The Co-Conspirator's Tale Now Available

http://www.fomitepress.com/FOMITE/Co-Conspirator.html

1979.  When Peter Somers fell in love with a girl named moonshadow on the Berkeley pier, little did he know that she was a member of a group of wannabe revolutionaries.  After an undercover cop is killed and another friend is falsely charged with the murder, the cell disappears.

2007.  Somers ends up back in Berkeley after receiving a letter describing the arrest of his friend on murder charges.  He joins forces with a lawyer and others in an attempt to clear his friend's name.  The authorities have something else in mind. 

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. Crimes committed by the police in the name of justice. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up.

There are no hero cops or private eyes in The Co-Conspirator's Tale, just a couple of folks who don't trust the world as it is to provide justice. The battlefields are the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area and the psyches of the accused, their accomplices and their accusers.

Ron Jacobs: Killing in the Name of Kindness

Ron Jacobs: Killing in the Name of Kindness

Ron Jacobs: Unbinding the Mind of US Media

Ron Jacobs: Unbinding the Mind of US Media

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.

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.

Ron Jacobs: Framing the Sixties

Ron Jacobs: Framing the Sixties

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.

Ron Jacobs: Suleiman and the Muslim Brotherhood

Ron Jacobs: Suleiman and the Muslim Brotherhood

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.

Is the Game Really Over for Mubarak? -updated January 31, 2011

As I write this on January 31, 2011, Al-Jazeera English is ireporting that six of its reporters have been arrested by the Egyptian military. Meanwhile there has been ongoing speculation as to whether or not the Egyptian military will support the ongoing protests against the Mubarak regime. The live video feed via internet is broadcasting protests across the nation. The protests are growing in front of the camera's eye. The old Mubarak cabinet has been dismissed and a new one is being assembled. A tighter curfew has gone into effect across the nation. Yet everyone is ignoring it. Furthermore, calls for a general strike are growing; the opposition has issued a call for a "mega-protest" on Tuesday and the major Islamist opposition group the Muslim Brotherhood has called for a peaceful transfer of power. Someone who might be among Washington's favorite men in the opposition, Mohammed El-Baradei, is supposedly under house arrest, but has appeared in Tahrir Square and called for Mubarak to step down. Others are calling for a trial of Mubarak and his government. Apparently, no protesters were killed by the security police yesterday, although over 150 have been killed since Friday. Some officers have met with Mubarak, while the military rank and file remain non-committal. Major clerics are reminding their faithful that the shedding of blood is prohibited under Islam. As I watch the video, a noticeable difference between yesterday and today's crowd and protests earlier in the week is the growing presence of women.

According to a report published by Reuters on July 13, 2009, 77 million of the 80 million Egyptians live on less than $ 1 a day. Around 30 % of the workforce is unemployed, 7 % of children miss schools because of poverty. There are over 100,000 homeless youth. Egypt’s official foreign debt is around 12 billion dollars, yet several of Mubarak’s corrupt ruling elites have stolen almost half this amount from Egyptian banks. These facts, along with the record of abuse by police forces defy Washington's statement that it is "not too late" for the Mubarak regime to reform itself and become a democratic government. This statement is comparable to the Carter administration's support of the Shah of Iran in 1978 and 1979 while street protests that eventually included close to 10% of the Iranian population rocked the nation.

Although there are a number of major differences between the Iranian revolution and the current situation in Egypt--with the primary one possibly being the national differences--the fact is that popular uprisings are exactly that no matter where they occur. That being said, and with the understanding that all sides in Egypt are aware of history, if the process underway continues, two things to watch out for are the response to the general strike call, the Tuesday protest call and whether or not Mubarak is able to woo any leading elements of the opposition into his sphere. If the response to the general strike and Tuesday protest call is massive, than one can expect to see Mubarak either forcefully crack down on the protests (if he can find any security units to go along with him) or perhaps even invite someone like El-Baradei into his government. Of course, if the latter occurs, El Baradei runs the risk of losing whatever support he has amongst the protesters. If that happens (and using the Iranian experience as a template), then the way for more religious elements opens wider.

If El-Baradei and other more moderate elements refuse to accept any offers of reconciliation from Mubarak, then it would seem the only means that would remain for Mubarak would be resignation or repression. His appointment of the current head of Egyptian intelligence to the vice presidency seems to indicate he may very well choose the latter. While official appointments with little meaning are being made by Mubarak, thugs from his ruling party have been captured by Cairo residents breaking into homes and shops in that city's wealthier sections. In response, Egyptians citizens have begun to set up neighborhood watch committees.

One of the Egyptian movement groups not talked about very much in the west is Kefaya or the Egyptian Movement for Change. This group, which was announced in 2004, is a network of (mostly youthful) opposition groups and individuals from across the ideological spectrum with the primary goal of ending the Mubarak family rule. Its role in the current rebellion is publicly unannounced, but the fact that the protests seems to have begun in the universities and amongst Egyptian youth tends to encourage the supposition that Kefaya was instrumental in organizing them. Given the recent rebellions and revolutions across the Arab world, perhaps the synthesis represented by this movement is the wave of an Arab future.

If so, then the regimes in Yemen, Jordan and other Arab nations would be smart to initiate reforms sooner rather than later. That is, unless it is already too late. As for Palestine, its administrative forces should pay close attention. Not only might they lose whatever authority they have left among the Palestinians, but the fact of an Arab world composed of popular governments has got to be one that Israel fears. After all, it is the US-sponsored regimes like Mubarak's that have been essential to Tel Aviv projecting its expansionist policies across the region. For Mahmoud Abbas to express his support for Mubarak while the streets of Egypt are filled with protesters demanding his resignation is extremely shortsighted. Furthermore, it looks like a political calculation Abbas and the Palestinian Authority can ill afford to make given the recent Wikileaks cable releases revealing the PA's willingness to concede to Israeli demands many Palestinians consider at best anathema to Palestinian national interests.

Ignoring governments for the moment, what do these protests mean for people around the world? As virtually any earthling knows, the past decade has seen an increase in economic disparity and political repression in almost every nation. From New York to Cairo; from Beijing to Buenos Aires, the neoliberal world order (or monopoly capitalism's latest phase) is feeling the effects of its greedy attempts to privatize the very basics of human survival. The legal and illegal corruption these attempts and the poverty they have spawned have been felt the deepest in nations like Tunisia and Egypt. Despotic government officials, their national and international business partners and the security forces that protect them have robbed and brutalized whole societies. All the while, those governments in the global north and west that have backed this phenomenon have in turn removed freedoms and economic security from large swaths of their own populations. Consequently, many nations have seen popular uprisings against these governmental actions, especially from their student and working class elements. But only two populations have reached the point of no return to the past: Tunisia and Egypt. Their example serves as a beacon.

Ron Jacobs: When Destruction Sickens

Ron Jacobs: When Destruction Sickens

The Co-Conspirator's Tale

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. Crimes committed by the police in the name of justice. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up.
 

There are no hero cops or private eyes in The Co-Conspirator's Tale, just a couple of folks who don't trust the the world as it is to provide justice. The battlefields are the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area and the psyches of the accused, their accomplices and their accusers.

The Co-Conspirator's Tale will be published by Fomite, Burlington, Vermont in Spring 2011. I will let you know when it becomes available.

Fomite is a literary press whose authors and artists explore the human condition -- political, cultural, personal and historical -- in poetry and prose.

Warren Haynes' Xmas Jam 2010 Jes Grew Report

"Jes Grew which began in New Orleans....They are calling it a plague when in fact it is an anti-plague."

--Mumbo Jumbo-Ishmael Reed

“ Jes Grew (comes) from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy and James Weldon Johnson's description of Afro-American music's unascribed development, … Jes Grew is a contagion, connected with the improvisational spirit of ragtime and jazz, that begins to spread across America in the Twenties. It is an irrational force that threatens to overwhelm the dominant, repressive traditions of established culture.”

-- Carl Brucker from his essay on Ishmael Reed in the Critical Survey of Long Fiction, (1987)

There's a gig that has been happening every December in Asheville, North Carolina for twenty-two years now. Its purpose is to raise money for Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit that helps people without a home to find shelter. Its mode of operation is getting together a group of great musicians to play with their own bands and with each other for eight or so hours one night every December.

The event is known as the Xmas Jam and the man behind the show is guitarist Warren Haynes, who plays with the Allman Brothers, the Dead, his band Gov't Mule and several other combos. This year's lineup featured Gregg Allman, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Steve Miller Band, members of Widespread Panic, Umphrey's McGee, and Haynes' new band simply called the Warren Haynes Band. The music ranged from the jam-band stylings of Umphrey's McGee to the total New Orleans funk of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band; from the soulful songs of The Warren Haynes Band to the rock blues of Steve Miller's group. It was a joyful assembly.

If I were to choose a couple favorite parts of the evening they would be the set delivered by Haynes’ new band and the closing set from The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The former, which was the first public performance of the group, featured five songs and most of the musicians that will appear on the group's upcoming CD release. The band includes the following personnel besides Haynes: Ivan Neville on keys (who played with Keith Richards and is a member of the Neville Brothers and Dumpstaphunk), bassist Ron Johnson, Terrance Higgins on drums, Ron Holloway on sax and blues singer Ruthie Foster. The songs included an original called "River's Gonna' Rise," a heartrending version of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You too Long" and a suitably funky version of Robert Palmer's "Sneaking Sally Through the Alley."

How does one describe Haynes' new ensemble? Soulful would be a good place to start. With Haynes weaving leads and rhythms as intricately as an ancient Chinese weaver of silk cloth for the emperors and Ron Holloway blowing melodies on a sax straight out of Memphis; a bottom provided by bassman Ron Johnson and Terrence Higgins and Neville's keyboards, the word ecstatic comes to mind. Just to make certain that ecstasy is the case, Ruthie Foster's vocals bring it all together like the final stitch on the aforementioned emperors' cloaks. Tight describes their playing while loose describes the way they made the audience feel.

The surprise of the night was Steve Miller and his band. For most people, Miller is probably best known for his multitude of popular hits in the 1970s and 1980s, including songs like "The Joker," "Take the Money and Run," and "Jet Airliner." The truth is that Miller and his band were one of the original San Francisco bands from the mid-1960s. Their first album, titled Children of the Future, is nothing short of a psychedelic classic. The titled song alone stands up there with the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star," and Quicksilver Messenger Service's "Pride of Man" as a tune that not only popularized the freak culture of the era but spoke to the ethos present during the best times of that brief but monumental moment in cultural history.

Unfortunately for those of us in the audience who remember that album, Miller did not play anything from it. He did however, play a couple mean blues tunes: "Further On Up the Road" and "Just Got Back From Texas." Warren Haynes accompanied him on the former. It was the pop songs that surprised me that night. After hearing the band open with a twelve minute version of "Jet Airliner" I will never dismiss that song again. The entire audience was on their feet and dancing like they were worshiping St. Vitus. The worship did not end until Haynes joined Miller and his band for their final song "Fly Like An Eagle."

After a brief acoustic interlude from John Bell of Widespread Panic, Gregg Allman and a special Xmas Jam backing band (which included Warren Haynes, former Black Crowes guitarist Audley Freed, Wallflowers drummer Fred Eltringham and Ivan Neville along with some members of the Dirty Dozen Brass band) took the stage. Opening with a blistering version of his hit "Midnight Rider," the ensemble played a half-dozen more songs including the early Allman Brothers tune "Dreams," Bob Dylan's "Just Like A Woman," and the Allman Brothers classic "Melissa." The situation in the auditorium by the end of the set had transcended mere ecstasy. Indeed, it was something much closer to rock and roll heaven. The version of "Dreams" with Ron Holloway's sax solo and Haynes' subsequent slide guitar work was the clincher in the journey to that celestial place.

Then the funksters took the stage. Before they played a note, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band set the tone with the words: "Welcome to Mardi Gras in Asheville, Man!" This group, if you have never heard them, blend New Orleans jazz, Dixieland, funk and blues into an incredible dance mix that is so infectious that even the dead can't help but move their feet when the band gets going. Opening with a tune of theirs called "Ain't Nothing' But a Party," the party got funkier as the set went on. The Temptations "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" (with Haynes joining in), followed by a song once played by Little MIlton called "That's What Love Will Make You Do" to Little Feat's "Spanish Moon" and on through Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." Every ounce of energy remaining in the Asheville Civic Center was squeezed into the funky frenzy created by this outbreak of what writer Ishmael Reed called Jes Grew in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo.

As the audience left the Civic Center a little after 3:00 AM on December 12th, they found that even the weather gods had succumbed to the Jes Grew. How else would one describe the uncharacteristic snowstorm that greeted them?

Socialist Worker Reviews Tripping Through The American Night

Keith Rosenthal wrote a nice review of my ebook in Socialist Worker

Ron Jacobs: Palestine, a Family's Story

https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/11/12/palestine-a-family-s-story/

Ron Jacobs: Vietnam's Revolution in the Revolution

https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/29/vietnam-s-revolution-in-the-revolution/

Tripping Through the American Night

My latest book, titled Tripping Through the American Night, was published in ebook format on October 8, 2010. The format used is known as epub--it is accessible on almost every ebook platform except Kindle (although there is some kind of conversion software out there). I read a sample on my computer by downloading the free Adobe Digital Editions software.

It is a collection of essays mostly about this land we call the United States. Naturally, they are written from a libertarian left perspective. Many of them originally appeared in Counterpunch. From the resignation of Richard Nixon to the knighthood of Mick Jagger; from the war in Vietnam to the election of Barack Obama; and from the campus of University of Maryland to the streets of Berkeley, it's all there. If you are interested in buying (or borrowing)a copy (assuming you have a way to read it), go to
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/e/2940011816574/?itm=1&USRI=tripping+through+the+american+night

Thanks. If you are interested in reviewing it, send me an email!

We Will Not Be Intimidated-The FBI Raids In Context

On September 24, 2010 the FBI raided several houses and a couple offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago and North Carolina under the guise of looking for proof that the people living in those houses were involved with organizations that "lent material support to terrorists." Ironically (or perhaps presciently) the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) also released an 88 page document titled The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S on that day. Not content to criminalize the representation provided by attorneys to those accused of fomenting terrorism as in the case of Lynne Stewart, with these raids the Obama administration has stepped up the repression that became quite commonplace under George Bush.
In short, the government is attempting to criminalize the organizing of antiwar protests. Furthermore, it wants to make opposition to Washington's assistance in repressing struggles for self-determination illegal. Other repressive actions by law enforcement against US citizens, including the sentencing of a videographer to 300 days in jail for trespass after he tried to film an unauthorized talk in Chicago and the acknowledgement by the Pittsburgh FBI office that it had spied on peace activists and used a private agency to help out, makes it clear that the PATRIOT Act and its excesses are alive and well under the Obama administration. Repression is a bipartisan activity, especially when it comes to the repression of the left.
These raids are a clear and vicious attempt to intimidate the antiwar movement. The grand jury is a fishing expedition, as evidenced (for example) by the warrant asking for papers from no determined time. This intimidation is a continuation of the harassment of the Twin Cities left/anarchist community that began before the 2008 Republican National Convention. If one recalls, several organizers had their homes and offices raided prior to the convention. In addition, hundreds of protesters were arrested and many more were beaten by law enforcement. Eight organizers were eventually charged with a variety of charges including conspiracy. As of September 25, 2010, three of those charged had all of their charges dropped and the rest face trial on October 25, 2010.
This is not just about the movement in the Twin Cities, however. The September 24th raids also took place in Chicago and North Carolina. There is a grand jury being convened in October 2010 with the intention of perhaps charging some of the people (and maybe others) subpoenaed on September 24th. These raids are an attempt by the federal government to criminalize antiwar organizing They are also an attempt to make support for the Palestinians and other people fighting for self-determination illegal.

The PATRIOT Act was passed on October 26, 2001. Since that passage, the level of law enforcement intimidation and outright repression increased quite dramatically. From little things like protesters being forced to protest in so-called free speech zones or face arrest to the recent approval of the assassination of US citizens by federal death squads, there has been a clear progression away from any concern for protecting civil liberties. Indeed, the concern for civil liberties is usually dismissed by politicians, judges, and other people in power almost as if they were some worthless costume jewelry from your grandmother's jewelry box. As mentioned earlier, this harassment and repression is not new to US history. In addition to multiple murders of Black liberation activists, illegal surveillance, false imprisonment and other forms of harassment, the use of grand juries was essential to the repression of the antiwar and antiracist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As the NLG document points out, "from 1970-1973, over 100 grand juries in 84 cities subpoenaed over 1,000 activists." However, nowadays there seems to be less resistance to it. Some of this can be attributed to the lack of press coverage, which is quite possible intentional. Much of the lack of concern, however, can be attributed to the state of fear so many US residents live in. This is a testimony to the power of the mainstream media and its willingness to serve as the government's propaganda wing.
To those who argue that the media doesn't always support the government and then cite Fox News' distaste for Obama or a liberal newspaper's distaste for certain policies enacted under George Bush, let me point something out. Like the two mainstream political parties (and the occasional right wing third party movement like the Tea Party), even when different media outlets seem to be opposing each other, the reality is that neither opposes the underlying assumptions demanded by the State. In fact, the only argument seems to be how better to effect the underlying plan of the American empire. The plan itself (or the rightness of the plan) is never seriously questioned.

The September 24, 2010 raids in the Twin Cities, Chicago and North Carolina may not seem like much, even to other antiwar organizers and leftists. The setting up of "free speech zones" may also appear minor. A grand jury fishing for supposed links to "terrorism" by antiwar activists may seem like no big deal. Violations of human rights in cases involving foreign nationals like Aafia Siddiqui (who was sentenced to 86 years after a trial that barely recognized her defense) do not even register on most Americans' radar. Yet, it is the cumulative effect of all of these efforts at repression that we should be aware of. As James Madison wrote: ""I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." If these seemingly minor encroachments on liberties we assume we have go unchallenged, how long might it be before assassinations and torture by the US military and their mercenary cohorts are carried out on US citizens? Oh wait, that's already happening.

Video Gamers and the Future of Labor Rights

Even though I’ve been involved in at least four union organizing efforts at jobs I have had since I began working in 1971, I have never worked at a union job. In addition, many of the various antiwar and antiracist endeavors I have been involved with have included trying to get unions on board. Having this experience with union activists has helped me stay abreast with the issues faced by those who organize labor. Foremost among these issues ever since the explosion of capitalist globalization in the 1990s is how to organize workers across international boundaries.

Besides never having held a union job, I’ve never been a gamer, either. In fact, I have a hard time getting to the third level of the very first Mario Brothers game. My son, on the other hand, like so many of his contemporaries, used to spend hours playing games online. I was certainly not aware of the phenomenon known as gold farming that occurs within the gaming world while bridging the actual world of dollars and yuan. Essentially, gold farmers are game players hired by quasi-legal operators to obtain as much game gold as they can by playing multi player video games. The employers, who are often part of a larger corporate or criminal operation, then sell the virtual gold in exchanges set up for this purpose to other players unwilling or unable to gather the game gold for themselves. Most of the gold farmers make a better living than many of their compatriots in the countries where this practice is located, but are still exploited by the people behind the larger operations.
Given that multi-player games are played by gamers from all over the world who would otherwise have no connections whatsoever, it can be argued that they represent a truly international phenomenon that has destroyed political and economic borders. Indeed, it is exactly this aspect of the game-playing world that is the foundation of author and internet freedom pioneer Cory Doctorow's latest novel, For The Win. Doctorow, whose previous novels include a bestselling adventure titled Little Brother that pits a band of internet savvy teens against the post-911 national security state, has written a novel with For the Win that is part thriller, part economics lesson, and a rallying cry to those in the world who still believe that workers can be a powerful force for social change.
The aforementioned premise that organizing international game workers can be the spark that ignites a prairie fire of social revolution may be a bit far-fetched to many, especially those whose vision of a typical video gamer is of some social misfit who can't relate to the real world. Yet, by the end of Doctorow's novel, even those readers may be convinced that the characters in For The Win might be on to something. Even if this isn't the case, the "beyond-the-borders" aspect of the virtual world of gamers is a very useful metaphor for labor organizers from Shenzhen to Los Angeles and from Hanoi to Buenos Aires trying to figure out a strategy that can keep up (or even move ahead) of capital's constant flight from country to country. Until a strategy that challenges capital on its own terms can be developed, workers around the world are stuck accepting the crumbs left to them by their employers or not having a job at all.

The story begins in an internet cafe in the worst slums of Mumbai where a group of teens work for a shady individual named Mr. Banerjee farming gold. Their leader, a girl named Mala, is more than just a good gameplayer. She is also a leader of the youths in the neighborhood. Meanwhile in Shenzhen, China, a group of young men are introduced. These young people are also gold farmers. Many of them began their working lives in a factory run by an multinational corporation that either fired them or closed down the operation when it became cheaper to move elsewhere. After a strike that is attacked by police, one of the young men named Lu runs into a pirate radio DJ who calls herself Jianda. Jianda is a love advisor and workers' advocate for millions of Chinese factory girls whose lives depend on their employer and whatever supervisor is above them in their shop. Using a sophisticated internet network of proxy servers, unused chatrooms and empty web addresses, her evening program reaches millions of these girls every night. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the son of a modern day shipping magnate who is flunking out of high school because of his gameplaying, runs away from home and puts his gameplaying skills to work for a game corporation as a freelancer. After hearing about the strike that Lu and his friends were involved in, he decides to join the cause. A labor organizer who goes by the name of Big Sister Nor begins to work with these disparate groups of game workers, Jiandi and other sympathizers and organizers.. Eventually, the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web (IWWWW) assumes a shape and gameworkers around the world begin to sign on. In addition, factory girls began to show an interest, as do the authorities, both state and corporate. Violence, negotiations and danger follow.

This story is fiction and describes a world known as "virtual." Yet, the economics discussed in its pages are as real as your laid off friend or the foreclosures up and down the street. In a time when national economies rise and fall on algorithms designed to sell money that never existed and corporate executives go unpunished for stealing thousands of people pensions and livelihoods, the idea that the virtual world may well provide us with clues on how to organize the real one is not far-fetched at all. Perhaps we should listen up.

Rachel Corrie Lives-The Israeli Attack On the Aid Flotilla

Just when you think Israel can not do anything more to anger most of the world, it does. The attack on the aid flotilla of ships that includes the MV Rachel Corrie on May 31, 2010 was beyond the pale of conventionally accepted actions, even by Israel. It was the ship Mavi Marmara that was attacked and several of its passengers killed because they dared to physically challenge the tactics of the Israeli government in its campaign to isolate and eventually eradicate the idea of a Palestinian people. Like Rachel herself, the people on the ship were activists actively opposing the Israeli regime's decades-long crusade to dehumanize and destroy the lives of those who call themselves Palestinian. Realizing that the blockade of goods into Gaza has reached disastrous proportions, these folks worked with thousands of others around the world to gather food, medicines and a multitude of other goods forbidden by Israel to enter Gaza and bring the goods to Gaza.
Israel, seeing this humanitarian act as a threat to its control of events in Gaza and the West Bank, decided that this shipment of goods would not go through. After all, if Tel Aviv had allowed the flotilla carrying the goods to pass through on the flotilla's terms, that would mean that there truly was a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In addition, it would also be a direct challenge to the forces in Israel whose goal is the eradication of Palestine and its assumption into a Zionist state where Palestinians are at best second-class residents. Apparently, it is not enough for Tel Aviv to take Palestinian land and ignore agreements it made with the Palestinians in Oslo--agreements that ensured Israel's dominance in the region despite the allowances they provided to the Palestinians. Like its partner in crime in Washington in the world, Israel insists that it will be the only power in the region to determine what happens to its subjects in occupied Palestine. No one can help them without being painted as a terrorist and anyone who does help them will be treated as such.
Washington's current doctrine (which it calls self-defense) provides it with its motivation to wage preemptive war or attack and occupy a nation where some members of a terror group trained. Tel Aviv's self-defense doctrine provides it with the self-justification to turn Gaza into an open air prison and attack it at will, arrest or kill Palestinians opposed to illegal Zionist settlements on Palestinian land, and divide families in two with a wall designed to keep Palestinians out of the ever-expanding state of Israel. That doctrine has now provided its misguided leaders with an excuse to illegally board a civilian ship in international waters and kill at least ten of its passengers. On the other side of the continent from where Israel undertook its act of mass murder on May 31, 2010 several nations are involved in capturing groups of pirates who attack and board ships carrying goods bound for other places. These pirates are considered international criminals and face the wrath of whatever navy happens to confront them. Their ships are often destroyed and the crews captured. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the IDF should face a similar justice.
Press releases from the Free Gaza Movement, which helped organize the flotilla, stated "Under darkness of night, Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep." Naturally, Tel Aviv tells a different story. Already, the Israeli media is painting the attack on the flotilla as one that was evenhanded. Left unmentioned in their reports is the fact that Israel attacked the ship in international waters and without any military provocation. Yet, if we are to believe the Israeli media, the best military force in the world--the IDF--was threatened by activists who may have been armed with some slingshots and baseball bats. Of course, this is the same IDF that sees boys with stones as mortal enemies and has killed many hundreds of those boys. There may be those outside of the Israeli power structure who will point to the fact that the activists on the attacked ship were armed with the aforementioned small weapons. Indeed, some Israeli politicians have already pointed to this fact as evidence of the flotilla members' evil intent and their role as members of something these politicians call"global jihad." This portrayal of the situation ignores the fact that Israel attacked the ship, not the other way around. What the activists on board were doing is defending themselves from the much greater weaponry of the IDF. That is the definition of self-defense, not the perversion of the concept used by the Washington and Tel Aviv to defend their crimes. Crimes that would be known as such if they were committed by smaller and weaker nations.

When the Sunshine Rose and Set On the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

The popular history of the 1960s includes a number of stories that are rife with rumor and unsubstantiated tales. From the possibility of conspiracies that killed two Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the rumors begun by a college student in 1969 that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, the period was an amalgamation of truths and exaggerations. Its history is the same even today. One of the groups whose history has been always shrouded in mystery is the Laguna Beach, California-based spiritual and drug operation known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Intimately connected to acid guru Timothy Leary and--through circumstance, LSD and money--the Weather Underground and Grateful Dead, this band of Southern California street toughs took LSD and became proselytizers for a new world based on love and spirituality. Their story was the subject of many a stoned conversation, DEA report, and partially informed newspaper article. Given the fact that the folks involved in the Brotherhood were smuggling, manufacturing and distributing illegal substances, it's easy to understand why no members wanted to talk about the group.
Investigative reporter Nicholas Schou has changed all that. In his recently published book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Mr. Schou provides the most complete history of this 1960s phenomenon to date. Based on numerous interviews, research, and driven by an apparently intense interest in the subject matter, the story told in Orange Sunshine captures the idealistic beginnings of the Brotherhood and its disintegration into just another drug operation with guns, egos and greed. While reading Schou's book, one can feel the genuine desire of the group's founders to change the world through marijuana, LSD, and an alternative way of living outside of the technological suburban nightmare they perceived all around them. The transformation of these founders from pot dealers, addicts, street toughs and surfers who obtained their first acid by robbing a Hollywood personality at gunpoint to a group led by John Griggs-- a man Timothy Leary called the holiest man in the world-- reads like a novel under Schou's pen. So are the story's next chapters as the Brotherhood develops a scheme to smuggle hashish from Afghanistan into the United States and use the profits to set up a utopia in the canyons of southern California, manufacture Orange Sunshine LSD and turn on the world.

About That Orange Sunshine
During its heyday, rumors about Orange Sunshine were as rampant as rumors about Bob Dylan playing at Woodstock. Some were true and some you just hoped were true. The second time I ever ate acid was in 1971 and the source was a friend of mine who had gone to boarding school in New England and then come to Germany to stay with his parents (who worked for some US corporation). It was a summer afternoon in Gruneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main. My friend took out a little leather bag and produced two orange wafer thin tablets and a piece of green blotter paper that had a drawing of the R. Crumb character Mr. Natural on it. The orange tabs, this guy began, are Orange Sunshine made by a guy in California who used to be Owsley's apprentice. You only need half a tab. In what was probably one of the saner decisions I ever made when it came to LSD, I took his advice and only ate half a tab. Then the melting began. My buddy R saw the Grateful Dead in 1971 at the shows that would later be culled into the Skullfuck album and insisted until his death that people on the stage at the Fillmore East were shooting balls of paper with orange sunshine tablets into the audience.
Even the Village Voice got into the Orange Sunshine story circle when it ran a story in the spring of 1971 about a guy who went by the name of Sunshine John. It seems John was somehow connected to the Brotherhood and, as part of its mission to spread Orange Sunshine around the world, was one of its primary distributors on the US east coast. According to the story (and Schou, as well), there was an acid drought in late 1968 because of the arrests of the primary US manufacturers of the drug. Then, along came Orange Sunshine. Tens of thousands of hits began to appear on the streets, at rock concerts and in rural communes. Most of them were given away for free as part of the Brotherhood's mission to spread peace, love, and acid. As the experiences related above make clear, the acid continued to be manufactured and distributed well into 1971 at least.

The Beginning of the End
Naturally, all this LSD drew the attention of the authorities. Until the early 1970s, most of the anti-narcotics work concerning the brotherhood had been carried out by local police in Laguna Beach. One officer in particular, Nicholas Purcell, was behind most of the arrests and harassment of the Brotherhood and those who distributed its acid and hashish. With the intensification of the war on drugs under Richard Nixon's White House, Purcell and his cohorts were able to involve California and federal agencies in their mission to destroy the Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued to smuggle marijuana products and distribute LSD. Simultaneously many of them were moving to Maui after the ranch in the canyons was raided and Timothy Leary was arrested and their leader John Griggs overdosed on synthetic psylocibin. In addition, the mission to spread peace and love via LSD was foundering. Like so many other spiritually inclined endeavors, when the Brotherhood lost their spiritual leader, the mission became confused by the more earthly desires of some of those next in line.
Egos and easy money transformed enough of those involved into just another bunch of drug dealers with guns and cocaine. Drugs, too, had ceased to serve a liberatory function. After those first few years of revelation and communion, they were now often just crutches or, even worse, tools of the oppressor. I knew this when acid and pot dealers I knew began considering guns a necessary tool of the profession. When old-time hippies who had always considered themselves providers of a sacrament began thinking only in terms of dollars, the signs were there. Greed became the watchword for some of its biggest dealers and cynicism replaced the hopes of just a few years earlier. To borrow a phrase popular at the time, like so much of the counterculture, the Brotherhood had become part of the over-the-counterculture. It had succumbed to the all powerful capitalist god of cash.

The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is simultaneously the story of the southern California 1960s counterculture and a metaphor for the phenomenon in its entirety. The story of Orange Sunshine LSD could easily be the story of the later years of the 1960s US counterculture. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that money, ego, and law enforcement trumped everything else in that period known as the Sixties in America, despite the most positive intentions.

It's Hard to Run With the Weight of Lead...

The last days of April 1970 seemed relatively uneventful. The first Earth Day occurred on April 22nd that year. For the most part it bore little resemblance to the green corporation festival many of today's Earth Days seem to be. At the same time it was not a radical showdown with police like that which occurred all too often. The most recent such episode had taken place in many US cities following the conviction of the Chicago 7 defendants in February. Apollo 13's failed mission was already over a week old and creating its own share of commentary in the nation's media. I was living overseas in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where I had moved with my family in March. The Beatles song "Let It Be" and Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" were near the top of the record charts. I was mostly listening to The Band's second album, the Dylan bootleg The Great White Wonder, the Stones' Let It Bleed, the Dead and the Beatles. I remember watching Johnny Winter play a short set on the German television show Beat Club. Major League baseball was just warming up. Being overseas, the best I could do was follow the box scores in the morning Stars and Stripes newspaper. The Stars and Stripes also gave us the news on the Vietnam War which, according to them and Richard Nixon, was moving along just fine. Indeed, there might even be an end in sight. Letters from friends in the States talked about the Grateful Dead new tour with the New Riders of the Purple Sage in a show that featured Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel with the New Riders and three sets of the Dead, one of them acoustic. Over a hundred thousand members of the US radical movement were gathering the last weekend of April in New Haven to protest the trial of Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins on charges they were eventually acquitted of. Even that protest was characterized as mostly peaceful.
Then April ended. Not with a whimper but a bang. The night of April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon told the world that US forces were invading Cambodia ostensibly to destroy the warmaking capabilities of the NLF and northern Vietnamese military. The speech was not even over before students and others across the US were in the streets. The protesters in New Haven issued a call for a nationwide student strike. A torrent of protest raged across the nation. So much for the halcyon days of April. In Frankfurt, thousands of protesters marched on the US Army offices known as the IG Farben Building. Besides the German protesters, there were GIs refusing to work and US military dependents walking out of their schools. Black armbands expressing solidarity with the protesters and against the war could be seen on many a young person on base—GIs and dependents alike. The authorities were naturally wary. May was to be the cruelest month this calendar year.

Back to the protests in the US and that Grateful Dead/New Riders tour. The tour had hit the East Coast earlier that spring and was now traveling through the northern climes. In the year 2000 the Dead’s archivist released a CD recording of one of those shows. This show, which took place at Harpur College in Binghamton, NY on May 2, 1970, is considered a classic. Musically, it shines. As an indication of the cultural and political climate of the time, it reveals more than just a good time. I wrote this about it not long after the CD was released.


This show in 1970 took place in between two events that shook America: the US invasion of Cambodia in a war that was supposedly winding down and the National Guard killings of four students during an antiwar protest at Kent State University in Ohio. The Grateful Dead took the stage on May 2, 1970 not only with the knowledge that the audience was restless almost to the point of riot but that their job as a band was to take that potentially negative energy and transform it into one hell of a good time. Like the best Dead performances from any time of their thirty-year traveling medicine show and carnival, they did! The acoustic version of the traditional (and Dead standard)"I Know You Rider" has as much energy as any electric version they ever did. With a crowd eager to burn off their energy via an all-night dance-a-thon, it was up to Jerry Garcia and the boys to provide the music.

The first set is an acoustic marvel. Beginning with a bouncy version of "Don't Ease Me In," the musical trip wanders into the aforementioned "I Know You Rider", where Jerry's licks blend beautifully with the rhythm guitar backing of Bob Weir and the always sound bassman Phil Lesh. Stepping back, the outlaw ballad "Friend of the Devil" is rendered with a conviction felt by many of America's youth in the US of 1970. A bouncy "Dire Wolf" follows as the boys beat it on down the musical line to an evocative "Black Peter" that brings the pain of death to the concert floor. Five more songs--including two from the Dead's masterpiece Workingman's Dead and two traditionals: Deep Elem Blues and the bluegrass gospel piece "Cold Jordan" finish out the set. That's when the fun really kicks in.

The remainder of this three-cd set starts off with a ripping "St. Stephen" and ends an hour and a half later with a quiet take on the folk classic "We Bid You Goodnight." The highlights in between include Pigpen sounding like a male version of Etta James in "It's A Man's World" and a take of the post-apocalypse song "Morning Dew" that acknowledges the pervasive feeling of that week that the end might have been near. The lead guitar work of Garcia on this tune and the version of "Viola Lee Blues" that follows it goes straight to one's spine as the notes do not send chills so much as they become part of the nervous system--it's as if the music and the listener are one: something that happens rarely in any musical performance but, when it does, nothing else compares.

Which is perhaps the best way to describe this recording: nothing else compares.


The next day the tour moved to Wesleyan College. Protests and riots raged across the nation. At the University of Maryland and dozens of other colleges and universities, authorities called in the National Guard. The bands played on, aware of the maelstrom growing all around them. No one, however, except for the perhaps the most apocalyptic members of society, saw what was coming next. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard murdered four students and wounded more than a dozen others during a protest at Kent State University. The Dead were not playing that day and most likely heard the news when everyone else did. Their next show was scheduled for MIT on May 7th. Organizers working with the Boston-Cambridge anti-imperialist group the November Action Coalition (NAC) were among the many Boston area antiwar organizations organizing a never-ending round of protests. In a conversation with NAC organizer Peter Bohmer many years later, he told me how the Dead became involved in these efforts. It seems that some fans of the band had the ear of the Dead and the band wanted to do something to express their state of mind about the escalation of the war. So they set up on Kresge Plaza on the MIT campus during a May 6th protest and played a nine song set. Bohmer wasn’t a fan, but remarked that Garcia and the other band members seemed like nice guys with their hearts in the right place.
The maelstrom of war, racism, and rebellion unleashed in the wake of Nixon’s words on April 30th took at least eight more stateside victims in the weeks following that Grateful Dead concert in Cambridge, Six blacks protesting racism in Augusta, GA. were gunned down. On May 14, 1970 two more young people were killed by Mississippi state troopers while protesting the war. The forces of law and order were resorting to the one card they could always pull from their sleeve: raw, murderous violence. Black and Brown-hued Americans knew this all too well. White ones were rediscovering it. Neither the war nor the racism of US political and cultural society was near an end. The music could only do so much.

Did Capitalism Destroy China's Democratic Stirrings?

Back in 1989, the world was captivated by media images of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and workers camped out in Tienanmen Square in Beijing. Most were horrified as they watched elements of the Chinese People's Army attack and kill hundreds of these protesters. The series of protests that are now summed up in the words Tienanmen Square were but the most public presentation of the struggle between the Maoist legacy and the move towards capitalism that has been going on in China since the 1970s. For many Chinese, it represented the end of a popular democratic urge for greater political freedom and its replacement with an authoritarian capitalist paradise (for the capitalists and their government facilitators). In other words, the result of the protests and the government reaction was that the only freedom that would be allowed in the post-Mao China was the freedom of global capitalists to exploit the Chinese people and reform its society to their benefit.
Chinese writer and Professor of Chinese Literature Wang Hui was one of those hundreds of thousands in Tienanmen Square in 1989. He is a critical observer of Chinese culture and politics and is a member of what various western media call the Chinese New Left. His newest English release, titled The End of the Revolution is a collection of essays mostly dealing with the effects of China's pugnacious pursuit of an essential role in the global capitalist order on its people and politics. Academic in its approach, Wang Hui's text details the demise of Maoism and its replacement by a political structure and culture that is socialist in name only. He discusses the separation of the democratic impulse from the pursuit of profit, the resulting curtailment of political freedom and an explosion of what passes for personal freedom in the capitalist nations of the West--the freedom to consume.
The End of the Revolution is more than a study of the new China. It is also a captivating study of the effects of global capital on a nation. Many of the situations described by Wang Hui could easily be describing the situation in almost any nation that is part of the neoliberal world of the twenty-first century. In addition, it is a discussion of the meaning of modernity in the world of capitalism and a convincing argument that the world of neoliberal economics is a world whose mechanics thrive best under authoritarian governments. According to Wang Hui, democracy is not a beneficiary of this economic system, but a hindrance that the financial world believes it must undermine to survive. Furthermore, it is Wang 's contention that China is the ultimate laboratory for hypothesis.
What about that protest in Tienanmen Square? Did it represent a true desire for democracy? Wang says yes, it did. However, like so many grassroots popular uprisings around the world, the symbolism of the moment was appropriated by some of the same powers that the original protest opposed for other purposes. The impulse for freedom and democracy mutated into a free market that ends up only freeing the pocketbooks and wallets of the managerial class while relegating the workers on the shop floor to poverty and in some cases a life of near slavery. The peasants, meanwhile, are forced by economic conditions to leave their villages for a life that cycles between low paying wage slavery and unemployment. When the work ends they are left to find their way back home or fend for themselves in urban streets. Tragically, the modern worker's plight often resembles the industrial workplaces of Charles Dickens' England. This is the nightmare of modernity Mr. Wang boldly questions.

Can the phenomenon Wang calls modernity exist together with democracy? What about political freedom and personal freedoms not defined by the marketplace? It is the opinion of the author and millions of others that they can but will require a fight by those opposed to the domination of the market. The global capitalists will tell us that it already does, but the truth contradicts that. In fact, the global capitalists have little taste for democracy when it gets in the way of their profits, which they believe it often does.. In China, this goes so far as censoring the Google search engine and forbidding Bob Dylan from performing. It also means that certain municipalities (Shenzhen being the best known) have become surveillance states on a par with the most fantastic of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's most paranoid tales.
The discussions Wang Hui presents are discussions that all of us should be having. They do not apply only to China. Indeed, it is easy to conceive that the aforementioned Philip K. Dick surveillance states that exist in China are mere test runs for the future US metropolis. The march of corporate capitalism is not a benevolent one. As any observer who has not bought the myths of the capitalist faith can see, those who sit in the boardrooms of finance and industry seem intent on expanding their ever-growing control of the planet, no matter what the cost to human freedom, life or the environment.

The Blues Had a Baby and They Named Him Jimi Hendrix-Spirits of the Red House

My friends and I used to fantasize about a life after death in a rock and roll heaven. Although there would be many guitarists present in the heavenly jam, the guy at the front of them all--sharing leads, riffs and chord changes--would be Jimi Hendrix. His clarion strings would stretch notes beyond the elysian boundaries, challenging Orpheus himself. As if to prove me right, a new disc from the master himself was released from beyond the grave on March 9th. Titled Valley of Neptune, the disc contains twelve never-before-released songs or versions of songs. The title song, a version of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Crying Blue Rain" were recorded in early 1969 with the best-known lineup of Hendrix's band the Experience (Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass) and percussionist Rocki Dzidzornu (who played percussion on the Stones song "Sympathy For the Devil"). The majority of the other material was recorded later the same year.
For those who don't know much about Hendrix's brief and fiery career, the year 1969 was probably the most chaotic and cataclysmic of them all. His band The Experience was dissolving in front of him due to a number of reasons--personal and business. Indeed, by the time of the April recording sessions where some of the songs on Valley of Neptune were recorded, bass player Noel Redding was gone. In addition, according to some biographers Jimi's drug use was reaching dangerous heights while his management was pushing him harder and harder to tour more and more. This pressure in turn led him to use drugs more, creating a vortex not unfamiliar to the lives of many performers and artists. By the end of 1969, Jimi would be playing with a new band featuring bass player Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. It would be this band-known as the Band of Gypsys-- that played at the Fillmore East on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day of 1969-1970. The album recorded those nights was the only live album by Hendrix ever released while he was still alive. Later that year, a reformed Experience minus Redding toured the US and Europe. This tour included the shows at the Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, CA. that were made famous in the concert film Jimi Plays Berkeley. The portion of this film that has the band playing Hendrix's "Machine Gun" while antiwar protesters fight with police outside is one of those cinematic moments where film captures the zeitgeist of a time. This time happened to be at the end of a month that began with the US invasion of Cambodia and included the murders of four students at Kent State University by National Guard troops, the police murders of two more students at Jackson State University and a national crisis.
Most folks who knew Hendrix's music back then can remember their emotions upon hearing about Hendrix's death on September 18, 1970. I recall being at home in Frankfurt am Main, Germany listening to the radio. The announcement was made during the regular hourly broadcast of the news headlines. Friends of mine who lived and breathed Hendrix were beyond distraught as they smoked pipe after pipe of hashish with fellow mourners--German and American--at an unofficial memorial service in Frankfurt's Grüneburg Park the next day.

As for the CD itself, let me discuss a few of the highlights. After opening with a version of "Stone Free" that opens with a contrapuntal syncopation that resolves itself with a classic Hendrix guitar adventure tailspinning to the song's end. The title song is a psychedelic blues that one can easily imagine dancing to. The lyrics talk about erasing the world's pain ahead of a new world to come. The guitar work carries the lyrics with an understated beauty that hints at that new world. The version of "Red House" is a masterpiece in and of itself. Slower than other recordings of the tune, Hendrix's guitar becomes that lyre invented by Hermes and played to perfection by Orpheus himself. This song has always been one of my favorite Hendrix tunes, from its rendering on Electric Ladyland to the multitude of versions present in the bootlegs and official releases that populate any Hendrix fan's collection. The guitar work here debates and enhances Billy Cox's bass playing without ever giving an inch on either side of the dais. The spirit of every bluesman from Robert Johnson to Charley Patton and Son House are present in the lead put forth here. My other favorite is the reworking of the Cream song "Sunshine Of Your Love." This tune was a fairly big hit in 1968 after its release in December 1967. Written by bass player Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton, its introductory measures are among rock music's best known bars. Hendrix and the Experience played this song quite often in 1968 and 1969 in their concerts, so it's not much of a surprise to find it on this disc.
Now, a cynic might say that it's easy to recycle some old tapes and make a buck off of them. If they were referring to this collection, they would be completely off the mark. This disc enables the listener to hear Hendrix in a brand new way. The members of the Jimi Hendrix Memorial Project that have committed themselves to maintaining and enhancing Hendrix's legacy have certainly done the man right with this release. It is definitely worthy of that rock and roll paradise referred to above.

Of Course Narcs Are Crooked....

We've all seen a television show or a movie about an undercover narcotics cop who become crooked. He loses the trust of his colleagues, then his family. Soon, the only contacts he has are with the world of drug dealers that he originally set out to destroy. Now picture this scenario of the criminal cop on a worldwide scale and condoned by various governments and their agencies, including that of the United States. Let's go a step further and understand that not only are these governments condoning these rogue activities, they consider them valuable to their national security. So, they allow drug dealers to bring huge amounts of heroin and cocaine into the country while at the same time others on the government payroll are arresting drug dealers not favored by US intelligence.
The scenario described above is but one aspect of the so-called war on drugs waged by the United States government. The "war" as it is being fought is, like all wars, much different than originally advertised. Even if there were pure motives ascribed to this war at its inceptions, those motives have long since disintegrated into an abyss of duplicity, denial, and atrocity. Like its progeny the global war on terror, the US war on drugs is a war that its antagonists never want to end since its termination would mean an end to their profit and status. Indeed, an end to the war on drugs would mean an end to the very agencies designed to fight it and the billions of dollars those agencies take from the taxpayers every year. Also like the global war on terror, the war on drugs is against an enemy that does not exist in terms of sovereignty persons, but as a phenomenon impossible to defeat. Therefore, it is an endless pursuit. In addition, it is a pursuit where the individual actors are often on both sides of the battle: where a drug dealer is also an informer and where a terrorist is also a CIA plant. To top it all off, these two wars on phantasms are interlinked. From the poppy fileds and heroin labs of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the coca fields and cocaine labs of Colombia (with many other places in between), the funding of terror and insurgent groups and the funding of forces fighting them is connected to the international drug trade.

The web of individuals, criminal groups, and other organizations involved in the international drug trade is multidimensional and complex. This is also the case with the individuals and agencies enlisted by the US government to fight that trade. The federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are among those who have attempted to catalog the elements involved in the drug trade. Author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) is one of the few that have attempted to catalog and describe the web woven by the government agencies supposedly fighting that trade. In so doing, he has described a system riddled with corruption and criminality. Sometimes this is the work of individuals enlisted by the agencies; sometimes it is the result of interagency turf battles; and sometimes it is agency policy.
Valentine's first book on the subject is titled The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs. This book told the history of Henry Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in all of its corrupt detail and racist assumptions. The stories between the book's covers have enough fodder for a dozen Hollywood movies or a multitude of crime novels. His latest on the subject, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA, covers the period beginning with the dissolution of the FBN, the short tenure of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and the creation and continued existence of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). It is a voluminous work with more characters than the proverbial Russian novel. Impeccably researched and documented, The Strength of the Pack details the cowboy attitudes of BNDD and DEA agents and the criminal acts with which they were often involved. It is the story of a bureaucracy constantly at odds with itself and with other agencies, especially the CIA. The conflict with the CIA was directly tied to that agency's use of drug running enterprises in its counterintelligence endeavors. It is the author's contention that this conflict was a product of the CIA's pursuit of its anticommunist agenda no matter what the cost. This contention is supported by the facts presented. There are mafia drug dealers let go and murderers employed by the CIA left to continue their criminal pursuits--all because of the role they played in Washington's war against the Soviet Union.
The US war on drugs begun by Richard Nixon preceded the war on terror by almost twenty years. The destruction of the Bill of Rights Americans currently accept as fact began then. No Knock warrantless searches, torture of suspects, and the assassination of foreign individuals became accepted practice under the DEA. Indeed, some of these became law. Like the war on terror, the war on drugs preys on the fear of the unknown. Likewise, it presents the use of force as the most effective means to fight the war, despite decades of evidence proving that this is not the case. Also, like the war on terror, the war on drugs has created a bureaucracy and a subsidiary industry in the private sector that exists only to perpetuate itself. This is arguably a primary reason why marijuana remains illegal in the United States--because too many people on the supposedly right side of the law make a living from its illegality.
Valentine seeks the truth in his books. In doing so, he uncovers a lot of ugliness regarding the men and women who say they are protecting us. For some readers, his revelations about the US-run assassination program in Vietnam called the Phoenix program or his detailing of the corruption and criminality of those hired by the US government to keep heroin and cocaine away from America's youth might be too much. This in itself is reason enough to read his books. The facade of morality that the DEA hides behind should be torn away if this country is to ever have a sane and humane drug policy. Just as importantly, that facade needs to be destroyed if it is ever to have a sane and humane foreign policy.

As Valentine's books make perfectly clear, there is more than a bit of venality behind almost every bureaucrat and political appointee presented to the populace in any given year. Donald Rumsfeld or Hilary Clinton, Robert McNamara or William Colby, the men and women that run the United States are, after all, human. Some would argue that they define humanity's baser elements.