"Ian Rankin once explained to an interviewer (the head of the Indian Communist Party!) that crime fiction is a way of talking about social inequality. Ron Jacobs applies that same maxim to the Sixties... in his wonderfully noir trilogy of those exhilarating and troubled times. And what Rankin does for Edinburgh, Jacobs amply illuminates for the Movement. Much much more than ripping yarns (though they are that too), from a master who's been there, done that, and lived to tell a tale or two."

--Ramsey Kanaan, Publisher PM Press/noir enthusiast

Monday, February 28, 2011

Washington's Internal Security Apparatus-A Long History

US citizens of almost all political stripes tend to live their lives ignorant of what the government that operates in their name is really up to. Some of this is due to the government's obsession with secrecy and some of it is due to the people's political naivete (or ignorance). Perhaps the only exceptions to this statement are those that exist on what are considered the fringes of US political discourse. Thanks in part to this ignorance, most US residents live their lives unaware of the police state author Andrew Kolin describes in his recently published book State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush.
This isn't just another book raging against the excesses of the George Bush administration. In fact, it is a historical survey of the slow but steady journey of the US polity towards an authoritarian regime designed to protect a relative few from the democratic urgings of the people. Kolin begins his book with a brief look at the debates over the writing of the US Constitution and its eventual incarnation as a blueprint for a centralized authority whose intention was to keep government away from the hoi polloi. Adjunct to this endeavor was a desire to expand the nation. This was done by killing the indigenous peoples living on the land to be expanded into. In order to justify this genocide, it was necessary to delineate the natives as something other than human. According to Kolin, the need for such an "other" is essential to the development of an authoritarian state. The Native Americans and the African slaves filled the need quite nicely given their obvious physical and cultural differences.
Another aspect of Kolin's proposition that differentiates it from so many other commentaries that have been written on the police state tactics of the Bush administration is his contention that the US police state is not a future possibility. It already exists. We are living in it. He backs up this contention with an argument that dissects the elements generally considered essential to the definition of a police state and applies them to the present day United States. From torture to propaganda techniques; from the government's ability to eavesdrop on anyone to its ability to wage war at will--these are but a few of the indices Kolin examines in his study. According to Kolin, however, the ultimate indicator of a police state is defined by whether or not the leader of a particular government (in this case, that of the United States) exists above the laws of the nation and the world. In other words, if the leader does something, is it ever illegal? Kolin provides multiple examples of every administration since Abraham Lincoln's operating in a vein suggesting that they all operated in this way at times. However, it was not until the inauguration of George W. Bush and the events of September 11, 2001, that the word of the president became a law onto its own. When George Bush said he was "the decider" he wasn't joking. He and every president to follow him truly have that power. They can decide who to kill, who to spy on, who to lock up, and who to attack without any restriction other than their own morality. Furthermore, they can also determine how such actions are to be done. As far as the presidency is concerned, no laws--not the Bill of Rights nor the Geneva Conventions--apply.
The march towards this police state that Kolin describes is best characterized by the phrase "two steps forward, one step back." Historically, for every presidential administration where excesses occurred, there followed another that saw a relaxation of some of those excesses. The repression of the Palmer Raids was followed by a decade where the Communist Party became legal; the McCarthy Era was followed by a relaxation of the anti-communist hysteria in the 2960s; Nixon's attempts to subvert the democratic process were answered with convictions and a series of laws that were supposed to prevent similar excesses. Yet, the march towards authoritarianism continued its quiet goosestep. Nowhere was this more obvious than in US foreign policy. After the US turmoil around its war against the Vietnamese, Congress passed a War Powers Act that supposedly limited the president’s ability to send US troops to other nations. In answer, every single president afterward pushed the limits of that law so that by the 1980s it was meaningless. Other attempts to limit the White House's ability to make war like the Boland amendment which made arming the Nicaraguan Contras illegal were just ignored. By the time Bill Clinton took power in 1991, the ability of the president to attack whenever and wherever was no longer seriously challenged by Congress, leaving the White House in sole control of the nations' military might.
The nation described in Kolin's book is a fearful one. It is a nation whose agents torture at will and whose military wages war for no apparent reason other than profit and power. It is a nation whose political police forces operate as both judge and jury and often fail to leave their personal prejudices at home. It is a nation whose judicial system rarely interprets a law different than the chief executive and when it does that executive ignores the ruling. It is a nation where so many of its citizens live their lives under the illusion that the authoritarian rule they increasingly live with is somehow protecting them. It is a nation that refuses to prosecute officials including the former president that were involved in torture that violated domestic and international laws. Finally, according to Kolin, it is a nation without redemption that will see the powers of the police state continue to grow unless its people wake up and dismantle it.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Making the Robbed Pay for the Robbers' Crimes

"Some men rob you with a six gun/and some with a fountain pen..."-Woody Guthrie
As I write this, Republicans and other right wingers fret and strut about their stage in Madison, WI. calling for the arrest of Democratic legislators refusing to be bullied into destroying public worker unions in Wisconsin. It's not that the Democrats completely oppose the GOP governor's proposal to destroy the unions, but the incredibly powerful and populous protests against the proposal have convinced them that they should disappear for a while. The protests, meanwhile, are growing in size and fury. A similar situation seems to be unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and other US states where similar attempts by anti-union state officials to destroy public employee unions are underway.
The desire to destroy the unions is being presented as a deficit reducing proposal. In reality, the unionbusting proposals would have very little effect on cutting the deficit. In fact, some reporters claim that Wisconsin did not actually face a deficit until the governor pushed through some tax proposals favorable to big business and the wealthy. These very same businesses and wealthy individuals are part of the small number of people that have benefited from the economic crash of 2007. It is their intention to continue benefiting at the expense of the rest of the country. Amazingly, numbers of US voters apparently agree with them despite overwhelming evidence that shows what is good for the super rich is not good for too many others. Despite this, they call for small government while being enslaved to the will of the corporations.

In her 2011 opening address to the North Carolina state legislature, Governor Bev Perdue called for a two percent reduction of the state's corporate income tax. This call from Perdue, a Democrat, is one that has been championed by the Republicans of North Carolina for a long time. Besides being one more bit of proof that there is very little difference between the Democrats and the GOP when it comes to kissing corporate tail, this call flies in the face of logic.
The state of North Carolina is facing millions of dollars in cuts. Libraries are being closed, public employees are being laid off and positions are not being filled. Schools are increasing class sizes, laying off teachers and threatening some districts with closures. Even police and other law enforcement (usually untouchable) are thinking about layoffs. Yet, Perdue and the legislature want to cut corporate taxes. Already, the income tax surcharge on North Carolina's wealthiest taxpayers ended with the 2010 tax cycle. So, what are they thinking?
The rationale behind this call to reduce corporate taxes is as old as the tax system. According to those who champion this nonsensical idea, the reason North Carolina isn't creating jobs is because corporations do not want to pay the 6.99% tax in North Carolina. If that tax is reduced, the tax cut's proponents claim that more businesses will set up shop in the state. Ronald Reagan used a similar argument when he was president. He called it the trickle-down theory. (As far as I can tell, it felt a lot more like getting trickled on). The most recent national politician to make this idea into law is President Obama when he extended the tax cuts for the wealthy.
The big problem with this theory is that it doesn't work. Jobs have been leaving this country by the millions since Reagan instituted his tax cuts and they haven't come back. Corporations don't want a tax cut. They want no taxes at all. Their bottom line is profit and most of them will go where that profit is the greatest. In other words, where labor costs are minimal and taxes are even less. It is the people of North Carolina that work in North Carolina's factories and buy their products, yet the politicians would have us believe that the corporations are doing us a favor by being here, and should therefore have to pay a lower rate of tax than the rest of us.
It should not be the duty of the state government to facilitate a race to the economic bottom for those who live and work in North Carolina. Nor should it be the function of any government entity to enhance the coffers of its corporations at the expense of its citizens. Yet, by lowering the tax rate on corporations, this is exactly what North Carolina is doing. With less tax monies, there will be less money for services like schools. Already corporations come to North Carolina looking to pay lower wages. They should not also benefit from paying a lower rate of taxes than those who work for them.
The scenario described above is one that rightwing forces (with no small amount of acquiescence from liberals) has been putting into place nationwide for decades. The cost of this endeavor has been the safety and health of workers; the impoverishment of entire neighborhoods in the United States and nations around the world; and the impending destruction of the educational system, to name the first that come to mind. If this scenario comes true, it may never reverse.

In a speech I heard Jesse Jackson give in 1984, he stated that workers didn't just want jobs, they wanted jobs that paid a livable wage, offered benefits and, most of all, provided the worker with a sense of dignity. After all, he continued, every slave had a job during slavery. The point being made here is that working people deserve a decent life just as much as those that employ them do. Just working is not enough. The worker uprising in Wisconsin is a recognition of this. As for those who tell private sector workers that it is the public sector workers' fault for the current economic mess--that is, pure and simple, a lie. It is the rapaciousness of Wall Street and the governments that work for it that are to blame. These and other lies pitting workers against each othere are just one more attempt by those in power to divide those who are feeling the pain of neoliberal capitalism's heartless and avaricious greed.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Father Time Wants to Forget--An Essay From the Past

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, the week between Christmas and New Year's was a week of psychedelic bacchanalia. The Grateful Dead were the house band for this festival and the cops kept their distance while hardcore freaks and more recent converts to the culture danced, smoked and otherwise shuffled, stumbled and tripped their way into the next year. Those who lived in the woods of this land brought their school buses into the parking lot of whatever venue the Dead were based at (usually the Oakland Auditorium, more recently known as Kaiser Auditorium), while the folks with more money booked their hotel rooms around the area well in advance. The latter included dealers of illegal substances, well-heeled scions of America's better off families, and working people who had been saving up for the week since January 2nd of the previous year. Then there were the rest of us--locals and heads from far away. We took the BART home (or to friends we had in the area) after the shows or maybe just wandered around all night in the campground set up in front of the building and patrolled by concert promoter Bill Graham's security forces. Whatever happened outside in the lot was fun, but the real fun was inside. I toked up with Ken Kesey one year on one of the Hog Farm buses, while another year I walked around as part of the force of volunteers whose job was to remind people that drugs were illegal and they shouldn't sell them in front of the police. I got a couple tickets for my efforts. I saw one of my best friends give away his ticket to a lady he fancied one year only to move in with her not more than a couple months later.
Inside was a better story. The Dead played two sets a night for the first four nights. On New Year's Eve they were preceded by at least one other group, usually two. I could list them here but that's not the point of this piece. I do want to mention my favorite additional musicians, however. They didn't open the show, but joined the Dead at midnight. While balloons and confetti showered down on the crowd, Etta James and the Tower of Power horns joined the band in a blistering rendition of the blues standards Turn On Your Love Light, Tell Mama, Baby What You Want Me To Do, Hard To Handle, and In The Midnight Hour. Ms. Etta praised the band after Turn on Your Love Light by saying that she never heard white boys play the blues like the boys with her on that stage that night. I could go on, but I won't. Suffice it to say that I haven't celebrated New Year's Eve like that since I left Oakland.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't make New Year's Eve like they used to. This year I'll be sitting at home with a couple friends, putting back a couple cold ones and thinking about 2005. It's been a year when the antiwar movement has grown and is actually influencing the conversation over the debacle in Iraq, yet the war shows no signs of ending soon. George Bush's administration has its lowest poll numbers ever, but continues on its self-serving quest to profit from the destruction of the world as we know it. Innumerable crimes have been committed by the aforementioned administration and it looks like they'll get away with every single one. The misnomered PATRIOT Act was extended despite the efforts of radical militant librarians and their like. Sure, the extension was only one month, but you can bet that lawmakers' arms are being twisted and perhaps even an event is being planned to convince the lily-livered members of Congress that this law should be made permanent. Integrity has never been a strong point of politicians, and the various indictments of 2005 proved this point once again. More alarming were the seemingly endless "revelations" about journalists who were either on the government's payroll both in the US and Iraq or just planted its lies in their newspapers because they wanted to be on the side of power. To add insult to injury, these so-called journalists then used the US Constitution's freedom of the press clause to defend their refusal to disclose the government official feeding them the lies. Ben Franklin, how many times did you roll over in your grave this year?
Oh yeah, did I mention that 837 US military men and women have been killed in Iraq so far this year (with two days left to go)? God knows how many Iraqis have met the same fate. In that forgotten war over in Afghanistan, there have been fifty GIs killed. Good thing that war is over, huh? As for acknowledged wounded in action, the total number of US WIA hovered near 4000 for the year of 2005. Needless to say, this is not a hopeful picture, but you'd never know that if you listened to George Bush's latest national speech. Then again, you would never know it if you listened to the nonsense coming out of most Democrats' mouths, either. Despite polls showing that more than one-third of the US population wants an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, one would be hard put to find one-tenth of the US Congress to support such a move. As for the military, many of its members keep hoping that the much-talked-about-yet-never-enacted phased withdrawal from Iraq will begin.
Natural disasters trashed a good portion of the earth this past year, as well. Unfortunately for those who lived where those disasters occurred, it was often the official response to the catastrophes that caused the most damage. this was especially the case in the nether regions of Louisiana and Mississippi, where thousands of people were left to live in the waste of a flooded city while the man who was supposed to be helping them emailed his secretary for advice on what tie to wear at his next press conference. From the few accounts that exist in the western media, many Kashmiris faced a comparable lack of official response after their part of the world was hit by devastating earthquakes. Of course, if one listened to the various holy rollers from all of the monotheistic religions, these disasters were just part of "god's" wrath on sinners and infidels. Human indifference and negligence didn't figure in these guys thinking. Why would it? Some of them are the same people who wage wars with (and on) other people's children to keep their profit margins big enough. It takes more than a bunch of pomposity disguised as righteousness to decipher god's will, if there even is such a thing.
Back to those days of yesteryear that I began this piece with. It's not that the times I lived in the San Francisco area were not without their tragedies and disasters. It was still the same country, for chrissake. US-run wars were going on in Central America and Afghanistan and the rich were trashing the US economy for the sake of their bank accounts and greed. The religious right were beginning their power grab on US politics and taking down the nation's moral compass in the process. Maggie Thatcher was doing a tag team attack with Ronnie Reagan on the world. That says a lot right there. Ronald Reagan was the the president of the US! That says even more. To be truthful it wasn't that much better for most of us who couldn't or wouldn't play their game. Perhaps that's why those days of bacchanalian denial were so welcome. They helped us all forget the reality we lived in. Hell, perhaps that's the reason for New Year's celebrations around the world and since the beginning of time, no matter what calendar we're talking about. Erase the miseries of the year just past and start with a clean slate full of hopes for the new one. What I wouldn't give for something like that now. That's the trouble with getting old. It gets harder to forget.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Blasts From the Past-Stevie Wonder and Gil Scott Heron

It's funny how many of us can remember the very first time we heard a particular song. Usually, it's because that song dramatically shifts the idea of what music can be. Other times, it's because that song speaks so accurately to the listener about something happening in the listener's internal or external world. Sometimes, it's both at the same time.
The very first time I heard Stevie Wonder's "Living For the City" I was living in New York. It was a Saturday night in the freshmen men's dormitory at Fordham University in the Bronx. There was one room where us weekenders would gather to drink cheap beer, smoke good Colombian herb, listen to music and bullshit. We were the guys who didn't go back to a home in suburban New York or New Jersey either because we lived further away, had to work or lived in the South Bronx, el Barrio or Bed-Stuy and just didn't feel like dealing with the street that weekend. The albums we played while we modified our moods and rearranged our brain matter usually included (in no particular order) something by the Allman Brothers, Earth, Wind and Fire, Eddie Palmieri, the Grateful Dead, the Stones or Beatles, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Sly and the Family Stone and another soul or salsa group or two.. It's not that there weren't other records in the various record collections of us weekenders. It's just that these bands represented a compromise of what we were all willing to listen too.
Anyhow, I had finished with my day's work at an Italian restaurant near the southern end of Central Park and taken the D Train back up to the Concourse. After eating a couple quick slices of pizza and picking up a couple six packs of Rheingold, I was ready for the evening. The first album to drop on the turntable was a new one by Stevie Wonder called Innervisions. I laughed in a way that only a bong hit can make one laugh as the needle hit the first song: "Too High." Even though Stevie might not have been singing about being too high on weed, it didn't matter. The second tune was a pretty soulful one about inner sight of some kind. Then came Stevie on a sneakily seductive Fender Rhodes playing a series of single notes that turned quickly into chords. "A boy is born/In hard-town Mississippi...." A story of an African-American family that is the story of thousands of African-American families that is the history of African-Americans after the US civil war. Out of the cotton fields of exploitation and degradation into the northern cities where racism disguises itself in terms of class and economics. Where brothers prey on brothers and the law is still a tool of a system that oppresses and not a tool for liberation or even fairness. And all set to a relentless rhythm track put down by Stevie himself.
When the song was finished everyone in the room was still. No matches being lit. No beer cans being opened or tipped. The last song on the album side played through ("Golden Lady", in case you forgot). Whoever was closest to the stereo didn't even have to ask. He played "Living For the City" again and again and again. I don't remember if we ever got to the second side of the album that night. Just enough for the city. Goddam straight.

I moved to Maryland in March 1974. A series of circumstances ended my New York City stay and my Fordham University student status. By August 1974 I was enrolled at the University of Maryland in College Park. Watergate had been on the television most of the summer until Dick Nixon took the (more profitable) coward's way out and resigned the presidency on August 9th of that year. It wasn't more than a month later that his successor pardoned the crook.
Anyhow, a month or so before Nixon took a helicopter out of DC, I heard a song by Gil Scott- Heron and Brian Jackson at a friend's house in suburban Maryland. That song, titled "H20 Gate Blues" starts off with Scott-Heron and his band laughing in the background. From there, it moves on to musing like only Scott-Heron can in that voice that demands your attention and resonates with authority, yet sounds like a brother sitting next to you at a booth in a neighborhood bar. He begins by talking about the blues. From standard blues like "I don't got no woman blues" to "the United States government talkin' bout the "Energy Crisis Blues". From there, the song heads into some serious signifying about what imperial war is all about ("Pepsi-Cola and Phillips 66, Boeing Dow & Lockheed/ Ask them what we're fighting for and they never mention the economics of war") and the hypocrisy of US policy; the apathy of the US populace; the CIA in Chile; and the corruption and racism of US politicians. All of this backed by a bass and keyboard. In fact, I believe it is a Fender Rhodes once again. This song mixes up politics, cultural commentary, and plain old irony. It represented the state of the nation. Presently and presciently. Add a few more decades of names of politicians and nations invaded and it still does. The name of the album that song appeared on is called Winter In America. This was also the title of a song Scott-Heron released a year or so later on the album The First Minute of a New Day. That song is a lament for a United States of America that could have been. Speaking of winter, it's still awfully freakin' cold out there. And I'm not talking about the weather.