.)

* Of course there is the ongoing economic meltdown which has become the principal focus for tens of millions of ordinary people looking fruitlessly for those green shoots of growth that the politicians and TV talking heads keep promoting. Activists, too, have been scuffling for their own survival and struggling to organize their coworkers and communities to fight cutbacks.

Behind The Obvious

There is another big-picture reason for the sorry state of the anti-war movement that is not easy to come to grips with. We have to face it: the 2008 election campaign and the Obama presidency are the biggest
things that have taken the wind out of the anti-war movement's sails.

From 2003-2008, a substantial and growing mass of class forces and social movements formed an objective bloc to the left of the Bush/Cheney administration. It was a broad united front consisting of sections and strata of the people including trade union members, environmentalists, educators, civil libertarians, college students, women's groups, African Americans, immigrants, veterans, etc.

The bloc was dominated by large, reform-minded, generally liberal organizations and coalitions whose leaders realized that there was no gain in kowtowing to the Bushies to try and get their programs passed. Still, it was more than a brief alliance of convenience, and was manifested in the deep visceral loathing for Bush/Cheney among the masses.

The lead unifying issue for this united front became the war in Iraq. For one thing, none of the forces in the bloc was strong enough to impose its program on the others: the unions weren't going to mobilize around reproductive rights nor the environmentalists around card check. More important, the war was, objectively, the principal contradiction facing the people of the US (and the world) and by early 2005 or so, popular rejection of the war had made it a very prominent vulnerable spot for the administration.

In fact, it can be said that it was the anti-war movement that elected Barack Obama. His Democratic rivals, Clinton and Edwards, had not spoken out during the buildup to the Iraq invasion, while Obama had. He became, by default, the anti-war candidate. And once the primaries were over and John McCain predicted that the US occupation of Iraq might continue for 50 or even 100 years, he was toast, even before the economy went belly-up.

By mid-2008, the united front was largely incorporated into the Democratic Party campaign. With Obama's election, the main organized groupings from that bloc became part of the establishment, and they did so on terms dictated by the White House. What was once an objective bloc is now an array of interest groups, each pursuing its own agenda, and each tending to regard others as rivals for (increasingly shrinking) resources and positioning to "affect affairs of state."

None of these groups was about to put the war at the center of their agenda, especially when confronted with the catastrophic and ongoing collapse of the economic boom. Even when Obama announced two big troop escalations in Afghanistan in his first year in office and showed no sign that a rapid and complete withdrawal from Iraq was in the making, there wasn't a peep. Quite the opposite, Obama was able to bring anti-war groups into the White House for closed-door meetings before making his announcement.

We ask: Is there any basis for expecting even a weaker version of a broad united front to coalesce to the left of the Obama administration any time soon, in particular one centered on opposing the wars?

A Hard Look Around

Looking around, the organized anti-war movement found that these developments had downsized it to its hard core: essentially peace people (religious and secular) and the anti-imperialist left.

The long uphill slog of trying to end the occupations now seemed like a task that might never end. As Obama put more troops in harm’s way than had ever been deployed under Bush/Cheney, Congresspeople who had spoken and voted against war funding before were, with a few honorable exceptions, suddenly confused and silent.

More important, hundreds of thousands of everyday people who had participated during the Bush years simply weren't there any longer. Their organizations weren't mobilizing them. Individually, some figured the job was done with Obama's election, or that he deserved a chance to get it done. The economy pulled the attention of many. Others were dismayed at how little their efforts had produced and gave up.

That all had its own suppression effect, disheartening a good part of the hard core of the anti-war movement. That core group, mainly aged forty-five to sixty-five when the war started, is not only tired but nearly a decade older.

We ask: When was the last time you turned out for an anti-war mobilization?

This highlights a final problem facing the anti-war movement. The sheer duration of these occupations has tended to normalize war—with "acceptable" casualty levels—as a regrettable but inevitable fact of life in the US. The first-year college students who were demonstrating against education cuts in California and around the country last month were in 3rd grade when Afghanistan was invaded and occupied, and in 4th when the Iraq war started. They've never really known a country not in combat in that region, since during their lifetime “we have always been at war with Eurasia."

Could the anti-war movement become the equivalent of the nuclear disarmament movement, with a handful of stalwarts still lobbying and holding vigils, still fighting the good fight three generations after it started in the early '50s?

So What Do We Do?

If there were some quick and easy way to bring into being a vibrant and growing anti-war movement, it would already be happening. We have our work cut out for us.

But we must keep on. As much as the terrain has shifted under our feet and presented us with an even steeper uphill trek, we still have a duty to oppose the crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that our rulers are committing, with our tax money, in our name.

The folks who marched with us in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 haven’t disappeared. There’s a whole layer of folks who cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement and are now organizers against budget cutbacks and the collapse of our social safety net. We need to reconnect the dots and bring an anti-war analysis and message into the struggles that have motion on the ground now.

One of the most powerful arguments against the wars right now is the astonishing bill for them. It costs $1 million a year to keep a single soldier in Afghanistan. How much does it cost to keep that person in college? Your city has a $300 million deficit? Simple--just don’t send 300 people to Afghanistan for a year, problem solved.

We need to build activity at the local level that’s easy for people to engage in and doesn’t require signing on to a whole stew of anti-imperialist statements. We also need to bring our bodies and signs to the marches and vigils against budget cutbacks in our communities, instead of just waiting for people to show up at an anti-war rally. We need to make the connections in our messages; “Heath care Not Warfare” at the rallies on the congressional showdown. “Books Not Bombs” when folks march in defense of public education.

This isn’t rocket science. We know how to do it. Let’s get going.


Dennis O'Neil is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad and active in the War Moratorium project.

Eric See became active during the first Gulf War, he was one of the co-founders of the War Moratorium project and currently works at Peace Action.

Initial comments on this piece

FotM has taken the liberty of borrowing these from Facebook. Kindly add your own in the comments section below.

Sigrid: i have not been able to leave town, pretty much, since last summer (think gas & brake repair). seattle is 100 miles to the south of me & is the nearest protest game around...not to mention i can't find anyone who can, who would.

Diana: There was not enough interest to have a bus from the Lehigh Valley to Washington [for the March 20 Demonstration]. Wwe drove down last weekend. There are vigils in several places on different days in the area, but since the Republicans are out of office people don't seem as outraged as they should be about the wars, the drones, the 20% unemployment, climate change...

Bruce: there's nothing wrong with the anti-war movement being a little like the nuclear disarmament [movement]--which was, after all, was incredibly effective and made up of long distance runner-type activists.

Larry: This is a very sound and very valuable article, and I hope it gets wide distribution. I do want to say though that at the beginning, it seems to buy into the emotional roller coaster so typical of the left.The statement that the anti-war movement is now "nearly invisible and in disarray" is simply not true--and in fact the rest of the article demonstrates this. There is a broad and tested base of anti-war activists in every part of the country, including rural Virginia, where I live. Yes, the highly visible actions are not happening and would not be covered if they did.

It is critical, as the article suggests, that anti-war activists move into alliances, esp. around the budget, and otherwise respond effectively to current conditions. But it is also critical that we convey a historical or at least transgenerational awareness of our task. Of course the antiwar movement shrank after Obama's election. Of course it shrank after the national turn against the Iraq war (almost entirely due to the antiwar movement). and of course imperialism didn't go away because either of these events. These are the conditions we work with. They do not contradict the reality that the anti-imperialist movement has grown in numbers, sophistication, and geographical and racial and age diversity over the last 40 years. It will never be easy in the belly of the beast, but let's not confuse predictable short-term changes with deficiencies in the movement building for the long term.

Laurel: If you want to feel better, Dennis, check out http://ny4cg.org/resources/detail.php?rid=2396 [which] spotlights 20 of 150 organized events organized around the 7th anniversary of the war.

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Another Lesson From the Greenboro Sit-Ins

This week marks 50 years since the Greensboro, NC, sit-ins, the historic protest which launched the Black Freedom Struggle in this country onto a new trajectory. We are seeing 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.

I posted such a tribute myself, yesterday. 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.

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Remembering the Rant That Shaped a Movement

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of a George Bush quote so spectacularly dumb that it will make any greatest hits collection--no need to buy the box set.

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on."

When Bush's interview was carried on the news, a retired Special Forces non-com named Stan Goff in Raleigh, NC went into a white-hot rage. He sat down at his keyboard and ripped out a response entitled "Bring 'Em On?" You may well remember it, although it was five years ago today. Within hours it swept across the Internet like a prairie fire.

Sparked by the letter's urgency and the response it triggered, a group of veterans and military family members made contact with one another and assembled the Bring Them Home Now! campaign. BTHN! kept the "Now" to the fore in the anti-war movement and helped coordinate within it a strong presence for forces from what some called the "military community." Stan not only took a central part in the campaign, but went on to act as adviser to the just-born Iraq Veterans Against the War in their crucial first year.

"Bring 'Em On?"

By Stan Goff

In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. I believed that if we didn't stop the communists in Vietnam, we'd eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'd been toughened by Basic Training, Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We are losing this war."

Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.

We had a battalion commander whom I never saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier instructions to do things like "take your unit 13 kilometers to the north." In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat, carrying sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights, over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he'd fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless, starched and spit-shined despot.

Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to "bring 'em on," the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been eating MRE's three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others' nerves. The rumors of 'going-home, not-going-home' are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people--as well as for official narratives.

This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the "non-existent" Iraqi resistance.

This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms.

Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war."

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Today In DC: This One Counts!

[Some thoughts on the current conjuncture, triggered by reading the FRSO/OSCL statement,
"Deepen the Struggle to Defund the War"]

Who here hasn’t felt the momentum and intensity growing as today’s demonstration against the occupation of Iraq drew closer? I think this reflects many people’s sense, perhaps unconscious, that we are in a very unusual situation. In fact, popular mobilizations right now have the potential to have far greater impact than they might normally.

Briefly, the powers-that-be in the US are finally starting to face the fact that they are in a box--they can’t afford to leave Iraq and they can’t afford to stay in Iraq. And they can’t find anyone with a relatively painless plan to get them out of the box. The dilemma is reflected in the new Congress, where the Democratic majority wants to appear strongly anti-Bush, anti-escalation, even anti-war, but is unwilling—so far--to take decisive action to bring the troops home.

With no program for ending the debacle claiming big momentum so far, it’s up to us, the people of this country, to take the initiative. Our demands will be heard, because they cannot at this point be subsumed into or co-opted by mealy-mouthed, half-stepping, hidden-agenda-laden political projects. If we mobilize broadly and struggle intelligently we can shape in significant degree how this issue gets debated, resolved and brought to a close.

How do we come to be in this interesting conjuncture?

The wholesale rejection of the Republicans in November, fueled more than anything else by a rejection of the war and occupation, created a set of expectations in broad sections of the people that now things would have to change. These expectations were further fed by the dumping of Rumsfeld and the media ballyhoo around the Iraq Study Group report, a complex and worthless plan aimed mainly at covering Bush's ass while it steered him toward a draw-down of troops.

But as the year ended, the Dems showed no signs of doing anything substantive toward ending the war, and Bush was treating the report with evident scorn, increasing popular unease.

Then three things hit hard within a ten day span. First, the botched execution of Saddam (a reminder that the "goal" of dumping him was a worthless one). Second, the death of the 3000th US troop.

Finally, Bush's announcement of "the surge." November’s "anti-war" majority in the 2006 elections had somehow morphed into an escalation in practice. This galvanized broad sentiment that something must be done to stop him and start ending the occupation.

All of this has put the Congressional Democrats in a bind. Their plan was to do the "First 100 Hours" thing of spending January passing popular legislative gimmes, and let Iraq slide as long as possible. Instead, they have been forced to face the issue squarely and watch their big legislative program rendered a sideshow. Now they, along with many Republicans in Congress, are scrambling to figure out what to do.

As argued above, their confusion reflects the confusion in ruling class circles, where the ugly truth can no longer be ducked. The high and mighty cannot afford the catastrophic defeat of leaving Iraq and all that lovely oil and the global power a hand on that spigot carries with it. But they can't afford to stay and become global pariahs while their crisis of legitimation at home deepens and their military rolls toward the breaking point. Finally, like Congress, they have no unity on a way forward.

In such a situation the role of the people becomes key, and our ability to shape the course of events greater.

Let me draw three conclusions from this rough-hewn analysis.

First, this is a time for unstinting activity. However successful January 27 turns out to be, people must redouble anti-war activism at a local level. It would be most desirable if United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) or a "supergroup"-style coalition like the one assembled at the call of US Labor Against the War in Spring 2006 were to put out a call for an Iraq Moratorium. One day a month where millions of people do something, as much as they are individually prepared to do, against the war, even if that's just signing a petition or calling a Congressional office. Collective actions like vigils or teach-ins are better, militant actions like high school blowouts or building occupations better still (though here clarity around why some person or institution is a target is particularly important).

Second, the target at the moment is Congress. The current situation, with various proposals being floated and entered as bills, is okay for a few more days, but there is a grave danger that "bipartisan compromise" will produce only toothless non-binding resolutions. Never mind holding Congressional feet to the fire, we must run a blowtorch across their soles, demanding a cutoff of funds for the occupation and/or a binding termination of the war powers act or a similar constraint on continuing the occupation. The militant campaign being waged in Scaramento to force Representative Doris Matsui (D) to do the right thing is one impressive model for such an effort.

Third, any resolution of this before 2009, which would be a delay for which history will not forgive us, will involve a final confrontation with the Bush administration. Though not yet the most likely scenario, a real rather than symbolic Congressional stand—be it rescinding war powers or defunding or something else--would doubtless become a Constitutional crisis, as the Preznit refuses to comply. Things could move very quickly toward impeachment, resignation, a "health crisis" or some other resolution if a majority gels in ruling circles that the guy is simply too great a liability to have around for another two years. That said, the main focus at present must remain on Congress and on the demand to end the occupation and bring the troops home now. Slogans and organizing around impeachment help prepare the terrain for a showdown as Bush and his regime grow more isolated, but we still have to win the immediate battle to get to that one.

There’s more to be said on tactics, outreach, slogans and other vital questions, but I have a 5:15 ayem bus to catch...

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Take Five--Reasons for the Fall-off in Anti-war Demos After '69

It's Friday, and time for Take Five. Last week's inaugural list was five lefty mysteries.

This time, it's a little more free-form. In a discussion about the student movement of today on another blog, a commenter nmed lawyerDan raised the following question:

One of the things I always wondered about was why there were those huge demonstrations of maybe 2 million people in the fall of 1969 and then, even as the war became even less popular, there were never such big marches again. It was like the Vietnam Moratorium ended the war, but it took 6 years to process the paperwork.

The response, by lao hong han, conveniently for Fire on the Mountain offered five points, as a partial explanation. That post follows:

I agree that the high point of mass demos was 1967-69. In the remarkable "Honorable Peace," one of the finest and most savage protest songs of the Vietnam era, Gerry Goffin writes of the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi ordered by Nixon and Kissinger:

I know the tide of protest has passed us by somehow,
But when will you speak out, if you don't speak out now?

(This puppy was recorded on Christmas Eve 1972 as the bombing intensified by, believe it or not, B.J. Thomas, Mr. "Rainsdrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," and almost universally forbidden radio play by station managers fearful of its blunt condemnation of Nixon.)

Five short points in partial explanation:

1. Fatigue with what some of us had taken to calling "Peace Crawls" and saw as ineffective and toothless, especially as media coverage dwindled.

2. A broad radicalization in the student movement which led to the eruption in May, 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, national shutdown of campuses, the partial or complete destruction of 33 ROTC buildings around the country, etc.). This advance was undercut even as it was happening by the 1969 collapse of SDS, depriving the student movement of organizational leadership.

3. The perception that the war was in fact ending with negotiations with North Vietanm and the NLF underway, the drawdown of US troops under "Vietnamization" to fewer than 200,000 by Fall, 1971, and the erosion of the US military.

4. The institution in 1969 of the draft lottery which let a majority of draft age males know whether or not they would likely be facing conscription, thus limiting the insecurity previously felt by an entire age cohort. This was followed by the end of the draft overall in 1973.

5. The fact that despite the shellacking of "peace candidate" George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, more and more Senators and Congressmen were belatedly taking stands for ending the war.

What say you, dear readers?

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Ten of Thousands March for Sean Bell

Yesterday, I joined some tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a solemn demonstration demanding justice for Sean Bell, the unarmed 23-year-old Black man gunned down by NYC cops while leaving his bachelor party, less than 12 hours before his wedding.

And it was one hell of a demonstration. Tens of thousands of us—I’m pretty good at counting marches but this one was just too damn big—strode down Fifth Avenue past the iconic Rockefeller Center tree in the middle of all the Christmas shopping hoo-hah. The media keep calling it a silent demo, because it was announced as one. Not hardly—plenty of chants and unison counting up to 50, the number of shots in the fusillade that killed Sean Bell and wounded two friends in his car.

A few observations follow—add your own in the comments, please.

1. The march was overwhelmingly Black, 80-85%, I’d say. The African American turnout was likely slightly lower because of a solid turnout from Africans and Haitians. Also significant, it was not a particularly young demonstration—there were plenty of kids and junior high students there with parents or grandparents, and even some high school kids seemed to be in family mode. I would say the bulk of the crowd ranged in age from 35 to 70, and judging by signifiers like neat dreads, kofis, and mudcloth jackets, they were folks who had actively identified with the upsurge of the Black Liberation Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There were banners from unions, church groups, NAACP chapters, the National Action Movement, and so on, but the number of folks from unions and churches exceeded the organized contingents by an order of magnitude or two. This was a noteworthy chunk of NYC’s Black working class on the move.

I recognized more of the white folk marching than I would have liked. Beyond usual suspects, folks turned out by their unions, and clumps of lefties, organized predominantly white contingents were few and far between. UFPJ, to its credit, was there with a big banner and a modest and well-framed flier, and there was supposed to be a NOW demo around the killing downtown at City Hall an hour earlier. If those folks subwayed up, I didn’t see ‘em.

2. Signs proclaiming “Improve Police and Community Relations” were handed out free by the NAACP and predominated, but there were plenty of homemade efforts as well. The NJ–based People’s Organization for Progress had two distinct clumps in the march (contingent integrity was very difficult to maintain in the jam-packed assembly area), but their distinctive signs—with much more direct and militant slogans--were scattered throughout the march as well. Many in the crowd addressed themselves to the officers guarding the route, and had some pithy things to say to the Black officers in particular.

3. The march screwed up holiday traffic in Midtown for hours; while the march was on, neither cars nor pedestrians could cross Fifth Avenue above 30th Street. Good! On the other hand, police containment tactics were distressingly effective. The entire march route, maybe a mile and a half, was very heavily copped out. Worse, it was lined with double layers of the interlocking metal barricades they’ve been using to keep rallies controlled and split up in recent years, and the police adjusted seamlessly to the unexpectedly large turnout by expanding the march’s right of way, once we stepped off, from one lane to the whole of Fifth Avenue. The police were unusually respectful, especially in light of the righteous anger that was being directed at them by marchers. They were scared, right up to the highest level.

4. The cops’ nervousness reflects the fact that the rulers of the city are running kind of scared themselves. And they should be—killer cops get off scot-free in NYC as a matter of course, and people are righteously sick of it. Folks are angry. Ed Koch, former mayor and current has-been columnist for give-away newspapers, made a point of complimenting Rev. Al Sharpton in his most recent outing, just as Bloomberg made a point of being photographed with him.

The problem is that after decades of the likes of Koch and Giuliani, there is a veritable thicket of laws, procedures and “safeguards” which make getting a cop behind bars for even the most outrageous shooting nearly impossible, even pretending for a moment that the city administration really wanted to. Impunity, racism and lamentable training make future Sean Bells and Amadou Diallos a certainty, and at some point the rage is likely to erupt.

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March in DC Jan. 27? You Bet, But Give the Locals a Listen!

See the map? Lemme tell you where this map comes from.

Every time a big peace or global justice demonstration is called for Washington , DC (which means, lets face it, at least once and probably twice in any given year), I get my coat pulled by my friend Steve. Steve's a longtime activist in DC, and his calls and emails on these occasions tend to be impassioned. With the big United For Peace and Justice rally against the occupation coming up January 27, we had our usual conversation, which I will summarize here.

The message--and, trust me, Steve's language is substantially more colorful and detail-filled-- is a simple one. As a rule, the big national coalitions calling these demos treat DC poorly. They make the major decisions shaping their marches and rallies without consulting with the locals about logistics, let alone how to tie in DC's struggles or mobilize the community there to take part. What's worse, they insist that area activists subordinate themselves to the advance team the coalition has set up to build and run the demo.

This time I challenged Steve to come up with a better plan, one that wouldn't isolate the march in the governmental section of DC--what Steve calls the Dead Zone--where the only people around on weekends are visiting high school classes and Finnish tourists. A skilled geographer, he came up with two carefully designed march routes, but decided the blog should only try to promote the one shown above. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

The route's merits are easy to understand. As the maps above show, it goes through the busy commercial districts bordering major Black and Latino communities. The march route passes right by several parks, which could be used for out-of-town bus drop-offs and rallies of constituent groups before joining the main march. And there are several Metro stations along the line of march, an important factor in January, as anyone who has taken part in the hypothermia-fests that are counter-inaugurals can attest.

I will close with one of Steve's more temperate observations: "People identify with the social imaginary of Washington, and engage in magical thinking--that screaming at empty buildings and each other will change the universe. The most effective part of these demos isn't the event but rather the dispersal, when participants filter into living parts of the city. I would love to see sometime a rally that chose to have the buses drop off out of towners at a number of outlying metro stops and moving through the subway system to the assembly point, which should be accessible by metro. There is a certain inertia to the pattern we see time after time, the noglobal movement broke through the set piece normalized protest senario, but thanks to traditional movement folks everything is comfortably marginalized once again."

UPDATE:

In response to complaints that the map does not give enough detail for non-DC old-timers to tell where it was going, Steve provided the following mapquest-style written route:


My proposed route goes from Malcolm X Park, down 16th Street to K Street, over to Mt. Vernon Square and down 9th, I and 7th Streets to Constitution and on to the West side of the Capitol. The written directions were generated by the software, the little dog trot around Mt. Vernon and onto I is to avoid streets that are main arteries for cars, but in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic on the weekends.

1. Go on 16TH ST ST
1.1 mile(s)

2: Turn right on K ST
.1 mile(s)

3: Go back East on K ST Mt Vernon sq
0.5 mile(s)

4.: Turn left on K ST ST
0.2 mile(s)

5: Turn right on 9TH ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

6 Turn left on I ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

7: Turn right on 7TH ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

8 Continue South on 7TH ST ST
Drive 0.5 mile(s)

9: Turn left on PENNSYLVANIA AVE AVE
0.5 mile(s) to arrive at the Capitol .

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