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Trump Unveils 'Vicious' Women's Health Restrictions During 'Women's Health Week' May 21, 2017
Posted by rogerhollander in Health, Revolution, Right Wing, Trump, Uncategorized, Women.
Tags: abortion, barbara lee, Global Gag Rule, global health, lauryn gutierrez, pro choice, reproductive health, reproductive rights, roger hollander, tillerson, women's health, women's rights
Roger's note:
It is going to be a very very very bad 4 or 8 years. Very bad. Whether Trump hangs in or is replaced by Pence, the policies of this Republican Panzer Brigade are going to create death and suffering, not only in the United States, but around the globe. The most immediate pain is being felt by Latin American refugees (many of whom have been in the States for decades), who are being rounded up and deported back to bloody homelands. Health care for women, the elderly and others most vulnerable is in grave danger. Environmental protections and public education are going down the drain. The Southern bigot Attorney General is giving the prison industrial complex a shot in the arm and revving up the so-called War on Drugs, which is actually a war on the poor, Blacks and other minorities. Workers will earn less as the rich pay fewer taxes and enjoy the fruits of deregulation. I could go on.
All this while the political classes and the mainstream media obsess on Trumps ties to Russia.
As we will see from the article below. the mean-spirited neo-Fascist Republican Party, in control of all three branches of government, is not satisfied with attacking women's access to safe abortions in the United States, is casting its deathly net in the four corners of the world.
"President Trump's expansion of the Global Gag Rule is a major assault on those who serve the world's poorest and most vulnerable women," CRR President and CEO Nancy Northup said in a statement.
Lauryn Gutierrez / Rewire
"This policy does not protect life. It jeopardizes the lives of countless women by withholding critical information and access to the full range of reproductive health care," said Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
May 18, 2017, Christine Grimaldi, http://www.rewire.news
The newly released details of President Trump's expanded "global gag rule" have lived up to advocates' dire expectations.
Sec. Rex Tillerson's U.S. Department of State on Monday approved the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" plan, which prohibits all global health assistance, not just family planning funding, from organizations that provide abortion care abroad with their own funds. Under the new framework, the State Department, USAID, and the U.S. Department of Defense are subject to the restrictions with narrow exceptions for their humanitarian assistance efforts.
The guidelines effectively hamstring $8.8 billion—"nearly 15 times as large as the George W. Bush-era Global Gag Rule," according to the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR).
"This policy does not protect life. It jeopardizes the lives of countless women by withholding critical information and access to the full range of reproductive health care."
Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), warned in January that a Trump gag rule has no place in 2017.
"Our worst fears came to light on Monday," Sippel said in a phone interview.
"This is not based in evidence, it's not based in global health."
Historically, the global gag rule is associated with an increase in abortions. Stanford University researchers in 2011 found that abortion rates spiked in 20 sub-Saharan African countries under the George W. Bush version.
Trump initially signed the executive order reinstating and expanding the global gag rule in a photo op that featured only white men. That the administration gave an exclusive on the guidelines to a conservative Christian news site during Women's Health Week only widened the gulf between words and actions in an administration that pays lip service to so-called women's rights while actively undermining them.
The timing did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill.
"The Trump Administration's new, expanded global gag rule will undermine global health efforts and the reproductive freedom and economic security of women worldwide—and it makes President Trump's blatantly false statement about concern for women's health, issued just one day ago, all the more insulting and ridiculous," Sen. Patty Murray (WA), the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in a statement.
The lead sponsors of the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) Act in the U.S. House of Representatives called on Congress to pass the permanent repeal of the "vicious, anti-woman policy."
"President Trump has shown he cannot be trusted to lead in the global fight for women's human rights and dignity," Reps. Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel, and Louise Slaughter—Democrats from New York—said in a statement with California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee.
The full breadth of the consequences is still emerging.
Outlets have reported that the new rule could jeopardize funding for groups working to combat the Zika virus. Trump didn't even spare George W. Bush's President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Bush's global gag rule had exempted PEPFAR, Slate's Michelle Goldberg reported, "because it was widely understood that the program couldn't meet its prevention and treatment targets otherwise … although applying the global gag rule to PEPFAR's programs ill affects millions of men as well."
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, slammed "another reckless move by the Trump Administration designed to cynically please his extremist base without regard for consequences."
"This egregious expansion puts millions more lives at risk, including those living with HIV and AIDS," HRC Senior Vice President for Policy and Political Affairs JoDee Winterhof said in a statement. "Withholding U.S. aid as a tool to limit anyone's access to health is simply un-American and stands in direct opposition to our country's role as a global leader for democracy and human rights."
Sippel urged people to contact their lawmakers in support of the HER Act or comparable measures.
"We have data and evidence today that we did not have in 2001, the last time this came into place," Sippel said. "I think we can get members of Congress to move on this if they're presented with the evidence."
An Unvanquished Movement May 31, 2016
Posted by rogerhollander in First Nations, Human Rights, Imperialism, Latin America, Mexico, Revolution, Uncategorized.
Tags: anguiano, chiapas, ezln, lacandon jungle, lascano, Latin America, martinez pelaez;, marxism, Mexico, mike gtonzalez, neoliberal, pan, paul sagado, pri, revolution, roger hollander, san andres accords, subcomandante marcos, Zapatistas
Roger's note: this is an update on the Zapatista movement and its history, and a discussion of strategies of resistance. The Zapatistas remind me in a sense of the Paris Commune about which Karl Marx commented that its importance was its very thriving existence. "Orthodox" Marxists are offended that the Zapatistas are not following their misguided "blueprint" towards revolution. Revolutionary acts take different forms, and Marx would be the last person to impose ideological criteria. The Zapatistas have been a major inspiration for the writings of the Irish born Marxist philosopher, John Holloway, and his seminal work, "Change the World Without Taking Power."
Twenty-two years after their formation, the Zapatistas continue to resist Mexican state repression.
by Paul Salgado, Jacobin
Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. Elizabeth Ruiz
In February, a federal judge in Mexico admitted that he had no choice but to accept that the state's case against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ELZN) could not move forward. The charges of terrorism, sedition, riot, rebellion, and conspiracy filed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1994 against Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos and the indigenous leaders of the resistance were null and void: the statute of limitations had expired.
That the two-decade-long battle the Zapatistas waged against the Mexican government's policy of privatization and neoliberalization would end with a legal whimper seems, at first blush, anticlimatic. But it is part of the famous black-balaclava-clad fighters' long-term strategy: silence in the face of oppression and opposition.
The San Andrés Accords
The Zapatistas appeared for the first time on the morning of January 1, 1994 to protest the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Armed members of the Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch'ol, and Tojolabal indigenous peoples — the poorest of the poor, some barefoot, some carrying guns dating from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, others carrying cardboard cutouts of rifles — seemed like characters from the novels of Carlos Fuentes or Laura Esquivel. Upon their arrival, they took over cities throughout Chiapas, freed prisoners in San Cristobal de las Casas, burned military outposts, and claimed the ranches of wealthy landowners as their own.
Although the world learned of their existence when their battalions came down from the mountains that freezing morning, they had been secretly organizing for the moment in their communities for ten years prior to the 1994 uprising.
"Our date of birth is November 17, 1983," Subcomandate Insurgent Marcos — who has now changed his name to Galeano to honor a comrade assassinated by paramilitaries in 2014 — recalled. "We prepared in silence for a decade to shout 'Enough!'," he said. "By keeping our pain inside, we prepared to cry out in pain, because we could no longer wait and hope to be understood by those who didn't even understand that they didn't understand."
Marcos, an eloquent, pipe-smoking mestizo (the government claimed he was a Mexico City philosophy professor influenced by radical liberation theology), became the public face of the Zapatistas' struggle. In January of this year, he outlined the reasons for the indigenous uprising:
The resistance of those from below is to wake those who sleep, to enrage those who are content, to force history to say what has been kept silent and to expose the exploitation, killings, displacement, contempt and forgetfulness that is hidden behind the museums, statues, books and monuments to the lies of those above.
In their silence, Carlos Fuentes wrote, the Zapatistas "won the hearts of a nation," declaring a "war against being forgotten."
The Mexican government charged Marcos and the indigenous leaders of the Zapatista movement with terrorism, sedition, riot, rebellion, and conspiracy. They met the Zapatistas' cardboard guns with tanks, soldiers, and helicopter gunships. But when the army failed, the government was forced to negotiate with the indigenous peoples, promising official recognition of ancestral lands, their culture, and their languages.
The San Andrés Accords — signed by the Zapatistas and the state in January of 1995 — marked the first time since the Spanish Empire's invasion five hundred years previously that indigenous peoples' collective rights to territory, autonomy, and self-determination had been recognized by the dominant elite.
But, as was apparent almost immediately, the agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. Eight months later, the PRI intensified anti-revolutionary activity in the Chiapas region: daily harassment at military checkpoints, constant overflights by helicopter gunships, and soldiers on patrol in villages with hunting dogs. Even more frightening was how the state outsourced terror to paramilitaries who threatened, intimidated, and forcibly evicted rebel sympathizers and their families from their land at gunpoint — and killed those who opposed them.
The Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center in Chiapas reports that the military's "paramilitary strategy has been effective because it relies not only on direct attacks perpetrated with impunity, but also on the psychological effect of the presence of paramilitaries recruited from among supporters of the government within indigenous communities, to create fear and tear apart those communities."
Why would the government so quickly turn its back on the agreement? Francisco López Bárcenas, a preeminent campaigner for indigenous rights, explained that the accords "would make it more difficult for foreign capitalists to appropriate the resources on collectively owned land." Mexican intellectual newspaper La Jornadaexplained, "Instead of establishing a new and inclusive social pact, respectful to the original peoples' right to autonomy, the state decided to maintain the old status quo": forcing autonomous indigenous peoples submit to government control and work as cheap labor for capitalism. As the Fray Center put it, the government wanted to make sure that wealth "accumulates in as few hands as possible."
Once the conservative and neoliberal National Action Party (PAN) succeeded in ousting the corporate PRI in 2000, "all México was put up for sale, and the state opted for a low intensity war in an attempt to end the Zapatistas' resistance," Bárcenas added.
Little Islands
The silence that followed the accords and the military's oppression in Chiapas following them is, in large part, due to the media. After portraying Marcos as a postmodern Ché Guevara and the Zapatistas as quixotic revolutionaries, it quickly lost interest. But the silence around their activities has allowed them to create an autonomous society deep in the Lacandon jungle, working quietly against the increasing neoliberalization of Mexico.
There and throughout Chiapas, hand-painted signs at the entrances to hamlets and pueblos mark the frontiers of Zapatista territory: "Here, the people command and the government obeys." Painted spirals representing caracols, or snails, emphasize the rebels' intention to "slowly, but surely" continue moving forward to organize their own society, whether the state recognizes it or not.
Sergio Rodríguez Lascano, editor of the Zapatista magazine Rebeldía, describes the Zapatista economy as "based on small agro-ecological parcels of land, tended by families for their own sustenance, together with ranches where the collective production of cattle, corn, coffee, bread, and honey provides an income for the community and contributes to the building of schools and medical clinics." Zapatista communities train their own teachers, medics, and midwives, run their own pharmacies using traditional herbal medicines, and even organize their own autonomous banks.
Not everyone on the Left agrees with Marcos's "silence as a strategy" approach or with the Zapatista's emphasis on local self-reliance.
Mike Gonzalez, a Marxist and Latin American studies professor, thinks "the Zapatistas' rhetoric of rights is posited on the assumption that a capitalist state is governed by principles and laws rather than class interests," and while the EZLN's "heroic resistance" is inspiring, a retreat into local autonomous communities is "a renunciation of any claim to lead society in a different direction. There is not a choice between power and its absence."
Former Mexican Revolutionary Workers' Party activist and academic Arturo Anguiano recognizes that the Zapatistas' attempt to escape capitalism has left the indigenous resistance open to the criticism that it is presenting an alternative that is "too exceptional, too specific, and probably unrepeatable."
"Marcos explains the Zapatista communities as 'little islands' or 'spaces of resistance' where social relations can be transformed without waiting for the revolution," Anguiano relates.
But Lascano doesn't see it that way. He says the Zapatistas are using the territory seized from the wealthy landowners to "construct an equalitarian alternative" that "is located outside the thinking and practice of the traditional left."
Part of the ELZN's distance from recognizable left practice, Lascano argues, is that Zapatista supporters "are not working class and the EZLN is not a workers' party because the traditional Marxist concept of class consciousness doesn't exist in these communities. But we have a number of things that have something to do with Marxism. For instance, everyone is involved in the communities' democratic political organization," he adds, which range from local assemblies to high-level juntas (councils) that are responsible for running the Zapatista territory's political, economic, and judicial affairs.
Lascano has declined invitations to join the current national campaign, led by radical Catholic priests, to rewrite Mexico's Constitution, and was uninterested in the presidential campaign of the left-wing former Mexico City mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Quoting Marcos, he declared, "The Zapatistas are going to build something else."
Historian Severo Martínez Peláez, known for his work on indigenous resistance during Spain's occupation of Mexico, says
It is a mistake to believe that the oppressed social classes live their "normal" lives when they are resigned to their fate by the inability to change it, and that their lives become "abnormal" when they rebel. This can only seem that way to those who are concerned that that supposed normality is not altered. The Zapatistas take pride that their indigenous communities — belonging to original peoples whose Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch'ol and Tojolabal names are still unknown even to most Mexicans — are living "abnormal" lives.
Isolated from the country's left — or, as Anguiano describes it, with the Left isolated from the Zapatistas — the indigenous resistance continues unheralded and out of sight for most Mexicans.
Work from Below
Yet with the return of the PRI to power in 2012, the Zapatistas showed that, even while silent, they have the power to resonate from the mountains of Chiapas to the presidential palace.
That year, the Zapatistas, together with hundreds of thousands of supporters, took to the streets in massive demonstrations throughout Mexico to demand that the original San Andrés agreement to recognize indigenous rights be respected by the political party that signed it.
The demonstrations were silent, but the message was clear: "Can you hear us?"
The Zapatistas have since applied their strategy not just to their old enemies in the PRI, but to the entirety of Mexico's notoriously corrupt political process, declaring that elections "don't interest us, nor do they concern us."
"Mexicans should organize for a world in which the people command and the government obeys. While others wait for those above to solve problems, we Zapatistas have already started building our own liberty, from below," the EZLN stated.
"We are building a new system and another way of life," Galeano/Marcos explained on January 1 of this year to the assembled EZLN fighters, Zapatista campesinos, and a few foreigners attending in solidarity, a celebration in the heart of the Lacandon jungle to commemorate three decades of resistance.
Before, to know if someone was a Zapatista, they had to be seen wearing a red bandana or a black balaclava. But now you know if someone is a Zapatista because they know how to work the land; because they care for their indigenous culture; because they know how to work collectively, and because if, when someone claims that the Zapatistas no longer exist, they respond: "Don't worry, there will be more of us – it may take a while, but there's going to more of us."
Despite the continued virtual military occupation of the jungles and mountains of Mexico's southern frontier, and despite the helicopter gunship patrols, the hunting dogs, and the threats, intimidation, and violence of paramilitaries in the pay of government-supporting political parties, the Zapatista resistance remains proudly undefeated.
Paul Salgado is a former labor union organizer working in communications for indigenous community organizations in Mexico.
The new issue of Jacobin is out this month. Buy a copy, or a special discounted subscription today.
#BlackLivesMatter and the Democrats: How Disruption Can Lead to Collaboration August 17, 2015
Posted by rogerhollander in Democracy, Hillary Clinton, Race, Racism, Revolution.
Tags: #blacklivesmatter, democratic party, ferguson, glen ford, hillary, jeh johnson, loretta lynch, martin omalley, michael brown, roger hollander, william clay
Roger's note: I find the Black Agenda Report website consistently one of the most penetrating and incisive, not only on questions of race and the Black movement, but also with an international perspective. Here we see once again (when will we/they ever learn?) how the sham quadrennial presidential election co-opts and swallows precious time and energy that should be dedicated to movement development and action. When all the shouting dies down, there will be a Hobson's choice between Hillary Clinton, who will not be moved an inch to the left by Bernie Sanders from her war-mongering imperialist position, and either Bush Three or one of the other Republican psychopaths.
If you have the time and interest, I recommend you go directly to this article and read the comments (http://www.blackagendareport.com/blm_and_democrats_disruption_to_collaboration)
Submitted by Glen Ford on Wed, 08/12/2015 – 15:22
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The #Black Lives Matter organization may believe that it is confronting, rather than collaborating with, the Democratic Party, by disrupting candidates' speeches. However, the tactic inevitably leads to "either a direct or indirect, implicit endorsement of the more responsive candidate(s)." In the absence of radical #BLM demands, "all that is left are the petty reform promises that can be squeezed out of Democrats." That's not movement politics.
"If the emerging movement allows itself to be sucked into Democratic Party politics, it is doomed."
A year after the police murder of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, an incipient mass movement struggles to congeal and define itself. The emergent movement is rooted in resistance to systemic state violence and repression in Black America, yet its trajectory wobbles under the push and pull of the contending forces that have been set in motion, and is further distorted by relentless pressures from a power structure that pursues simultaneous strategies of both cooptation and annihilation.
Physical annihilation is a constant threat to the "street" component of the movement, such as the young people of Ferguson whose defiance of the armed occupation inspired a national mobilization, and whose urban guerilla language resonates in all the inner cities of the nation. They are the cohort whose social existence has been shaped and defined by a mass Black incarceration regime inaugurated two generations ago as the national response to the Black movements of the Sixties. The clearly visible fact that many of the cops that occupied Ferguson during this week's anniversary of Michael Brown's murder were physically afraid – and that the "street" brothers and sisters were demonstrably not – is all the proof we need that Black youth in what we used to call the "ghetto" remain eager to confront their tormentors.
Physical annihilation, or a lifetime of social death through imprisonment, is also only a presidential executive order away for the "above ground" activists of the movement, whose comings, goings and communications are carefully tracked by the First Black President's secret police, as reported byIntercept. The various components of what is collectively called the Black Lives Matter movement are on the domestic enemies list of Homeland Security, overseen by Jeh Johnson, a Black man, and the FBI, under the overall direction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a Black woman.
"Black youth in what we used to call the "ghetto" remain eager to confront their tormentors."
Lynch, like her predecessor, Eric Holder, believes her race entitles her to play both Lord High Prosecutor and Black role model. Thus, as a Black "elder" and "credit to her race," Lynch purports to have the moral authority to define what the movement should be doing to commemorate Michael Brown's murder. "The weekend's events were peaceful and promoted a message of reconciliation and healing," she said – as if people should reconcile themselves to a system that kills a Black person roughly every day, has resulted in one out of every eight prison inmates in the world being an African American; a system that cannot possibly be healed. "But incidents of violence, such as we saw last night," Lynch warns, switching to her Lord High Prosecutor persona, "are contrary to both that message, along with everything [we] have worked to achieve over the past year."
What the Obama administration has spent the year trying to do, is co-opt the same activists they are building dossiers on, in preparation for possible future detention. There are clear limits, however, to the enticements that can be offered by an administration that, like all Democratic and Republican governments in the United States for the past 45 years, is totally committed to maintenance of the Mass Black Incarceration regime – albeit with some tinkering at the margins.
The greatest asset of the movement cooptation project is the Democratic Party, itself, an institution that thoroughly dominates Black politics at every level of community life. Not only are Black elected officials overwhelmingly Democrats, but virtually all of the established Black civic organizations – the NAACP, the National Urban League, most politically active Black churches, fraternities and sororities – act as annexes of the Democratic Party. Two generations after the disbanding of the Black grassroots movement and the independent politics that grew out of that movement, the Democratic Party permeates political discourse in Black America. And the Democratic Party is where progressive movements go to die.
"There are clear limits to the enticements that can be offered by an administration that is totally committed to maintenance of the Mass Black Incarceration regime."
If the emerging movement allows itself to be sucked into Democratic Party politics, it is doomed. Yet, the #BlackLivesMatter organization, a structured group with a highly visible leadership and chapters in 26 cities, is now circling the event-horizon of the Democratic Black Hole. To the extent that it, and other movement organizations, have gotten money from labor unions, they are accepting Democratic Party cash, since organized labor in the U.S. is also an extension of – and a cash cow to – the Democrats. Indeed, labor union money in a presidential election year is far more dangerous to the independence of the movement than grants from outfits like the Ford Foundation. Labor wants measureable results for its dollars, and will make its money talk at the ballot box.
#BlackLivesMatter activists may convince themselves that they are confronting the ruling class electoral duopoly by disrupting presidential candidates' speeches, but the tactic leads straight to cooptation. What is the purpose? If #BLM's goal is to push the candidates to adopt better positions on criminal justice reform, what happens afterwards? The logic of the tactic leads to either a direct or indirect, implicit endorsement of the more responsive candidate(s). Otherwise, why should #BLM – or the candidates – go through the exercise?
Former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor Martin OMalley, whose draconian street-sweeps resulted in the arrest of 750,000 people in one year – more than the total population of the city – submitted a full-blown criminal justice system proposal after being confronted by #BLM. Will it be graded? Is #BLM in the business of rating candidates? If so, then the group is inevitably acting as a Democratic Party lobby/constituency, and is wedded to certain electoral outcomes. At that point, it ceases being an independent movement, or an example of independent Black politics. It's just another brand of Democrat.
If the goal is to pressure candidates to put forward "better" positions on criminal justice or other issues, then what #BLM is actually doing is nudging Democrats towards incremental reform. In the absence of radical #BLM demands, all that is left are the petty reform promises that can be squeezed out of Democrats. (None of this works with the Republican White Man's Party.)
The #BLM tactic avoids formulation and aggressive agitation of core movement demands. But, a movement is defined by its demands – which is one reason that the current mobilization is best described as an "incipient" movement; a mobilization with great promise.
"Any sustained Black movement must, of necessity, be in opposition to the Democratic Party and its civic society annexes."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. denounced Democratic president and sometimes ally Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War, in 1967, and rejected even the appearance of collaboration with the ruling class duopoly. King understood that his job was to move masses of people towards their own empowerment, not to act as an interest group or lobby in the corridors of the system. (Malcolm X, and later, the Black Panther Party, would have pilloried King if he had.) Half a century later, the Democratic Party is full of Black officials, but, in light of their performance in office, this is more evidence of defeat than victory. Two months before Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus – four out of five full-voting members – supported continued Pentagon transfers of military weapons and gear to local police departments, including the Black congressman representing Ferguson, William "Lacy" Clay.
The Democratic Party, like its Republican duopoly cousin, is a criminal enterprise, polluting the politics of Black America. Any sustained Black movement must, of necessity, be in opposition to the Democratic Party and its civic society annexes. They are the enemies, within, the people who have facilitated the mass Black incarceration regime for two generations. "Lacy" Clay and his CBC colleagues have killed thousands of Michael Browns.
People's core demands ring out in every demonstration. When Black protesters shout, "Killer cops out of our neighborhood," they aren't referring to a couple of especially bad apples; they're talking about the whole damn occupation army. That's why the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, which holds its national conference in Philadelphia,August 22 and 23, believes "Black Community Control of the Police" is a righteous, self-determinationist demand. Other groups may feel strongly about other demands, and that's fine. Movements are lively places. But, a movement cannot congeal without core demands.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted atGlen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Glen Ford's blog
Reading I.F. Stone on Earth Day: Why We Still Won't Get Anywhere Unless We Connect the Dots April 24, 2015
Posted by rogerhollander in Environment, Revolution.
Tags: earth day, environment, history, i.f.stone, izzy award, naomi klein, revolution, roger hollander, social change, Vietnam War, war
Roger's note: I love it (actually I hate it) the way left radicals (including one as honest and forthright as I.F. Stone, a giant in the field of radical journalism) will basically lead us up to it, but will not use the R word. There are reasons for this which I understand, foremost of which is the series of failed 20th century revolutions, beginning with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, "connect the dots" is a totally inadequate substitute for a genuine call to action. Karl Marx was a radical journalist. He wrote for European journals and the New York Daily Tribune. Failed revolutions resulted from external aggressions and a failure to understand Marx, not the opposite. In today's North American academic, political, and corporate dominated media world, advocating revolution borders on the suicidal. Nevertheless, critical analysis points in no other direction.
In his speech near the end, Stone says: "Until we have a leadership willing to make the enormous changes …" Only the willfully blind can believe that the "leadership," bought lock, stock and barrel by the military industrial complex, will ever be "willing" to make fundamental changes. That will only come from below.
Nonetheless, kudos to Naomi Klein and to dear departed Izzy Stone for at least pointing in the right direction.
(Photo: elycefeliz/cc/flickr)
One week ago, I was honoured to receive an "Izzy Award" for "outstanding achievement in independent media and journalism." The annual award, which this year also went to David Sirota for his groundbreaking investigations into political corruption in the U.S. pension system, is named after the great muckraker I.F. Stone ("Izzy" to his friends).
In past years, the award has gone to people who do a far better job of embodying the legacy of Stone's investigative reporting than I (Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill among them). But as I said at the ceremony at Ithaca College, I doubt the judges have given the honour to anyone whose grandparents would have been more thrilled. Without fail, my late grandfather Philip Klein would read I.F. Stone's Weekly to my late grandmother Annie while she knitted some new creation.
In preparation for the ceremony, I read some of Stone's environmental writing, and came across a piece that seems very worth sharing today. It's the speech he gave on April 22, 1970—the very first Earth Day. Never one to mince words, Stone's speech was titled "Con Games."
Picture the scene: it's the Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the National Monument in Washington, D.C. Millions have participated in Earth Day events across the country and thousands are now gathered on the National Mall to listen to music (including Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs) and hear rally speeches from political heavyweights.
It is in this joyous and self-congratulatory atmosphere that a curmudgeonly I.F. Stone, by now a full-fledged icon on the left, takes the stage. And he unapologetically rains on the parade, accusing Earth Day of providing cover for escalating war and calling for a movement willing to demand "enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution."
Not everything about the speech stands the test of time (as we now know, the threats posed by pollution are far more dire than mere "litter"). But what Stone saw clearly, and what bears repeating four and half decades later, is that the ecological movement will get nowhere if it fails to connect the dots with other overlapping crises facing our society, from racism to militarism to inequality. Stone wasn't saying that pollution was irrelevant—simply that it "is not going to be solved in isolation."
Amen to that. So on this Earth Day, let's hear it for Izzy, and for all the others willing to crash the most comfortable parties.
I.F. Stone, "Con Games," speech delivered at Sylvan Theater, Washington, D.C., April 22, 1970
In the ancient world, the Caesars did it with bread and circuses. And tonight, I'm afraid, is the first time that our Caesars have learned to do it with rock and roll, and idealism, and noninflammatory social issues. In some ways, I'm sorry to say, we here tonight are being conned. This has many of the aspects of a beautiful snow job. The country is slipping into a wider war in southeast Asia, and we're talking about litterbugs. The secretary of defense, on Monday, made a speech to the Associated Press sabotaging the SALT talks, presenting a completely false picture of the world balance of power, ending what little hope we had of progress in those talks, preparing the way for a bigger, more expensive arms race at the expensive of mankind, and we're talking as if we needed more wastebaskets.
The divisions of white and black in this country are getting to the point where they threaten our future, and we're talking about pollution. And it's not that pollution is not an important subject, but if the Nixon administration feels so deeply about it, why don't they do something substantial about it?
One important thing about this town is that you can never take very seriously what the officials say. They're the prisoners of a vast bureaucracy. Much of what they say is merely rationalization of their lack of momentum. But in particular, the president said, and I think quite rightfully and quite truthfully, that in the next ten years it's now or never for the air we breathe and the water we drink. And then, after making that speech, he put in a budget in which 52 cents out of every general revenue dollar goes to the military, and barely four-tenths of one cent goes to air and water pollution. And that's a real con game. And that's a real snow job.
We are spending, on new weapons systems alone, more than ten times as much, in this coming fiscal year, in the Nixon budget, than we're going to spend on air and water. We're spending a billion dollars more a year on space than all our expenditure on natural resources. The priorities of this government are lunatic—absolutely lunatic. And we're not going to save the air we breathe and the water we drink without very many fundamental changes in governmental policy and governmental structure.
Before I came down here tonight, I heard a TV announcer say with great satisfaction that he hadn't heard a word said about Vietnam all day. Well, I'm going to say a word about Vietnam. We're not going to be able to save our air and our water, and the resources of our country, for our children and our grandchildren, until we end the militarization of our society, until we bring to an end the effort of American imperialism to rule the world and to waste our resources and our honor and our kids on a futile and murderous and insane task.
The problem of pollution is not going to be solved in isolation. The basic and most important pollution problem that we have to deal with is to prevent the pollution of the atmosphere of free discussion by the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell administration. A society can only progress and deal with its evils if it is prepared to allow the widest measure of free speech, including free speech for radicals who are completely opposed to the basis of that society. Any society allows you to agree with the government. A free society allows you to disagree fundamentally. And it takes a lot of disagreement, and a lot of hollering and a lot of demonstration, to shake any establishment out of its accustomed ways. And the main menace to the solution of these problems is an administration that thinks they will go away if they just put a few radicals in jail.
The problems are enormous. The source of pollution is man. And man's technology. And the enormous institutions he has built up that make him a prisoner. And somehow we've got to shake loose. And the biggest menace—the institution that ties us down most—that wastes our substance—that threatens to waste more of our youth—is that great big, five-sided building across the Potomac—the Pentagon. They are preparing to do to us at home what they tried to do in Vietnam.
Only this week, General Wheeler, the retiring chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, gave an interview to U.S. News and World Report in which he said that criticism of the military was due to a Communist plot. This is an effort of the military to revive McCarthyism, to preserve its enormous power and privileges in our society. And until its power is broken, until the military is reduced sharply in size, we're not going to be able to solve these problems.
You know, there is no use talking about Earth Day unless we are prepared to make these fundamental changes. Everybody's talking about Earth Day, and it comes out of the mouths of so many hypocrites it turns your stomach. What kind of an Earth Day can we celebrate in a country that is spending so much of its money to destroy the Earth? How can we talk of reverence for life when we're spending so much on our enemy, our genius, our money, and our youth on building up new means of destroying life?
What's the use of talking about the pollution of air and water when we live under a precarious balance of terror which can, in an hour's time, make the entire Northern Hemisphere of our planet unlivable? There's no use talking about Earth Day until we begin to think like Earthmen. Not as Americans and Russians, not as blacks and whites, not as Jews and Arabs, but as fellow travelers on a tiny planet in an infinite universe. All that we can muster of kindness, of compassion, of patience, of thoughtfulness, is necessary if this tiny planet of ours is not to go down to destruction. Until we have a leadership willing to make the enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution, there is no use talking about buying more wastebaskets or spending a couple of hundred million dollars on the Missouri River. If we do not challenge these fundamental causes of peril, we will be conned by the establishment while basic decisions are being made over which we have very little control, though they endanger everything on which our future and the world's depend.
© 2014 Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, author, and syndicated columnist. Her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), has just been published. Her previous books include the international best-sellers, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. To read all her writing visit www.naomiklein.org. Follow her on Twitter: @NaomiAKlein.
How to Stop Capitalism in its Tracks January 12, 2015
Posted by rogerhollander in Capitalism, Marx and Marxism, Revolution.
Tags: capitalism, mark hand, marxism, naomi klein, piketty, reformism, revolution, roger hollander, stephanie mcmilloan
Roger's note: it is, of course, a good thing that criticism of the capitalist economy has broken even into the mainstream. And on the political left trashing capitalism has become pretty much the in thing. Nevertheless, a critical understanding of what capitalism (or, for that matter, what capital is) is a rare occurrence, even in the so-called progressive Blogosphere. Since the deepening of the word wide crises (war, economic disparity, environmental disaster, etc.) has become more and more evident, and because everyone knows that we live in a capitalist world (private, state and mixed), it takes no great leap of logic to realize there is something very much wrong with capitalism.
But what is almost universally lacking in analysis is a rigorous and historical understanding of what capitalist economy is, much less an understanding of the revolutionary nature of the struggle to go beyond capitalism, and even much less a philosophic context that takes into account the very nature of human existence and the notion of human freedom. I am no great revolutionary scholar, but what I have learned I have learned through a lifetime of participation in the struggles for social, political and economic justice and informed by a study of capitalism via the writings of and organization formed by the founder of Marxism Humanism in North America, Raya Dunayevskaya (www.newsandletters.org).
The work of Stephanie McMillan, of which I became aware from the article below, is a welcome exception to the usual analyses of capitalism from the left, which tend to be either disappointingly reformist or corrupted by a nihilist and defeatist attitude, largely a result of the gross failures of the various 20th Century Marxist revolutions.
When she became aware of flagrant injustice and felt the need to take action, McMillan was advised in essence to work "within the system," to lobby and write letters to politicians. She soon became aware of the futility of such a strategy and began to dig further. Like most of us who have benefited by North American education and economic prosperity and who live relatively comfortable middle class lives, the truths that we discover when we are serious about investigating are difficult to adopt, "inconvenient," if you will (for me, I was hit over the head with this reality as a 20 year old university student spending a summer in various Latin American countries). It implies a break with a world view that has always served as an emotional safety net; that is, the notion that if we follow the rules and work hard at uncovering and exposing injustice, then our democracy has the capacity to adjust and correct. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't have that capacity because democracy in a capitalist economy is more symbolic than real, and it only serves to mask the deeper source of injustice. We are left with no choice. We either abandon our comfort zone in a revolutionary way, or we consciously or unconsciously rationalize a reformist strategy (Communism didn't work, so we can only try to reform capitalism), one that is doomed from the beginning to fail, the kind of failure of imagination for which William Blake coined the phrase "mind forged manacles".
My only criticism of McMillan, from what I have read in this article, is her use of the first person plural (we, our) in such a way that implies that those who come to a better understanding of the problem are the ones who are going to have to resolve it. Naturally, activist philosophers are essential to revolutionary struggles, but the subjects of revolution are the various classes of oppressed peoples, and without them no amount of intellectual acuity or vanguard "leadership," can lead to meaningful change; rather the notion of Praxis, the intertwining of thought and action.
One cannot deny how bleak things seem. But the essential truth is not that there is no other option than cancerous capitalism, rather there is no other option than its destruction and replacement with a humanistic and democratic form of socialism.
Oscar Wilde wrote, "The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." He was discussing a personality type, but in doing so he came close, if unwittingly, to encapsulating the very essence of capitalism.
May Day, Stephanie McMillan
Cartoonist and Journalist Stephanie McMillan Provides a User-Friendly Guide
by MARK HAND
If capitalism keeps chugging along, we're all in big trouble. That's the prognosis of Stephanie McMillan, an award-winning political cartoonist and author of the new book, Capitalism Must Die! A Basic Introduction to Capitalism: What It Is, Why It Sucks, and How to Crush It.
The most urgent reason to stop capitalism in its tracks, according to McMillan, is its prominent role in harming the planet. Capitalism possesses an inherent growth imperative. This means that the normal functioning of capitalism is causing water shortages, ailing oceans, destroyed forests and ruined topsoil.
But even if an ecological catastrophe weren't upon us, capitalism would still need to be dismantled because it's based on exploitation, McMillan said in an interview. "There's no reason why the social result of production needs to be in private hands and that only a few people should own what everybody produces," she said.
McMillan uses her book to introduce and popularize basic concepts of revolutionary theory. "I wanted to provide something that was accessible to people, that people wouldn't be afraid to pick up," she said. But once they pick it up, readers will find a "doorway into deeper levels of theory because we always need to learn more about the system," she explained.
Overturning capitalism, according to McMillan, will require getting as many people as possible — liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, environmentalists and unlabeled people — on the anti-capitalist bandwagon. And once they're aboard, the goal will be to educate them on the complex and long history of capitalism.
A serious weakness among activists in movements for social change has been a lack of understanding of the true nature of the system they live under. Instead of naming capitalism as the problem, McMillan writes, activists often use vague populist terms like "the 1%," "the rich," "banksters," or "greedy corporations." But the problem runs much deeper than the corruption of any particular individual or institution, according to McMillan. "It lies in the structural foundation of the entire way of life that currently dominates the globe," she writes.
"Capitalism Must Die!" also serves as a guide to fighting back because, according to McMillan, now is a better time than ever to get organized. "Capitalism is in a huge crisis," she said. "We need to understand how it works and what the nature of the crisis is and the nature of the different moments that it passes through so that we can identify its vulnerabilities and weaknesses."
Something will inevitably happen to capitalism as the crisis deepens. "It will probably have to restructure itself and it could become fascism or it could lead to a civil war between the representatives of different factions of capital or some horrible things that don't actually improve anything," she said in the interview. "Or we can organize and get rid of them."
Indeed, McMillan hopes people will use what they learn from the book to organize in their communities, workplaces and schools. "Theoretical clarity for its own sake is pointless intellectualism; instead, it should be a guide for action," she writes.
There Is No Alternative
After decades of neoliberal supremacy, critiques of capitalism have sneaked into mainstream debates, with Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate as notable examples. Both authors, however, approach capitalism from a reformist stance and hold up social democratic versions of capitalism in Western Europe as viable alternatives.
McMillan doesn't believe Western European capitalist models — the ones that offer stronger social safety nets and more enlightened views on environmental issues — are worth defending. Capitalism, in whatever form, is inherently destructive because it converts the natural world into commodities. And it's inherently exploitative because profit always comes from the exploitation of workers. "It doesn't matter if you give them healthcare or a higher salary; you're still exploiting them for private gain," she said.
While still exploitative, Europe's form of capitalism may in fact be less harsh than in the U.S. because the rising capitalist class in Europe had to deal with a feudal class. "They had to make some concessions to the masses in order to get their system in place," she said in the interview. "Whereas in the U.S., they came over here and slaughtered everyone and took the land. There was no concession made. There was no feudal class that they had to fight against or deal with."
Even with the publication of the books by Piketty and Klein, the supremacy of capitalism still remains unquestioned in the mainstream media. "It's the framework that everything else exists within. The debate has to be inside that framework. Nothing can exist outside. It's like what Margaret Thatcher said, 'There is no alternative,'" explained McMillan. "It's hard for people to imagine that there could be any alternative. People think, 'I guess this is all there is. This is the only way humans can behave.' Capitalism is naturalized."
Right now, the level of political consciousness within the working class is very low. And that didn't happen by chance. "That is by design and it's by indoctrination and conditioning," she said. "But it is a problem that we have to deal with." The capitalists and their representatives in government are adept at finding new ways to squash and tamp down threats to their control. "We have to keep evolving our tactics as well," she added.
The Occupy movement provided a glimpse at what's possible. It made people realize they can rise up and take collective action. "It was very inspiring to people for that reason," McMillan said. "There was a broad base of support for something like that. So many people got involved so quickly and there was so much discontent. It made people feel good that they weren't alone and it showed the potential of what could happen."
But Occupy also was a learning experience. "It showed the weakness and the need to be stronger. If we're actually going to go up against the system, it can't just be a spontaneous gathering of a bunch of people. It has to be organized — planned and strategic," she emphasized.
It's Our Only Shot
McMillan knows that eradicating capitalism is a long shot. "But I feel like it's our only shot. The reason that I keep doing it is because there's nothing else — the only other alternative is to give up and die or accept things the way they are and end up in a worse situation," she said.
Anybody who really understands what's going on cannot stand idle, according to McMillan. "It's our historical responsibility," she insists. "It's a matter of human dignity."
Accepting things the way they are would mean allowing 10 million children under the age of five to die annually because, under the normal functioning of global capitalism, it's not profitable to save them, she writes in the book, citing a study by the nonprofit group Save the Children. It would mean continuing to accept racism, which has always been central to capitalism's expansion and has been used to excuse the ultra-violent policies — from genocide of indigenous people to slavery and now the "war on terror" — that serve the accumulation of capital, she explains.
McMillan understood what's going on when she was in high school and a relative urged her to read Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth, a 1982 book about the destruction of life on Earth from nuclear war. She was reluctant to read the book. "I instinctively knew that if I read it, then I would have to then deal with the horrible issues that were going to be in there. I didn't want to disrupt my comfortable existence. I understood that I would have to do a lot of hard things," she remembered.
But the relative kept prodding her: "You've got to read this. It's the biggest issue. Reagan is going to destroy the world. We can't let this happen and you have to read this." McMillan eventually relented and opened the book. As she expected, it was horrifying and upsetting. She realized humans couldn't go on living with the possibility of nuclear war hanging over their heads, which seemed very possible at the time.
McMillan started going to meetings with peace and justice activists in her native South Florida. They would tell her to write letters to her congressperson, write letters to the editor of local newspapers and sign petitions. Even as a newcomer to political activism, McMillan knew these steps were not going to be sufficient. "And I would ask, 'Is there anything else?' and they would say, 'No, that's it.'"
But then McMillan met a guy wearing a purple hat who was talking about revolution. He was standing outside a screening of a movie about nuclear war. "It was like a light bulb, 'We could actually have a revolution now.' I thought it was just a historical thing that happened in the past, like the Declaration of Independence," she recalled. "I didn't know we could have another one."
The guy with the purple hat gave McMillan a copy of a newspaper filled with words she didn't understand: the proletariat, the bourgeoisie. "I came home really excited and told my dad, 'I think I'm a communist! This is going to solve everything,'" she recalled. "And he pounded his fist on the table and he goes, 'What's the labor theory of value.' And I said, 'I don't know.' And he said, 'How can you call yourself a communist if you don't even know what the labor theory of value is, one of its basic concepts?'"
McMillan immersed herself in study and quickly learned that the labor theory of value means that the exchange value of a product is based on the socially necessary amount of labor power — measured in time — that is generally required to produce it. But under capitalism, one of the key ingredients is surplus value. And under capitalism, the buyer of labor power — the capitalist — appropriates the surplus value generated in the process of commodity production.
You Can't Be Neutral
Mastering political theory is tough enough. But putting it into action is even harder. Along with decades of organizing and activism, McMillan has worked as a cartoonist, drawing the popular daily comic strip Minimum Security and the weekly editorial cartoon Code Green, where she seeks to propagate her ideas through crafty drawings and funny dialog. She has received numerous awards for her cartoons, the most notable being the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Editorial Cartoonists in 2012.
As a working journalist, McMillan has learned that reporting is never objective. "There is no such thing. It's never neutral. It's never non-partisan. If somebody is involved in an issue and they acknowledge it in the article — you know where they are coming from — then it actually has more credibility because they have a deeper level of understanding of the issue because when you just dropping into something like a tourist, you can't really understand it deeply," she explained in the interview.
Many of the journalists who reported on the Occupy movement, for example, were unfamiliar with it. "They just observed the surface, the spectacle. They didn't know all the dynamics. They didn't know all the people, all the different political trends, all the different tendencies within it. They're just reduced to describing the surface imagery," she recalled.
McMillan also has written several books with political and environmental themes such as "As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial" and "The Beginning of the American Fall." Since the publication of "Capitalism Must Die!", people have told McMillan that the book brought them clarity and a comprehensive understanding of capitalism. They also appreciated how the cartoons helped to make the concepts clearer.
Going forward, McMillan believes anti-capitalists will need to work with liberals and reformists, even if it often can be an exercise in frustration. Anti-capitalist organizations should only engage in common work with reformists, though, when they are organized enough to insist that their politics are represented, she writes.
If and when anti-capitalist groups make headway, the dominant class will respond with ever-increasing violence and, as it has repeatedly shown, will not hesitate at committing massacres on any scale using what McMillan describes as the "capitalists' accumulated forces of lies, wealth and arms."
"But we are potentially stronger than them," McMillan writes. "We outnumber them, and we have right on our side."
Mark Hand covers energy issues. You can reach him at markhand13@gmail.com , or follow him on Twitter at @MarkFHand.
Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. October 3, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, History, Race, Racism, Revolution, Uncategorized.
Tags: black liberation, cia, Civil Rights, civil rights movement, countelpro, fbi, history, malxolm x, martin luther king, Race, racism.assassination, roger hollander, ronald sheppard, segregation
Roger's note: you can purchase Ronald Sheppard's pamphlet at http://www.remarxpub.com
by Roland Sheppard. ReMarx Publishing, 2014.
Reviewed by Roger Hollander, Black Agenda Report
The question of who ordered the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. is a vital one, and thousands of pages have been written on the issue. Those who dismiss the notion that the United States Government would engage in assassination (by characterizing those who believe this as 'conspiracy nuts') willfully ignore the 1975 Church Committee Report (that exposed covert, illegal government activities) and the many CIA-orchestrated assassinations and coups d'etat from Africa to Latin America.
The CIA's experience with overseas assassinations has given it more than enough expertise to conduct domestic assassinations, with the added advantage of having control over investigating agencies at the local, state, and national levels.
Deciding criminal guilt is largely based on proving means, motive, and opportunity. When it comes to political assassination, the key question is motive.
Powerful government institutions possess, or can easily obtain, the means and the opportunity to conduct an assassination and divert attention to "a lone gunman," or a patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald. The mainstream media conveniently forget this fact as they rush to legitimize wacky theories that take the heat off the CIA, FBI, NSA, and police.
"When it comes to political assassination, the key question is motive."
In Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Roland Sheppard exposes the U.S. Government's motive for assassinating Malcolm X in New York's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965 and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The fact that Sheppard is one of the few remaining eye witnesses to the assassination of Malcolm X adds a note of immediacy and authenticity to his analysis.
Sheppard describes the unusual absence of security on the day of Malcolm X's assassination, and he recounts his personal observations of what happened in the crucial moments. He tells of a second suspect apprehended that day by the New York Police, a man whose existence later disappeared from the official version of events. However, when Sheppard was interrogated at the Harlem Police Station, he saw this man walking freely into one of the offices. Sheppard recognized him as the assassin.
In 1999, the King family launched a civil suit in 1999 to expose the facts surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
"After considering all the evidence, a Memphis jury ruled that someone other than James Earl Ray had been the shooter … that the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee, and federal government agencies were all involved in the assassination."
The heart of Sheppard's work is his analysis of the motive for these two government assassinations.
There is nothing more threatening to the U.S. corporate elite, the government, the military, and the mass media than the prospect of revolution. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were developing beyond their original Black liberation philosophies. They were emerging as powerful advocates and organizers for revolutionary change in the American economic and political system.
In his final years, Malcolm X expanded the fight against racism to include the fight against poverty and war. In 1962, he supported striking hospital workers in New York City. And he was the first mass leader in the United States to publicly oppose America's war against Vietnam.
In his speech at the Oxford Union in 1964, Malcolm X gives Shakespeare a revolutionary twist. He begins with the famous question: "Whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them." His answer, "And I go for that. If you take up arms you'll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who's in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you'll be waiting a long time."
The U.S. Government also feared Malcolm X's growing international stature and the political connections he was making in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Sheppard reminds us that Malcolm X met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in New York, in December of 1964. He was invited by Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian revolution, to participate along with Che and other independence movement leaders at a conference in Bandung beginning March 3, 1965. He had also arranged for the issue of human rights violations against Afro-Americans to be considered on March 12, 1965, by the International Court of Justice at the Hague. His assassination put an end to all of this. (Ben Bella was assassinated just four months later.)
Fighting words Martin Luther King, Jr. was also beginning to challenge a political system that profits from racism. Sheppard cites King's speech at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention in August 1967,
"Why are there forty million poor people in America? … when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth … you begin to question the capitalist economy."
King pointed out that the Northern Liberals, who had given moral and financial support to end Jim Crow laws in the South, would not support the effort to eliminate economic segregation. As Sheppard states, "Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to subvert the Poor People's Campaign. King was building a mass movement against poverty, and those who profit from poverty were determined to stop him."
King's opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam sent shivers down the back of the military-industrial complex. In his historic sermon at the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, sometimes referred to as the greatest MLK speech you never heard of, King exclaimed:
"Money that should have been spent on Johnson's War on Poverty was being lost in Vietnam's killing fields … A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death … We are taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools."
King called for a coalition of labor, anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war activists; and a united movement poses the greatest threat to the status quo.
Marxists?
In his books on Malcolm X, George Breitman states, "Malcolm was not yet a Marxist." A reviewer of Breitman's work added, "Not yet! But it was only a matter of time."
Malcolm X wrote:
"It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it's more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody's blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It's only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely."
Martin Luther King, Jr., may not have been as far along the road of rejecting capitalism for socialism. Nevertheless, I believe that this was also a matter of time. In a 1966 speech to his staff, King explained: "… something is wrong … with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."
"Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to subvert the Poor People's Campaign."
The U.S. Government was determined that neither of these fighters should be allowed to have that time. However, before moving to assassinate them, it tried to "neutralize" them.
Sheppard describes the activities of COINTELPRO, the FBI's program to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam-War movement, and any other threat to the status quo.
FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover, called King "the most dangerous Negro" and tried to blackmail him into silence. To discredit Malcolm X, the FBI paid an informer inside the Nation of Islam. When these efforts failed, assassination was the final option.
The U.S. Government assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. because they rightly came to understand and challenge the capitalist economic system, its social impact (war, poverty, injustice, environmental disaster), and its reliance on racism to divide-and-conquer.
Sheppard concludes with an appeal to action; we must learn the truth about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. so we can carry their vision forward and conclude the struggle they so bravely began.
Roland Sheppard describes himself as a retired Business Representative of Painters Local #4 in San Francisco, a life long social activist and socialist. Prior to being elected as a union official in 1994, he worked for 31 years as a house painter. Roland Sheppard's Daily News is accessible athttp://rolandsheppard.com/
James Baldwin, Born 90 Years Ago, Is Fading in Classrooms April 24, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Education, Race, Racism, Revolution.
Tags: afro-american, black history, education, felicia r. lee, james baldwin, Race, racism, roger hollander
Roger's note: As with MLK's more radical anti-war, anti-American speeches vanish (whitewashed, pun intended) from official history, so do genuine revolutionary radicals like James Baldwin, Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) and Amiri Baraka (born Leroi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, my birthplace). It is no coincidence, rather a conscious amnesia. In the same week celebrating the 90th anniversary of Baldwin's birth, the US Supreme Court upholds racist anti affirmative action state law. This week also saw the passing away of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the prize fighter who spent 19 years in prison based on racist prosecutions and verdicts in Patterson, New Jersey (my beloved home state).
By FELICIA R. LEE
APRIL 24, 2014, New York Times
Dinobi Agwu reading a poem inspired by James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" in Erika Brantley's, background, 9th-grade English class at the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem.
James Baldwin's 1953 novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," about a Harlem teenager's search for meaning, quickly became a classic, along with his searing essays about race published a decade later in the book "The Fire Next Time." But in recent years Baldwin's presence has diminished in many high school classrooms.
In a year that marks the 90th anniversary of his birth, educators offer different reasons for Baldwin's faded presence there, from the concern that he is too controversial and complex to the perception that he has been eclipsed by other African-American voices. Collectively the explanations illustrate how attitudes about race have changed, along with the way the high school literary experience has evolved according to currents in the field.
"Baldwin is still there, but he's not there in the way he was," said Jocelyn A. Chadwick, chairwoman of the secondary level of the National Council of Teachers of English, pointing out that while in the 1960s and '70s students would study Baldwin's essays, short stories and novels in their entirety, today they often encounter his work only in anthologies.
Isaac Asante participates in a discussion of "Sonny's Blues" in Ms. Brantley's class.
Now teachers, scholars and other Baldwin fans are seizing on the anniversary of his birth in Harlem to inspire what they hope will be a revival of a younger generation's interest in the work of one of the country's most gifted writers and major voices on race and morality.
The New York Live Arts festival "James Baldwin, This Time," which began on Wednesday and continues through Sunday with performances and events across disciplines, is an extensive commemoration of the writer, who was black and gay and died in 1987. The festival kicks off a yearlong, citywide consideration of Baldwin at several places, including Harlem Stage, the Columbia University School of the Arts and the New School's Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Additionally, some of Baldwin's books are being reissued this year, and there are new appraisals of his work as well as new work inspired by him. "Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems" (Beacon Press), with an introduction by the poet Nikky Finney, came out this month. Vintage reissued "Giovanni's Room" and "Go Tell It on the Mountain" last year. Already the attention has prompted a broader conversation about Baldwin's legacy.
"I think he's not taught as much anymore on the high school level because he's incendiary and, for some, inflammatory," said Rich Blint, a Baldwin scholar and associate director in the Office of Community Outreach and Education at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Paradoxically, the belief that the county is somehow postracial, Mr. Blint said, has shut down some discussions about race. "Think about how impoverished our racial conversations are now," he said.
Educators also cite poor reading habits, censorship and Baldwin's absence from the list of works suggested for Common Core standards as reasons his works are not studied regularly. And since the late '70s and early '80s, as school districts have scrambled for more diverse subject matter in the classroom, Baldwin has had to share space with a new crop of black writers, especially women: Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Over the years, some parents and schools have also challenged what they saw as the sexual material, violence and profanity in Baldwin's work. Sex — interracial and intraracial, gay and straight — is prominent in his fiction. His raw dissections of race also raised concerns.
Long before it was fashionable to argue that race was a social construct, Baldwin famously said, "Insofar as you think you're white, you're irrelevant," during a 1979 speech in Berkeley, Calif., a sentiment he repeated in his writing and public appearances. Racism was not a stain on American exceptionalism, Baldwin argued, but a deliberate feature of a country that he said routinely terrorized black people. He moved to France in the late 1940s to evade racism, but he returned home often, and he helped to articulate the pains of the civil rights movement.
"He was one of the fiercest critics of the American race problem who ever put pen to paper," said Khalil G. Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A historian, Mr. Muhammad has taught Baldwin to students as young as eighth grader to help them understand history and to articulate and communicate the conditions of their lives, he said. In his travels around the country, though, he does not find nearly enough young Baldwin readers, he said.
In the words of Walter Dean Myers, an award-winning children's author, in an interview, "It begins with the fact that the students are not reading that well at all, the teachers shy away from complex issues, and the parents are not making demands." While it can be difficult to generalize about a vast universe of schools, high school students who do read Baldwin are more apt to attend elite or high-performing schools, said Mr. Myers, who in 2012 and 2013 traveled to dozens of libraries, schools and community centers around the country as a national ambassador for young people and literature.
Nevertheless, in some quarters Baldwin remains a vivid part of adolescent lives. In a classroom decorated with Baldwin quotations at the Frederick Douglass Academy 1 in Harlem, students in freshman English one recent morning recited poems inspired by "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin's short story about a jazz musician whose demons include heroin.
"In a dark place is where my soul lays/one parent dead and the other missing," went two lines of "Stanley's Blues," by Stanley Anisca.
Shawnakay Shaw recited, "Living in the hood ain't no joke/especially when you're broke selling dope."
To include young people in the new considerations of Baldwin, students from the James Baldwin School, a Manhattan high school, will join such prominent artists as Ms. Finney, Suzan-Lori Parks, Marcus Gardley, Vijay Iyer and others in reading and discussing Baldwin's writing at a Live Arts noon program, "Jimmy at High Noon," at the New York Live Arts Studio every day during the festival.
For some Baldwin fans, those events are a bright spot on a generally dull landscape. "On one hand, he's on a U.S. postage stamp; on the other hand, he's not in the Common Core," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. "A lot of public high school students will not have heard of him, and that's a tragedy. The burden of protecting James Baldwin's hugely important legacy is on teachers of English."
Baldwin's name and books are not listed in the appendix of the Common Core State Standards, a set of learning goals adopted by more than 40 states and the District of Columbia. (Richard Wright, for instance, is included.) Its proponents argue that the core's "exemplar" list of books and writers is just a guidepost, not definitive and not reflective of a canon or a curriculum. Many canonical titles are not on the list, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain being one example.
Susan Pimentel, a leading writer on the standards for English language arts and literacy, said in an email message that it would be heartbreaking to think that a great story like "Sonny's Blues" would be overlooked just because it was not on the list. However, she said, "It simply was not the aim of Appendix B to create a list of important authors to read and wade into the canonical arguments of the 1980s."
At Frederick Douglass, there was no doubt that Baldwin would be in the canon and the classroom. Joseph D. Gates, the principal, said his school has the latitude to create the curriculum with the staff and to include work that will be relevant to students. The school has a reputation for sending all its seniors to college, including some to Ivy League schools.
"I think Baldwin presents a perspective that is uniquely Harlem," Mr. Gates said. "Many of the struggles the students face are the same: self-identity, racism, drugs and alcohol, even though the times have changed."
Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014 February 2, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Marx and Marxism, Revolution.
Tags: capitalism, communist manifesto, corporate profits, economic cycles, economics, globalization, industrial labor, karl marx, marxism, marxist economics, Marxist Humanism, monopoly, monopoly capitalism, progressive income tax, Raya Dunayevskaya, roger hollander, sean mcelwee, unemployment
Roger's note: I find it interesting that journalists cannot write positive things about Marx with a caveat to show, I guess, that they are not slavish ideological Marxists. Marx did not consider himself to be a prophet or a maker of blueprints for the future. If so much of what he projected has come to be true it is because of his profound intellectual and analytic digging and not because he was some kind of a seer into the future. First of all Marx was a philosopher, not an economist. More specifically a philosopher of human liberation. He realized that he needed a complete understanding of the history of human development and economics (he read and absorbed every one of the political economists of his day, from Adam Smith and Ricardo and Malthus to names you and I have never heard of) in order to develop a philosophy that contained the theory and practice for human individual and social liberation. Furthermore, it is not untrue but rather misleading to state that "Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with." With a particular reference to the Paris Commune, he often wrote of a future of "freely associated labor." He wrote about the "withering away of the state" and, of course, his most profound "vision" of a future classless world was described in his classic: "from each according to his/her need; to each according to his/her ability" (I added the gender neutrality of which Marx would have approved). I found the best introduction to Marx was through his so-called "early writings" or "economic manuscripts" (I have the old Bottomore edition); and for a deeper understanding of Marx, the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism.
From the iPhone 5S to corporate globalization, modern life is full of evidence of Marx's foresight
By SEAN MCELWEE
January 30, 2014 12:30 PM ET, Rolling Stone
Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images
There's a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days – from Rush Limbaugh accusing Pope Francis of promoting "pure Marxism" to a Washington Times writer claiming that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an "unrepentant Marxist." But few people actually understand Marx's trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist's prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. And while Marx was wrong about some things, his writings (many of which pre-date the American Civil War) accurately predicted several aspects of contemporary capitalism, from the Great Recession to the iPhone 5S in your pocket.
Here are five facts of life in 2014 that Marx's analysis of capitalism correctly predicted more than a century ago:
1. The Great Recession (Capitalism's Chaotic Nature)
The inherently chaotic, crisis-prone nature of capitalism was a key part of Marx's writings. He argued that the relentless drive for profits would lead companies to mechanize their workplaces, producing more and more goods while squeezing workers' wages until they could no longer purchase the products they created. Sure enough, modern historical events from the Great Depression to the dot-com bubble can be traced back to what Marx termed "fictitious capital" – financial instruments like stocks and credit-default swaps. We produce and produce until there is simply no one left to purchase our goods, no new markets, no new debts. The cycle is still playing out before our eyes: Broadly speaking, it's what made the housing market crash in 2008. Decades of deepening inequality reduced incomes, which led more and more Americans to take on debt. When there were no subprime borrows left to scheme, the whole façade fell apart, just as Marx knew it would.
2. The iPhone 5S (Imaginary Appetites)
Marx warned that capitalism's tendency to concentrate high value on essentially arbitrary products would, over time, lead to what he called "a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites." It's a harsh but accurate way of describing contemporary America, where we enjoy incredible luxury and yet are driven by a constant need for more and more stuff to buy. Consider the iPhone 5S you may own. Is it really that much better than the iPhone 5 you had last year, or the iPhone 4S a year before that? Is it a real need, or an invented one? While Chinese families fall sick with cancer from our e-waste, megacorporations are creating entire advertising campaigns around the idea that we should destroy perfectly good products for no reason. If Marx could see this kind of thing, he'd nod in recognition.
3. The IMF (The Globalization of Capitalism)
Marx's ideas about overproduction led him to predict what is now called globalization – the spread of capitalism across the planet in search of new markets. "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe," he wrote. "It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." While this may seem like an obvious point now, Marx wrote those words in 1848, when globalization was over a century away. And he wasn't just right about what ended up happening in the late 20th century – he was right about why it happened: The relentless search for new markets and cheap labor, as well as the incessant demand for more natural resources, are beasts that demand constant feeding.
4. Walmart (Monopoly)
The classical theory of economics assumed that competition was natural and therefore self-sustaining. Marx, however, argued that market power would actually be centralized in large monopoly firms as businesses increasingly preyed upon each other. This might have struck his 19th-century readers as odd: As Richard Hofstadter writes, "Americans came to take it for granted that property would be widely diffused, that economic and political power would decentralized." It was only later, in the 20th century, that the trend Marx foresaw began to accelerate. Today, mom-and-pop shops have been replaced by monolithic big-box stores like Walmart, small community banks have been replaced by global banks like J.P. Morgan Chase and small famers have been replaced by the likes of Archer Daniels Midland. The tech world, too, is already becoming centralized, with big corporations sucking up start-ups as fast as they can. Politicians give lip service to what minimal small-business lobby remains and prosecute the most violent of antitrust abuses – but for the most part, we know big business is here to stay.
5. Low Wages, Big Profits (The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor)
Marx believed that wages would be held down by a "reserve army of labor," which he explained simply using classical economic techniques: Capitalists wish to pay as little as possible for labor, and this is easiest to do when there are too many workers floating around. Thus, after a recession, using a Marxist analysis, we would predict that high unemployment would keep wages stagnant as profits soared, because workers are too scared of unemployment to quit their terrible, exploitative jobs. And what do you know? No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal warns, "Lately, the U.S. recovery has been displaying some Marxian traits. Corporate profits are on a tear, and rising productivity has allowed companies to grow without doing much to reduce the vast ranks of the unemployed." That's because workers are terrified to leave their jobs and therefore lack bargaining power. It's no surprise that the best time for equitable growth is during times of "full employment," when unemployment is low and workers can threaten to take another job.
Marx was wrong about many things. Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with – which left it open to misinterpretation by madmen like Stalin in the 20th century. But his work still shapes our world in a positive way as well. When he argued for a progressive income tax in the Communist Manifesto, no country had one. Now, there is scarcely a country without a progressive income tax, and it's one small way that the U.S. tries to fight income inequality. Marx's moral critique of capitalism and his keen insights into its inner workings and historical context are still worth paying attention to. As Robert L. Heilbroner writes, "We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable." Today, in a world of both unheard-of wealth and abject poverty, where the richest 85 people have more wealth than the poorest 3 billion, the famous cry, "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains," has yet to lose its potency.
Pete Seeger Dead: Famed Folk Singer, Songwriter And Political Activist Dies At 94 January 28, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Revolution.
Tags: anti-racism, black list, chris talbott, civil rights movement, folk music, michael hill, Obituaries, peace movement, pete seeger, Pete Seeger Dead, Pete Seeger Died, Pete Seeger Folk Music, Pete Seeger Obituary, Pete-Seeger-Occupy-Wall-Street, political protest, protest music, video, we shall overcome, weavers
Roger's note: A genuine American hero has left us. A man virtually with no rival in his field: folk music/humanistic radical politics. For some years there has been a movement to nominate Pete for the Nobel Peace Prize . To think it went to our bellicose president. Pete Seeger: a life to celebrate and to emulate.
CHRIS TALBOTT and MICHAEL HILL 01/28/14 06:25 AM ET EST
NEW YORK (AP) — Buoyed by his characteristically soaring spirit, the surging crowd around him and a pair of canes, Pete Seeger walked through the streets of Manhattan leading an Occupy Movement protest in 2011.
Though he would later admit the attention embarrassed him, the moment brought back many feelings and memories as he instructed yet another generation of young people how to effect change through song and determination — as he had done over the last seven decades as a history-sifting singer and ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser.
"Be wary of great leaders," he told The Associated Press two days after the march. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders."
The banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage died Monday at the age of 94. Seeger's grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days. Family members were with him.
"He was chopping wood 10 days ago," Cahill-Jackson recalled.
With his lanky frame, use-worn banjo and full white beard, Seeger was an iconic figure in folk music who outlived his peers. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and wrote or co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his fingers poised over the strings of his banjo.
In 2011, the canes kept Seeger from carrying his beloved instrument while he walked nearly 2 miles with hundreds of protesters swirling around him holding signs and guitars. With a simple gesture — extending his friendship — Seeger gave the protesters and even their opponents a moment of brotherhood the short-lived movement sorely needed.
When a policeman approached, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger said at the time he feared his grandfather would be hassled.
"He reached out and shook my hand and said, 'Thank you, thank you, this is beautiful,'" Rodriguez-Seeger said. "That really did it for me. The cops recognized what we were about. They wanted to help our march. They actually wanted to protect our march because they saw something beautiful. It's very hard to be anti-something beautiful."
That was a message Seeger spread his entire life.
With The Weavers, a quartet organized in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group — Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman — churned out hit recordings of "Goodnight Irene," "Tzena, Tzena" and "On Top of Old Smokey."
Seeger also was credited with popularizing "We Shall Overcome," which he printed in his publication "People's Song" in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from "will" to "shall," which he said "opens up the mouth better."
"Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger," Arlo Guthrie once said.
His musical career was always braided tightly with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Repeatedly pressed by the committee to reveal whether he had sung for Communists, Seeger responded sharply: "I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American."
He was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal.
Seeger called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the music he, Guthrie, Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter and others had created or preserved.
"The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones," he told The Associated Press in 2006. " … And I showed the kids there's a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio."
His scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and Seeger accused the network of censorship.
He finally got to sing it five months later in a stirring return appearance, although one station, in Detroit, cut the song's last stanza: "Now every time I read the papers/That old feelin' comes on/We're waist deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on."
Seeger's output included dozens of albums and single records for adults and children.
He appeared in the movies "To Hear My Banjo Play" in 1946 and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in 1970. A reunion concert of the original Weavers in 1980 was filmed as a documentary titled "Wasn't That a Time."
By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honors.
Official Washington sang along — the audience must sing was the rule at a Seeger concert — when it lionized him at the Kennedy Center in 1994. President Bill Clinton hailed him as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them."
Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honored him with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger. While pleased with the album, Seeger said he wished it was "more serious." A 2009 concert at Madison Square Garden to mark Seeger's 90th birthday featured Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Emmylou Harris among the performers.
Seeger was a 2014 Grammy Awards nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which Stephen Colbert won.
Seeger's sometimes ambivalent relationship with rock was most famously on display when Dylan "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Witnesses say Seeger became furious backstage as the amped-up band played, though just how furious is debated. Seeger dismissed the legendary tale that he looked for an ax to cut Dylan's sound cable, and said his objection was not to the type of music but only that the guitar mix was so loud you couldn't hear Dylan's words.
Seeger maintained his reedy 6-foot-2 frame into old age, though he wore a hearing aid and conceded that his voice was pretty much shot. He relied on his audiences to make up for his diminished voice, feeding his listeners the lines and letting them sing out.
"I can't sing much," he said. "I used to sing high and low. Now I have a growl somewhere in between."
Nonetheless, in 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album, "Pete."
Seeger was born in New York City on May 3, 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to religious dissenters of colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin and taught; his father, Charles, a musicologist, was a consultant to the Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression. His uncle Alan Seeger, the poet, wrote "I Have a Rendezvous With Death."
Pete Seeger said he fell in love with folk music when he was 16, at a music festival in North Carolina in 1935. His half-brother, Mike Seeger, and half-sister, Peggy Seeger, also became noted performers.
He learned the five-string banjo, an instrument he rescued from obscurity and played the rest of his life in a long-necked version of his own design. On the skin of Seeger's banjo was the phrase, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" — a nod to his old pal Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with "This machine kills fascists."
Dropping out of Harvard in 1938 after two years as a disillusioned sociology major, he hit the road, picking up folk tunes as he hitchhiked or hopped freights.
"The sociology professor said, 'Don't think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it,'" Seeger said in October 2011.
In 1940, with Guthrie and others, he was part of the Almanac Singers and performed benefits for disaster relief and other causes.
He and Guthrie also toured migrant camps and union halls. He sang on overseas radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information early in World War II. In the Army, he spent 3½ years in Special Services, entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific, and made corporal.
He married Toshi Seeger on July 20, 1943. The couple built their cabin in Beacon after World War II and stayed on the high spot of land by the Hudson River for the rest of their lives together. The couple raised three children. Toshi Seeger died in July at age 91.
The Hudson River was a particular concern of Seeger's. He took the sloop Clearwater, built by volunteers in 1969, up and down the Hudson, singing to raise money to clean the water and fight polluters.
He also offered his voice in opposition to racism and the death penalty. He got himself jailed for five days for blocking traffic in Albany in 1988 in support of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose claim of having been raped by white men was later discredited. He continued to take part in peace protests during the war in Iraq, and he continued to lend his name to causes.
"Can't prove a damn thing, but I look upon myself as old grandpa," Seeger told the AP in 2008 when asked to reflect on his legacy. "There's not dozens of people now doing what I try to do, not hundreds, but literally thousands. … The idea of using music to try to get the world together is now all over the place."
Associated Press writer John Rogers in Los Angeles and Mary Esch in Saratoga Springs in contributed to this report.