Recreate 68……..Why?
About a year ago John Buttney returned to Colorado for a visit after a long absence. I had a chance to see him again, was glad to do so, something made possible through the organizing skills of our mutual friend Jay Jurie, now in Florida.
Although his name might not ring too many bells today, 40 years ago a lot of people in Colorado – both in the public and in the intelligence agencies – knew the name of John Buttney. He and his companero, Bruce Goldberg, were leaders of the Boulder Chapter of Students For A Democratic Society – SDS. Both graduate students in philosophy -Buttney told me he had been greatly influenced by French philosophers like Merlo Ponte – they were, to my mind, among the best and the brightest radical organizers to work in Colorado, at least in the last forty years that I have been here. They were excellent, powerful speakers, fearless and principled and their influence extended far beyond the Boulder campus, as they were invited to talk all over the state to mountain and plain, urban and rural areas. First class rabble rousers in the best and most wholesome sense of the term.
Buttney and Goldberg led the anti-war movement on the Boulder campus in the late 1960s. Wasn’t that a time! During their most active years, the student newspaper – The Colorado Daily – was transformed into one of the best, most interesting radical-left wing sources of news In the country. The old issues, archived at the Norlin Library, remain a gold mine of social movement history and could easily be the raw data for someone’s Master’s or even PhD Thesis. Among other things, Buttney and Goldberg and their colleagues unearthed the University’s then-connections to the nation’s intelligence agencies, Defense Department contracts, etc – exposing the degree to which the University of Colorado connected to that `thing’ we’re still fighting – the military industrial complex. I would expect that CU as well as other universities and colleges in Colorado are even more tied into the system now than they were then.
When it was all over – and it ended rather abruptly for both of them – Buttney left Colorado and settled in California. Whatever he’s done, he’s essentially been an organizer of peoples’ movements all his life, doing what he can to fight the system. Goldberg went on to teach. We were together for a brief moment at Red Rocks Community College in Golden. He went on to be the executive director (or something akin to that) of the Colorado Federation of Teachers, was `discovered’ by the American Fedieration of Teachers powerful (and rightwing) president Al Shanker for whom he worked as an advisor for several decades. I have heard that he retired, writes and spends a lot of time playing the piano, something he was very good at and greatly enjoyed.
New Kind of Colorado Pioneers
I knew Buttney and Goldberg somewhat.What might be called their `radical careers’ were starting to fade at about the time I arrived in Boulder in 1969. The demonstrations at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago which had so badly deteriorated into a police riot, had passed. Our paths crossed long enough for them to have had a significant influence me, on a return Peace Corps Volunteer and staff member from Tunisia starting graduate school. The movement that they had helped spawn would continue. The traditions of building a class conscious, politically aware militant student movement – against the war in Vietnam, for civil rights lived on long after they had left the campus. I got to know the Buttney’s – both John and June – somewhat better than Bruce, and then sometime in the mid 1970s they were all gone, like so many other radicals that have made their mark in Colorado at one time or another, scattered to the winds, leaving little traces. But then, as an old friend John McBride commented to me recently – good radical organizers are rarely seen or heard –they are not so concerned about media, but about going about the thankless task of building social movements. And as for `credit’ – forget it. Just as well they’re not interested as they rarely get it, a tendency that has turned some bitter in their later years. `Just think of how rich I could have been if I had gone into business rather than..’.as their voices tail off. And yet the organizers are the great sowers of seeds of social justice and peace. I wish they could get credit. Only a sustained peace and justice movement can keep their memory – and their accomplishments alive. Not easy.
There were many other fine and talented people from that era – it was NOT only the Buttney’s and Bruce Goldberg – but to my mind they were the movement’s heart and soul – and although I have never expressed it publicly, to them I owe a great debt of gratitude – their example taught me – to a considerable degree – how to think and act politically. I remember an exchange with Goldberg not long before he left Colorado `We might be powerless, but damn, we’re well informed!’ We all went our different ways politically for a while as well, but that is of little import. There is a whole generation of labor and civil rights organizers, Marxist (remember that old word) formations that cut their teeth in the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and whether they know it or not, or acknowledge or not they built on the heritage of Buttney and Goldberg., a new kind of Colorado pioneeers
Actually it turns out that even before I arrived in Boulder one sunny day in late August of 1969, that Buttney and Goldberg had had something of a parting of the ways. Buttney’s political evolution had led him to the Weatherman faction of SDS. Goldberg, who had – at least at the time – more common sense – passed. That had to have created some distance between the old friends. Although one of the most significant radical student movements of American history – not just the 1960s – SDS was not able to maintain its internal political cohesiveness for long and soon spawned a number of left wing, revolutionary groups, among them a number of Maoist formations (Revolutionary Union, October League, Progressive Labor Party among them) and the Weathermen. I am convinced that the movement which Buttney and Goldberg helped shepard into life those days created the environment, the seeds for what would follow – the movement to close Rocky Flats – one of the great social and peace movements of Colorado history. But someone else will have to explore the precise links. Movements like Rocky Flats don’t just pop out of nowhere.
Along with the older Communist Party USA (to which I belonged for some time), these groups would, with a number of radical Chicano, Native American and Black organizations whose social roots emerged from their particular historical situations, all found some modest base in Colorado, until for one reason or another, sooner or later they simply withered on the vine, collapsed or in many cases, got absorbed into the Democratic Party. There were also `radical spiritual’ groups – followers of the Guru Maharaji, the Hari Krishna’s and others. It is easy for some of us more stoned-secular types to berate such spiritual movements but keep in mind that there are some very powerful figures in Colorado today who came out of these circles as well and in their own ways they challenged the bankrupt values of the day, if only in encouraging people to drop out and follow a spiritual rather than a material path. Later some of them, like the founder of Horizon milk products, Mark Retzloff, would prove they could be first class materialists as well. During those years, 1960s through 1989, there were also anarchist groups in Colorado but their followings tended to be rather small. Their star would rise a bit later.
He used to take acid and now he loves God…but he still has that look in his eyes. (a line from a Jim Ringer song)
I think a `where are they now?’ book would be a kick. Although I’d bet most of them retain the core values developed and agitated for in earlier times, few remain politically active. Others became obscenely rich. Many simply got burnt out, disillusioned, tired or frustrated that building social movements is a far more difficult task than it first appeared. The knowledge that `the revolution is NOT here’ is pretty depressing for true believers (and even skeptical believers) and if it is not about to happen, why put so much energy into it? Social movements are hard enough to build and even more difficult to sustain and nurture it seems. Human relations were not particularly good either. Neil Dobrow, who used to be an organizer for the Socialist Workers’ Party and is now associated with the Jewish Identity movement here in Colorado (and has become quite religious) related how it was personal vindictiveness within his own movement in part that pushed him out of the left. I could relate on a certain level.
Back to Buttney’s story, which is essentially the story of the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969…The Weatherman believed that the United States – then, despite the costs of the Vietnam War – still not only the richest country in the world at that time, but the richest country in the world ever until then – was ripe for revolution and armed struggle. Locked in their ideologies, they misread even the most obvious signs: Americans wanted to end the war in Vietnam, have civil rights extended to all, but revolution was far from their mind. And in the decades that followed, the right, having had their complaceny seriously disturbed by the radical upsurge, would plan their revenge which they have been implementing step by step for a quarter of a century. But such things as evaluating the political balance of forces meant little to the Weathermen, and besides, they seemed incapable of so doing. Courage they never lacked, but something else rather elementary was missing: an analysis and a political sense for where the American people were at, not just in the universities. No one more misread the political landscape of the time as they did.
Having either read too much Mao, or having fallen in love with Che – this, mind you, decades before the Motorcycle Diaries – and somehow forgetting that Peking, Hanoi or Havana are not Denver or Cleveland to say nothing of the People’s Republic of Boulder, the Weathermen and women saw their role as igniting that revolution and picked Chicago as the focal point for what they hoped would be the beginning of a sustained armed struggle against the state. At the very least they surmised, their efforts would heighten the contradictions within the powers that be. Part of the plan – their hunch – is that the state of the nation was such – that when the Weatherman ignited the armed struggle that it would stimulate nothing short of a general uprising and that they would be joined in their effort by radical Black, Chicano and Native American groups, the more radicalized wings of the labor and peace movements. And so they went to Chicago and John Buttney went with them.
Of course history suggests rather strongly that none of what the Weatherman thought would happen, did happen. They found themselves isolated and in very small numbers in Chicago. Their radical minority comrades did not show up nor did the labor or peace movements. They were there all alone, a couple of hundred of them facing a gazillion angry Chicago policmen. The Weathermen had let their intentions be known rather openly and the city’s police were waiting for them. Chicago’s Mayor Daly, during the best of times never the great democrat, would be damned if the Weathermen would start their general uprising in `his’ city. From what I can tell, the Weatherman had no strategy, no tactics for dealing with the confrontation other than `getting it on’. The results were predictable to pretty much everyone in the country except themselves. The Weatherman got the fight they wanted, mostly with the Chicago Police who had not until that time read much Gandhi or Martin Luther King . It wasn’t much of a fight at that – armed and trained Chicago policemen whipped into a frenzy by an angry reactionary mayor fighting kids wearing motorcycle helmets with an occasional baseball bat. The demonstrators got the shit kicked out them. It was ugly. The scene did embarrass the United States before the world to have their youth mercilessly beaten by the Chicago police before tv cameras, suggesting, yet again in the 1960s that all that glittered was not gold in the US of A.
Who wants to romanticize or recreate that?
Never Recovered
Although they survived for another ten years or so, mostly underground, the Weathermen never recovered. Some small factions survived even into the early 1980s and continued their armed actions against the state, becoming more and more isolated with each bombing they committed and more and more bitter at the American people for not supporting the revolution. Then the whole thing just collapsed. The Weathermen had misjudged – by a long shot – the mood, the political temperature of the nation and even of those they considered their closest allies. The Days of Rage were a complete failure. The movements for peace and social justice did not grow or deepen as a result. They, the Weathermen, were alone, isolated and discredited. Buttney was charged with all kinds of felonies. I don’t remember if the charges came from the Days of Rage or from the activities here in Colorado. He had played his hand, honestly with much courage actually, and lost. As I recall, I don’t think he had to do prison time and he was able to get off on most of the charges against him, but penned in on all sides – prohibited by law from even stepping foot on the C.U. Campus – before long he left Colorado.
In the end, the Weathermen got the whole picture wrong, had no idea of how to create the chemistry for social change – not an easy thing mind you in any case. For those of us cutting our teeth in radical politics of the time, they became something, if you like, of an `anti-model’. They talked tough, very radical stuff, but as a movement had little substance, a narrow political base and when they failed did not blame themselves but the American people. The fact that their base was so narrow suggests that even at the time many people could already see through them. They are of course, today, easy targets to kick around. That said, to this day I respect their courage, don’t doubt their commitment – literally their willingness to die for their beliefs. That’s strong stuff, one doesn’t see much of it these days, or hardly. But theirs was too much of the politics of moral outrage, uncontrolled moral outrage with little analysis. What’s left of their heritage is a decent and generally sympathetic video available from Netflix (where I got it) or Blockboster: Weathermen.
Thanks Margie, Alex
Shortly thereafter I made a friend, companera, one Margie Stewart, a rare white woman who knew how to work with people of color like few I have known. We’re still friends and always will be. She used to speak of the need for `controlled rage’. Without the rage – or simply call it anger – anger at injustice, at the way power works as we get to understand it – there is no radical politics or not very much. Without the control, there is no direction, no connection to the broader society. Funny how a phrase can guide one’s thinking. It still does. Thanks Margie.
Life should have humbled some of us in the left more than it has.
What have we built?
We’v got a few progressive magazines like the Nation, the Progressive, etc. Circulation remains rather stagnant. There is one left-liberal think tank (Institute for Policy Studies) battling a host of right wing heavily financed institutions. A few peace groups have proven to have staying power like the indominable American Friends Service Committee, a few civil rights groups that vascillate between conservative policies and their old activist roots (come alive in Jena). Here in Colorado we’ve KGNU and nationally of course, saving the day five days a week, Amy Goodman and Democracy Now. Something, but not much. Oh yes, and then we have a new crop of left millionaires and foundations who think that their money buys them the right to speak for social movements – or buys the social movements or political parties outright.Why not?
Where are the lasting social movements, progressive institutions and parties that will be here when we are gone? How affective have we been at building connections between the social forces that can bring a George Bush and his neo-con entourage to its knees. We’re still trying to figure out how to do that, fumbling along. You’d think with the economy coming unglued, the health and education systems in shambles, the rich getting disgustingly rich and the poor pathetically poorer that the chemistry is there for an upsurge. And yet it hasn’t quite happened has it? Lately there has been an interesting debate in the left as to why the peace movement against the war in Iraq is so small although 70% of the people of this country are against the war.
Alex Cockburn, gadfly extraordinaire, reflected upon this in a recent piece that greatly annoyed a lot of people in the peace movement and the left. He seems to specialize in that. I for one appreciate the fact that he has simply, once again, forced us to think about the situation that we are in. Phyllis Bennis felt a need to respond and did. In the end, i am less concerned with Cockburn’s analysis (although as usual parts of it are brilliant) and Bennis’ critique (a bit too defensive even if some of the points are well taken) tha the conclusion I draw from it: how do we grow as a movement. How do expand our base, become more inclusive, connect to the broader population of this country to activate them , without which we’re in for more wars, and an even greater erosion of our civil rights than before. How do we evaluate which `old structures’ are worth salvaging, what new ones need to be built? How to build them? Thanks Alex for rubbing our nose in our own shit again. Really. As the ad goes – thanks, we needed that. It certainly got me and a few of my burnt out leftie friends here in Denver thinking.
Don’t know the answers. Really.
I don’t know the answers to these questions. Just doing my bit to explore how we might proceed. I just don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to `re-create 68’. The folks working with the group `re-create 68’ here in Colorado have gotten themselves into something of a hole, mostly of their own making from what I can glean. They ought to look homeward to understand their shrinking base and influence rather than blaming their situation on a few of us who are, frankly too old and burnt out to represent some kind of organizational threat to them. And they should learn from history – our common history. But I doubt they will.
Wanted: Someone/Anyone!
Qualifications:
– Oppose the probable US Bombing of Iran
– Call for an immediate and complete withdrawal of US military from Iraq including dismantling of all U.S. military bases
– Be willing to publicly criticize the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as immoral and inhumane. Support UN Resolutions to resolve the conflict
– Prior political experience is generally seen as a detriment, peace movement activism preferred (but not necessary).
– Prefer someone who would run against her in the Democratic Primaries – but a left independent candidate would be ok too
Commitments and Promises:
– Can offer you no money. Have none…but would fund raise
– Can offer precious little political support and muscle. Have none but would see what we can garner up here
– Am willing to chauffeur all through the mountains (on weekends when I am not working)
– Will promote your candidacy in the local coffee shop(s) where I hang out, among the friends in my poker circle and on my blog that no one reads. (Actually it is read).
Committee For An Interesting Election in District 2, R. Prince chair and sole member (to date – but we have great growth potential)…By the way…I am quite serious about this.
303-455-3437… or robertjprince@gmail.com www.cpjnews.com/blog.htm
Will the US Attack Iran?
by Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince
Are we being mislead again?
For those of us who know something about the history of Iraq as well as U.S’s foreign policy, the media’s attempt to construct a fictitious case against Iran and its so called nuclear threat sounds very familiar.
Remember how the neocons and their imbedded media made the case for attacking Iraq?
While the rest of the world knew the facts, in the U.S, all the news channels from Fox to the ‘more respectable’ channels were competing with each other to see which one could make a better case out the scrap of misinformation that they were fed by the administration to attack Iraq. Unfortunately, some local liberal politicians who should know better – Ken Gordon and Joan Fitzpatrick among them – are lending their names to spreading these distortions.
It took only few years for the facts to surface and for people in this country to learn that not only Iraq did not constitute a threat to any one, particularly United States, it had no WMD, there were no yellow cakes and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and no links to Al-Qa’eda.
We are seeing the same orchestra playing again.
From the work of think-tanks to the warnings of politicians to the drumbeats of alarming newspaper articles and op-eds and the narratives of calling Iranian president the new Hitler and Iran as the new 1938 Germany, as was done in Saddam’s case. From Cheney to Condi Rice, from Democratic to Republican Presidential hopefuls, from Podhoretz to McCain’s infamous “bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb- Iran” song, are nothing but the repeat of what was done to sell an illegitimate and illegal war in Iraq.
Like Iraq, this administration has decided to go to war with Iran at any cost; it is not a matter of if but when. Bush and what is left of the old guard, especially Cheney, are determined to use their failed policy of régime change through military intervention in Iran.
Calls for deepening sanctions, funding of subversion against Iran, and cutting economic ties (as Gordon and Fitz-Gerald suggest we do) – an economic and political full court press – are steps towards unleasing the military option, which appears more likely with each passing day. Once again the Bush Administration – with much bipartisan support – is passing up a golden opportunity for resolving our differences with Iran diplomatically.
The current policy is leading us up dark alley which will result in tragic consequences for American, the region and Iranian people if not the world. Let’s not let this happen. Don’t do it, don’t attack Iran.
Iman Ibrahim Kazerooni is an imam for the Moslem Community of Denver. Rob Prince teaches International Studies at the University of Denver
WHAT CAN I DO about WAR and PEACE?
Upcoming Peace Conference
discouraged? concerned? frustrated? upset? worried? angry?
but …..
What Can I Do About War And Peace?
NOON–3 P.M. SAT. SEPT. 29
REGIS UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE CENTER
ACTIVATE for ’08!
Far northeast corner of campus; 52nd/Lowell, North Denver (Mapquest 3333 Regis Blvd)
Hear Imam IBRAHIM KAZEROONI, eloquent voice for peace in his homeland (Iraq).
What we can do to get us out of Iraq and prevent an attack on Iran. Learn about the real situation in Iraq—what Petraeus and Crocker pretended not to know about the failure of the “surge.” Bush’s plan for endless war, permanent bases for oil, bankrupting the U.S.—and the failure of the Democrats to stop it.
Sponsored by NORTHWEST NEIGHBORS FOR PEACE.
WORKSHOPS Campus organizing: teach-ins & rallies. Military recruitment in schools, broken promises to vets. Building a movement: organizing in your neighborhood, school, church, workplace.
PRACTICAL POLITICS Pressuring Republican and Democratic candidates to stop the war and get out of Iraq – how to move them from the inside and outside; building neighborhood groups to influence party caucuses; public action against the war: keeping the pressure on.
Next month: why we need universal health care; what you can do to get it.
brought to you by Northwest Neighbors for Peace *
Info: 303-561-0035
**********************************************************
To the Memory of Malvina Stone (November 4, 1908-August 27, 2007)
Aunt Mal – August, 1974
It’s been a month since I have written.
A trip intended to take ten days in NYC to visit family turned into nearly a month. An aunt (who raised me along with my mother), Malvina Stone, had become ill, she would die before I left New York three and a half weeks later. She did not had children of her own but we, my sisters and I, considered her `more than an aunt’, almost a second mother. She (98) and my mother (88) both have Alzeimers. They had lived together with that condition in Hollywood Florida until they deteriorated to the point that one of my sisters had to trick them to coming to New York and placing them in an assisted living facility at Westbury, Long Island.
Just prior to my visit my aunt took several falls in the assisted living facility. As a result she was hospitalized. She never left hospital care again. Although she had had several bouts with death in the past – at least a half dozen times when we thought we’d lose her – this time the grim reaper won, not without alot of help from a bankrupt and inept medical system – the Parker Rehabilitation Center associated with National Jewish Hospital in Nassau County New York, to be precise. I cannot pass that place without thinking dark thoughts about how poorly she was cared for there.
Malvina Stone (b. Magazine) one of 14 children born to Sarah and Julius Magazine (they hailing from Grodno [now in Belarus] and Bialostok [now in Poland]). My maternal grandmother who spoke seven languages fluently and had the voice of an opera singer (as I was told) was considered eugenically unfit at Ellis Island when she first tried to enter the country, had to return to Europe and eventually re-entered the US illegally through Canada taking a train south from Montreal.
Aunt Mal’s is a 20th Century story of a poor Jewish woman growing up in an extended immigrant family in Brooklyn before World War One, and dying a century later after the milleneum had passed by seven years. Of the 14 Magazine siblings, seven survived into adulthood: Louis, Hyman, William, Ira, Joseph, Beatrice (my mother) and Malvina, my aunt. Born `Molly’ (which happens to also be the name of one of my daughters), she changed the name to Malvina as a young adult. Now many of the brothers and sisters are once again together, in death as they had been in life, this time at the New Montifiore Cemetery in Long Island. The Magazines! They were, in their day, so committed to each other, so faithful to their brothers and sisters, so hopeful in their youth for what this country had to offer poor Eastern European Jews. Along with my uncles (and now Aunt Mal) at the grave site is my cousin Jay Magazine (son of Ira and Rose Magazine) who died in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Jay worked at the restaurant at the top, Windows on the World. 6-9 months afterwards DNA testing identified a small body part (I was told a hand) which is buried near his mother and father.
The near month I just spent in New York was emotionally challenging because of the declining condition of my aunt, my mother’s Alzeimer’s, the typical difficulty in making difficult decisions with siblings (although we did pretty well all in all) and the fact that after 38 years it should be no surprise that I felt very out of place in New York. I’d lost much of that tough edge and `built-in-shit detector’ quality that makes New York City living tolerable (although my sisters seem to have gained these psychological skills to an impressive degree). Colorado living has made me soft I thought to myself. Driving a car, even on Long Island and not directly in the city, scared me. The neighborhood in which I grew up – near Jamaica High School – has changed. The Catholic (mostly Italian, some Irish and a precise few Jews) – Jewish working class, middle class and largely white neighborhood now hosts two mosques and has a sizeable Indian and Pakistani population. My impression was that Indians and Pakistanis in Queens seem to get along better there than in India and Pakistan. My presence in New York triggered an almost inevitable flood of memories, not the kind that are overwhelming, but they did remind me why I relocated in Colorado.
The last month of her life, August 2007, Aunt Mal fought so hard to live and we, my sisters and I, along with her great nieces and nephews, and my `almost-brother-iaw’, were by her side most of time, pushing an overworked and understaffed medical corps to meet Aunt Mal’s needs, ease her pain. We got very good at making real nuisances of ourselves with the doctors and nurses and there were many `incidents’. Without this prodding, Aunt Mal’s suffering would have been far greater. In the end, she experienced the kind of shabby treatment more and more Americans will come to know, the kind of indignity which characterizes the health care crisis in America. See Michael Moore’s `Sicko’ for details. A single payer federally funded health care system never made more sense.
What a dear, tough old bird – a genuine family matriarch who had kept the family together for most of her 98 years and 10 months on the planet! Think of what has transpired during the course of her life. There were more horses than cars in NYC when she was born but she died in an age of cell phones and nuclear weapons. She’d lived through (and had memories of) World War I, the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Depression of the 1930s, World War II, Vietnam, Watergate, the Reagan years and now Bush (to whom she simply referred both politically and morally aptly as `that son of a bitch’).
It is from her and my mother, that I get whatever human values I might still possess, as the men in our family in the end weren’t worth much on the human level. They suffered from wild-cockitis much of their lives, used the women in their lives one way or another, squeezing out the life (and more specifically `the money’) out of Aunt Mal and then abandonning them. My dad left, Uncle Sam died after incurring terrible medical expenses. But Aunt Mal was always there. She was there when my father, early on, did not have the money to buy our family’s way out of the `shetlel’ in Brooklyn. Aunt Mal put it up so that the family could crawl into the middle class.
Likewise when my dad needed capital to go into business (silk screen business) Aunt Mal bankrolled him in part. He would soon go on to bigger and better things (in his view) marrying the daughter of one of the silk screening industry’s post war giants (Joseph Ulano). To do so, of course, my father had to dump my mother, which he did (although I do not believe he ever got over the guilt that it all provoked), and betray my aunt’s trust. He moved on, having found his version of a one-way, life time ticket to Disneyland. He never left that world, never wanted to but seems to have had some (minor regrets) later in life. Perhaps not. In the end it was all `a grand illusion’.
My father left a shell-shocked ex-wife (the rest of her life, she never really recovered from the pain of the divorce), but Aunt Mal stayed. Along with her husband my `Uncle Sam’ she helped raise me and my two sisters supporting both materially and emotionally. Uncle Sam – I really had an `Uncle Sam’ – a Jewish one to boot! – and appropriately enough my Uncle Sam was, in his youth, a Communist as was one of his brothers. They both left the CPUSA in response to the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 after which they became Jewish-mafia lawyers. Although I cannot prove it, I am rather certain they did legal work for Meyer Lansky Some of my other uncles appeared to have been involved in minor ways in that network as well.
In the mid 1950s Uncle Sam served 6 months at the Federal Peniteniary in Danbury Connecticut for contempt of court. He refused to testify before a grand jury about his mafia connections. I remember how he told me before he left that he was going on a six month vacation to Connecticut. I was so proud of my uncle that he was so rich that he could go on a six month vacation, but why Connecticut and why in November? And why couldn’t Aunt Mal go with him I asked? Would he write me I remember asking. No he responded. It was only 30 years later, almost incidentally, that I learned the truth of the matter and that was shortly before his death in 1992.
If my father married into wealth, my uncle tried to invest his way there but never made it. Actually the two of them were doing more or less the same thing, and were driven by similar values and powerful urges, the urges of poor Jewish kids growing up in NYC in the 1920s and who were driven to get as far away from the poverty of their youth as possible. Neither talked much about their youths, their roots, their family connections and I would learn only bits and pieces about them by chance in my later life.
I think Uncle Sam only fronted as a lawyer for much of his life after prison. By then (after the late 1950s), his spirit seemed to have been largely broken, his reputation shot. For much of the rest of his life he went through the motions. He’d go to an office in NYC near Wall Street and sit there all day reading the New York Times and take the train back to Queens in the evening. He hardly had any cases and made very little money. We knew this because when he did have a client, it was nothing short of a family event.
Nor did he every completely break with his past. Sometime in 1977 after our first daughter, Molly, was born, Uncle Sam surprised me with a call from what was then Stapleton Airport in Denver. He was on his way to Reno with a client who was facing a federal indictment there. I never was told for what. Thinking Reno is as close to Denver as Philadelphia is to New York, Uncle Sam called me at home to ask if I could take off a few hours to drive him and his client to Nevada. I don’t think he was kidding – New Yorkers are notorious for their ignorance of Western geography. I told him it was too far, 900 miles, but went out to the airport with Molly in tow (Nancy was working) to spend a little time with him at the airport. I spent a half hour with him and `Vinny’, his client a tough looking man with no neck, who spoke what I can only refer to as `high Brooklynese’ with an accent that suggested he had not gone to Harvard. Vinny kept looking over his shoulder. He could have played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. When I asked what the case was about, Vinny’s face turned red, his eyes flashed daggers, Uncle Sam got nervous, and picking up on all that, Molly – then all of a couple of months old, with an uncanny sense that it was time to end the reunion, began to cry, thus mercifully, shortening our historic family reunion.
Through thick and thin, Aunt Mal fiercely protected Uncle Sam’s dignity and reputation. But his real profession most of his life wasn’t law, but milking Aunt Mal for almost every penny she was worth. And she was worth a good deal. Aunt Mal had entered the field of electrolysis in the 1930s (something I have always considered a modernized version of a form of medieval torture) – removing excess hair from people so they could look less primate-like. She did this for half a century, had an office on 34th Street and Madison Ave (then very sheik) and was once written up in Vogue Magazine (sometime in the 1960s) as one of the five best at it in New York City. She worked nearly 12 hours a day, five days a week and eventually went blind as a reward for such detailed painstaking work. Yet even after she’d lost her sight Aunt Mal knew every corner of her apartment so thoroughly that unless you knew her well, it was not obvious that she could not see.
She made alot of money. Uncle Sam spent it. They were a well oiled team in this respect with a well defined division of labor. And they played `pretend’. She pretended that he earned a living (which he rarely did the many years I knew him) and she pretended that he wasn’t robbing her blind at every turn. Their apartment in Elmhurst used to have a walk-in closet where Uncle Sam would spend Aunt Mal’s money mostly without her knowledge or permission. Uncle Sam had what I can only describe as something approaching a genuis for bad investments with impeccable timing. Indeed I believe he never could pass up a bad one, the worse the possibilities the more like he was to be attracted to it. He once boasted – it was in early 1958 just before the Cuban Revolution – that he had recently invested in a gold mine in Cuba, with of all people, Ernest Hemingway and that both he and Hemingway were about to become rich. Mercifully, he didn’t live long enough to lose the rest of her money when the stock market bubble burst in 2000. His finely honed financial instincts would have made him a prime candidate to have heavily invested in Enron.
This way, Uncle Sam went through his wife’s hard earned wealth. He didn’t leave Aunt Mal destitute, but nearly. If not for a relative of my friend Michael Myerson, Peter Schillinger, Aunt Mal would have been penniless. Schilllinger was able to get some of Aunt Mal’s money back from one of Uncle Sam’s many failed real estate schemes. She lived on that money – as did my mother – for five years.
For most of the 15 years that Aunt Mal survived Uncle Sam’s death, she did what she could to keep a stiff upper lip, and assiduously lived in denial. As if she were trying to convince herself that her marriage had been a success, she repeatedly spoke about how well she and Uncle Sam got along, how generous he was (with her money), how funny (he was extremely funny), etc. etc. But as she slipped into Alzheimers’ somtime after the age of 95, the traces of bitterness began to surface – how she had given him everything, how he had wasted it away and left her with virtually nothing.
Aunt Mal used to say with some pride how Uncle Sam had never yelled at her, and in so doing measuring him against other men of her day. She was quite proud of this and repeated it frequently as if that compensated for his having bled her dry financially. I guess the rules were you can rob your wife blind as long as you don’t yell at (or hit) her and that qualified Uncle Sam for the highest compliment she could bestow on any human being – `oh, he’s such a nice man’…`with the word `nice’ being heavily emphasized.
But hospitalized, in delirium and near death, the denial she had cultivated all of her life evaporated. Her criticisms of Uncle Sam (and men in general) sharpened as I listened to her – writhing in pain before the doctors would give her morphine – repeat over and over `all men are bastards’. Maybe he wasn’t `such a nice man’? I loved him by the way, his foibles were human enough and I long ago decided he couldn’t help it and did the best he could to make it through this strange world of ours.
But he didn’t hold a candle to his wife, my Aunt Mal.
Maybe she had a point?
Congress will be marking Hiroshima Day this year in its own special truly `American’ way.
– They won’t be commemorating or mourning the 250,000 or so people who were vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, one whose shadows has been etched into cement for eternity.
– They won’t be talking about the hundreds of thousands of other Japanese that died slow deaths in its aftermath or the American soldiers and sailors who were used as guinea pigs in subsequent nuclear blasts – downwinders they’re called (http://www.downwinders.org/) – and were rewarded by their country by dying extraordinarily painful deaths from exotic forms of cancer, often with no help from the Veterans Administration.
– Nor will they be talking much about all those US veterans and Iraqis from the first Gulf War (1991) who have come down with condiitions as a result of being exposed to depleted uranium.
That said, Congress is marking the occasion.
Two days ago by a vote of 395 to 13 – with overwhelming bi-partisan support – the House of Representatives approved the 2008 defense appropriations budget of $459 billion. However like the recent Middle East arms deal, which was first publicized as a $20 billion arms purchase from Saudi Arabia, but when probed turns out to be a $75-100 billion deal to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and at least 5 other Gulf states, the defense appropriations budget is much larger than it appears.
Not included, as John Feffer noted in a Foreign Policy In Focus piece, was:
nearly $50 billion in defense spending on the Department of Energy’s nuclear programs (which are a part of a separate budget and formally not included in defense)
$150 billion in supplemental Bush Administration requests on the Iraq and Afganistan wars
Nor does it include any of those parts of the budget that are considered `Black’ – or hidden from public scrutiny
So it is impossible to tell precisely how high this budget ultimately goes, but that the $650 billion figure is quite conservative. The fact that Democrats were able to pare down the original proposal by 1% is something less than impressive. That they might try to make political hay of it as I would imagine they will, is pathetic and disingenuous.
Again, it underlines the essentially bi-partisan support that the war on terrorism – or more accurately, the war for US global hegemony – enjoys in Congress. It challenges the notion that despite their cries to the contrary, that when push comes to shove, the Democrats are a serious opposition to the Republicans. To say, as US Congressman Mark Udall has, that this is necessary to `support the troops in Iraq’ is such patent demagogy that it does not deserve a reply.
The winners here are obvious: the arms merchants, the Lockheed Martin’s, Boeings, Ratheons and the like, the private military contractors that have been getting a larger and larger share of the piece, the different arms services and intelligence agencies that live off of the public dole and need the myth of a terrorist threat to keep the money rolling in. Many of the systems for which the money is allocated are non-functional, like the Star Wars project.
Nothing exposes the Bush Administration’s priorities as clearly as this military budget. And to think this budget was pass the same week – actually almost to the day – the federal government said it doesn’t have the money to repair the nation’s bridges in the aftermath of the collapse of a major bridge in Minneapolis.
The politics of this budget and those of the Middle East arms deal are in some ways similar. The Bush Administration is coming through in a big way – deals that will go on for decades – for one of its more important constituencies – the arms industry. There is a message in this and that is a kind of unstated threat that if a democrat is elected president, this gravy train might stop (not likely) or if not, slowed down a bit.
The military industries are rather good at reading political messages and it can be presumed without straying to far from reality that they’ll gear up for the next year, pony up big bucks and strategize with Bush how it might be, that despite the most disastrous presidency for the people of Iraq, Afganistan and Palestine, despite the radical chipping away of civil and democratic rights here in the United States, that the Republicans might just find a way to pull of winning again next November.
Unlikely? Perhaps?
Impossible? Just remember how the Dems lost the last two elections.
The Salazar Brothers (one in the House, the other in the Senate) Vote for the `Protect America Act’
Things are sometimes not what they seem, particularly when it comes to bills enacted by Congress under the Bush Administration. So it is with the `Protect America Act’, which would be more aptly labeled `Extend Domestic Spying and Surveillance Act’ which passed both houses of Congress just the past Friday before the Congressional summer break. It is an indication of weakness of the Democratic Party to deliver on the 2006 elections with its emphasis on ending the war in Iraq as soon as possible, restoring civil rights, etc.
The bill updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, expanding the Bush Administration’s already unprecedented powers – previously granted by bi-partisan consent in the Patriot Act and other legislation – to eavesdrop without warrants on `foreign suspects whose communications pass through the US’ and on Americans suspected of having foreign contacts with terrorists. Since there are no Congressional guidellines to define these terms, their definition is left up to the most undemocratic administration in US history to decide.
Besides expanding the scope of surveillance to include US citizens through the loophole of monitoring calls to foreigners, the bill frees the attorney general’s office and the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without getting a court order from FISA courts, this despite the fact that until now, the FISA judges almost always granted such requests.
The act is valid only for six months and then must be renewed. That said, its passage shows that the Bush Administration still has enough power and influence, at least in the halls of Congress, to pass repressive legislation and to do so with at least some Democratic support. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 227-183 and the Senate by an even wider 60-28 margin. Colorado Congress people voting against the legislation included Diana De Gette, Mark Udall and Ed Perlmutter.
The Salazar brothers, John in the House and Ken in the Senate supported the legislation as did ultra-conservative Republican Marilyn Musgrave. Tom Tancredo, Colorado’s contribution to the Congressional looney bin, interestingly enough did not vote. On the national level, Diane Feinstein of California showed her true colors by supporting the bill (and making a rather unconvincing explanation of protecting America from the terrorist threat).
The Salazar brothers votes come as no surprise in a state where the hidden lobby is a powerful military presence both in terms of weapons producers (the most obvious and by no means the only exampe being Lockheed Martin) and a string of military bases and missile sites (in the north east) of one kind or another. Both have – despite trying to position themselves as moderates – supported every piece of legislation aimed at ratcheting up the arms race and eroding civil rights in this country that President Bush and the neo-cons have thrown at Congress.
Tancredo’s non vote is interesting. It might be because some of his supporters on the ultra-right are the anti-government fanatic types who, whatever else, also oppose the erosion of civil rights in their attempts to `get government out of their lives’. That usually translates into the libertarian type attempts to erode government controls on Corporate America, which of course need no monitoring because they are so honest, and keep the public interest at heart.
Thanks to Jewish Voice For Peace and Ron Forthofer for providing the detailed information on the vote.
The Colorado Democratic Party had trouble raising what was supposed be its share of the seed money for the convention suggesting on some level, weakness. It needed national help. Of course given that Denver had been chosen for the convention site, it did get the necessary financing to get the ball rolling. But what is the Colorado Democratic Party? And how did it come to have the kind of national clout necessary to win the national party’s support to hold the convention here?
Although not all of the story centers around Denver’s Democrats, there are Dems all over the state with their own interests and agendas, one cannot understand Colorado Dems without some idea of Denver’s role in the party’s history and development.
Three Mayors: Left Campaigners, More Conservative Once in Office
Consider the following: Although all of them would rather soon in their tenure be heavily influenced by developers and their schyster lawyers, since 1984 the last three Denver’s mayors, a Chicano, Black and White, all come from out of what might be considered the center-left.
• Federico Pena started the ball rolling in 1984. He was at the time clearly someone who came out of the left and who won at least in part because he was able to gain the support of the Crusade for Justice, by then a dying organization but with still enough organizational skill and mass contacts to provide a campaign structure to deliver the votes.
• In 1992 Pena was replaced by Wellington Webb who was in his youth, along with his wife, a student activist in the Black student movement who established a base for himself with Denver’s Black Community – highly organized mostly through Black churches.
• Webb stayed in power for 12 years to be replaced by John Hickenlooper, a white restaurant-bar owner, but one who once again, had a history somewhat left of center. His wife is a Quaker and a part of the cities politically active Quaker movement and Hickenlooper himself was on the board of The Chinook Fund – an unquestionably left of center foundation
All three needed their left-liberal constituencies to get elected and got their support. All three, on one level or another, were pressured to tone down their politics and answer to local political dons (and behind them more conservative interests) once in office.
Denver – A Liberal Town…
The pattern tells us something about Denver (and Colorado) politics: although it certainly has a spectrum of political views, that the constituency is in the main liberal or left. The liberal left element has the ability to actually put people in office and can mobilize for elections but not enough power to sustain their influence after the candidates of their choice get elected. The same pattern tends to hold for the city’s choice to the House of Representatives, although even though they too tend, once in office, to bend a bit to the right, it is not so far or as consistent a the mayors. For the past 30 years there have only been two – Pat Schroeder and Diana De Gette – both clearly liberal, both easily on the side of peace (with certain limitations – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being the big one to no surprise) and both
Key Constituencies
The key constituencies in the city are ethnically and class based. Denver’s Black Community is small compared to that of let’s say Chicago, Detroit or New York. Still it is, as mentioned above, highly organized and tends to vote heavily as a block. The voting pattern is pretty much established through the ministers of the Black churches, who can consistently turn out the vote, and who tend to work rather closely together. They have something of a mafia-old style way about them, although on most issues, because of the realities of their constituencies, support moderate or liberal candidates. The Chicano Community is organized too – and got a great boost through the organizing efforts, talents and militancy of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, the center of which was The Crusade for Justice, whose charismatic and politically sophisticated leader for a more than a quarter of a century, Rudolpho Corky Gonzalez, passed away from a stroke only a few years ago.
Then there is the labor movement.
Never that big or influential in this `right to work’ state still, it has the ability to get out the vote and in elections has been highly disciplined and active. Although it has shrunk over the past 40 years that I have been in Denver, to underestimate or ignore it will almost certainly lead to defeat at the polls. The recent changes in the Colorado legislature and the election of a Dem to become Colorado’s governor, Bill Ritter, would not have happened without labor’s active support. Of course one of Ritter’s first acts as governor – to veto a revision of the Colorado Labor Peace Act, which would have made union organizing much easier – again suggests the limits to labor’s power.
One cannot leave Denver’s Jewish Community out of the picture. They have produced no mayors nor members of the House of Representatives, suggesting, again certain limits to their power and influence, yet behind the scenes they, through a number of key figures, very influential on both the city and state level. I’ll explore their social history in some detail in a moment below as they are key players in bringing the Convention to Denver and in the overall political direction and what one might call `texture’ of the state party.
There are other social forces that cannot be ignored in this city, or not very much ignored. There is a peace movement in the Denver metro area that flexed muscle and brought down a plant 20 miles or so outside the city that used to produce triggers for nuclear warheads, the Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility. The Women’s Movement in this city has been vibrant and for sometime produced one of the more interesting women’s magazine’s in the country (which I often still refer to in doing research): Big Mamma Rag. And there is a gay rights movement that has been politically active for decades and has the political clout to bring down homophobic politicans.
All that means that progressive themes – social and economic – run deep through the bowels of this city and much as local politicians would like to do so, ignoring the predominantly progressive nature of this city’s constituency for too long is a prescription for eventual discrediting and defeat. The other side of it is, politicians shape their candidacies with some kind of populist tinge and then to one degree or another move to the right soon their after. That seems to be the pattern. And people, many of them whose roots cannot avoid radical connections would like to and do forget from whence they have come. But that’s America isn’t it? The country of dynamic change and historical amnesia….
Hidden Heritage
It might appear inconsequential to talk about the Marxist left in this city, as today that movement is fractured, marginalized, sectarian in many ways and with little obvious influence. But that wasn’t always true, not at all and understanding the history of the left in this city – of its rise and decline – helps explain both the depth of the progressive stream here on the one hand, and its fragmented, if not factional nature today. But then left movements have an organic quality to them. The social chemistry which causes them to explode is poorly known or understood even often by its participants. A connection between grievances, a program and constituency explodes, matures…sometimes achieves some of its goals …and then quickly whithers on the vine and dies, again for a plethora of reasons. They often leave few traces. Yet as lost and unknown as it is, the history of the left in Denver s an extraordinarily rich heritage on which I will only lightly, but hopefully accurately. Today what seems to be missing is a kind of social glue to keep the different constituencies – sketched above – from deteriorating into factional fighting and positioning, which permeates the state’s Democratic Party today on every level.
Yet repeatedly, Colorado and Denver Democrats have shown they are capable of balancing their conflicting interests to stay together and at times, like recently, to regain political power and influence, but at a price. The whole party has, like the nation, moved to the right. Although there are some very decent and liberal Dems in Colorado’s legislature, they are mostly `new Democrats’ influenced more by free trade and high finance than by labor unions and protecting living wages and immigrant rights. Indeed within the party some of the biggest under the surface clashes are of a class nature, with the more conservative elements both needing and being suspicious of the influence of labor…and labor needing and being suspicious of the party’s larger donors.
And yet it wasn’t always thus. There was a social glue and from what I can tell it might surprise people what it was: the Communist Party, most especially that party as it existed in the city and the state from the 1930s to the 1950s. Very little has been written about this as yet, although some of the history, especially of the McCarthy Era in Colorado is starting to appear in bits and pieces. Rare is it that social movements of any kind have much to say about how history remembers them if it does at all. And without overstating it, communists were, during that period, a force with which to be reckoned, in the labor movement and certainly in the Black and Hispanic (overwhelmingly Chicano) community. There were other groups, communists never did it by themselves and were never strong enough to dominate the left or the different social movements, but they had genuine muscle, and that engine of that muscle was the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA as it was then and is still known. Today it is little more than a cult, albeit it seems a rather wealthy one, with more money than members. There will be no ressurrection.
Long – really for the past 40 years – only a hollow shadow of what it was up until the mid 1950s – the CPUSA in Colorado had genuine influence before that. Strong in the labor movement here especially among the meat packers, the mine, mill and smelter workers and several other unions, the CPUSA was also an integral player in the city’s civil rights movement (what used to be called the Civil Rights Congress and in Latino politics as well). Today, up and coming young Jewish, Chicano or Black aspirants to politics often agonize about whether or not they should jump ship from the Democratic to the Republican Party (and have angst over whether or not to tell their parents). A half century ago, youth from the same constituencies agonized over whether they should join the Socialists or Communists (and had angst over whether or not to tell their parents).
In those decades both immediately preceding and following World War II, the CPUSA, despite all its faults and weaknesses that would eventually lead to its demise, provided the social glue that would evaporate with its collapse. Still to this day, I keep hearing of the grand parents and great grand parents of this or that local politician who came out of the left. There really is a whole slew of them and I could tick off a bunch of names of people now in office whose relatives were either in the CPUSA (or in the case of a few local leaders whose grandparents were fbi snitches to that movement), other Marxist parties or the radical Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Causes of the Left Collapse
In the 1950s, Denver’s Communist movement collapsed for all practical purposes, never to regain its former power or influence. There were many reasons for this, among them:
• the 1956 revelations of the 20th Party Congress in the USSR exposing some of the crimes of Stalinism. The inhumanity of Soviet Communism so long denied by communists world wide could no longer be hidden. The myth of a progressive, humane, democratic face to Communism was shattered forever – and this almost a half century before the system collapsed. Many people, including many people in Denver, left the party at that time
• its own factional, sectarian and undemocratic nature. It was a top down operation. This tended to spawn a broader factional and sectarian culture which has infected the Marxist left ever since. Communists were pretty good at alienating potential allies over small, in some cases, minuscule and irrelevant points of dogma or policy. And they played hardball and left on some level a bitter legacy. The marxist left reorganizing in the city in the 1970s inherited this factional sectarianism and was unable to overcome it, remained small and largely divided against itself (Trotyskists, CPUSA, a number of Maoist groups, social Dems). As someone who was a part of the marxist left in those days, I have always deeply regretted the divisions and have wondered about its causes – some internal, some external – every since.
• there were tactical considerations now long lost in history – tactical mistakes – which despite all the short comings mentioned above – could have been avoided. The analysis of the CPUSA on the McCarthy Period was off base. The CP saw in McCarthyism the advent of fascism in America and did not understand its temporary (although it did last more than a decade) nature. Although it remained, throughout that period, a legal political party, the campaign against it was such that the party took the decision to go underground. Once it did, with its leadership scattering to the winds, its base left to fend for itself without organizational support, the organization essentially and quickly collapsed. This was precisely the case here in Colorado. In California, where this decision was not respected and the CPUSA retained a public face inspite of the repression, it remained more of a force, especially in the Bay Area and to a lesser but still substantial extent in Los Angeles.
• Other things were going on in the left movement in the 1950s that would explode into the ethnic social movements of the 1960s: the racism within the communist movement itself. Again, a careful view of history would reveal that leftists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were in the forefront of the struggles against racism. Indeed on a national level, no objective analysis of the civil rights movement in this country can avoid giving the marxist left some credit, and the CPUSA in particular some credit, for their role in the struggle to end formal racial discrimination in the United States. And this was hard, dangerous work. I think it was the movements finest moment and this explains why Black activists, Paul Robeson, WEB Dubois and later Angela Davis found a home in the CPUSA or if not in the party, not far from it (as it seems was the case with Robeson). But for all that, including in Colorado, there were strains, serious strains with Black and Hispanic members chafing at the bit of what was, despite its accomplishments, a predominanetly white dominated organization in close coodination with Moscow.
• But when all is said and done, I am convinced that the main reason for the collapse of communist and other marxist movements in the 1950s, lies elsewhere. It is an oft ignored fact that the United States during that period was, easily, the richest country in the history of the world at the peak of both its economic and political power. If American capitalism did not `deliver’ for everyone equally in this country – and it decidedly hasn’t – it delivered for enough Americans everywhere in enough ways to neutralize any serious radical or left threat to the system as a whole. Nothing like the movements of the pre-WWII period emerged in large measure because there were genuine improvements in social and economic conditions although contradictions and conflicts remained. . Even the most radical of the ethnic movements were essentially about getting their fair share of the pie, more than changing the system. For three decades wages, working and living conditions improved for the vast majority of the American population and a social contract existed between labor and capital that held strong for 30 years until Ronald Reagan came to the Presidency in 1980. It is this, as much as anything that took the wind out of the sails of the radical movement in the United States. And while all this is coming apart at the seems during the last decades, the prosperity was strong enough to cause a left, based on countering social and economic inequality, to shrink to insignificance. And the left has yet to recover even if the objective conditions have deteriorated.
New Ethnic Social Movements
This above social history is not irrelevant to Denver’s subsequent social history or to the present. Many political themes, movements of today have their roots in the past. When the new, militant civil rights organizations exploded into activity in the 1960s, they virtually all felt a need to shed their white leadership and did without looking back. They looked to their own and out of it came movements like the Black Panthers, the Crusade for Justice, the American Indian Movement, in the east the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and the Young Lords, ie, ethnically based radical social movements that had shed their white leadership. These movements might have respected Fidel Castro, but were generally unimpressed and uninfluenced by Soviet or Chinese Communism, the first of which was already largely discredited, the second going through such consistent and radical gyrations that it was hard to follow or look up to as any model. In many ways their programs were anti-corporate – and they certainly understood political repression better than anyone – but theirs was rarely a socialist vision.
In one way, these movements were more effective and able to mobilize more of their own but in another way, a splintering along ethnic lines resulted and sooner or later, the realities of American politics would come into play: that while these groups could articulate and fight for a program that reflected the interests and needs of their people, that they did not have the political clout to win their demands on their own. They needed support, coalitions without which they were too small or isolated to win much of anything. And so they came together, not in some kind of left coalition of different forces – although the Poor People’s March on Washington DC was an attempt to foster such a movement – but within the Democratic Party itself. And there they have remained ever since, certainly here in Colorado, and generally speaking nationwide. And all of them or almost all of them, shed their left origins and became Democrats…although the values, the vision in most cases, for many peple involved, remained unchanged.
The Perpetual Dilemma: Waiting for Godot
One result is that the left here in Denver, with only occasional exceptions, has been unable to rally these social forces among which they worked so effectively in the early and mid 20th Century. And herein lies one of the great dilemmas that has plagued left and social movements ever since which I can best describe as follows: the independent left – left of the Democrats – has good politics but has lost its social base. The Democrats have the social base but not the politics. As a result, the choices open to radicals on the left of the political spectrum actually are not especially attractive – and indeed are rather polarized. They can be summed up as follows
• one can remain outside the Democratic Party, join a left formation, regardless of which one. To do so, one is engaging in the politics true to one’s heart – that is not a small thing by the way – but one in which at least for the past 40 years has had a rather narrow social basis. The social forces that used to be the base of the left are simply not there, or not there for the most part. If one takes this path, the main goal is to extend the left’s social base. This has not happened, or hardly. And many have tried it.
• one can become a Democrat on the logic that the social forces that can change America – as one understands that in Marxist terms – are in the Democratic Party for the most part, most especially labor, Chicanos, Blacks, Women, Gays. The idea here is to win the Democrats during a period of a nationally declining labor movement to more left, progressive positions and to move the party to the left from below, and if possible, split its progressive base off from its conservative pro-corporate party leadership. This hasn’t happened and although there is a certain amount of polarization in the Democratic Party, I don’t see it splitting soon. Indeed, the Marxist vision, political wet dream if you like, is to split the party with its naturally more progressive and socially conscious elements moving into some kind of mass left party. Some of us (I include myself here) have been working for and waiting for something like this to happen for forty years. Hasn’t happened and I believe it aint-a-gonna- happen soon either. It’s like waiting for Godot. Despite all the tensions between the base and the leadership – essentially a class tension – the party is holding. It is a perfectly logical for leftists looking at this situation to join the Democratic Party and to work within it. The politics might be weak, but the base – the future of any social change – is there
• then there are fools like me who think that there is a role both inside and outside the Democratic Party for the left, with some people working within the party to change it, make it more progressive and responsive to a people’s agenda (as I will vaguely call it) but who are not willing to give up a commitment to an independent left. I try to work with both movements, to further an agenda. As a result we tend to be trusted by neither. The Dems worry about us trying to radicalize the party. They are right. That is exactly what I hope happens. The independent left, small and narrow as it is, are suspicious because people like me on some level, really rather modestly actually, work with Democrats which they consider some form of original sin. Some of these politically independent left voices have become especially shrill these days about working with Democrats. And then some of the most shrill among them are not so independent, but are actually registered Republicans. Caught in the middle so to speak, we, independent leftists get hammered by both sides. That’s ok. It builds character as they say.
This social history – not much different in Denver and Colorado than elsewhere in the nation – gives perspective to today’s Democratic Party which I would hope is both fair and accurate.
Denver’s Jews
So…as to Denver’s yids, its Jews.
Denver’s Jewish Community has an interesting, vibrant history, like many groups, it has a mixed history, but on the whole, there is much to be proud of. It is, despite its almost blind embrace of Zionism (more on that later) a progressive history in the main. It is a tight knit community with families that have been here since the 1880s and 1890s. It is a community that has known some discrimination, anti-semitism – both the Catholic kind (Jews as Christ-killers) and the more WASPy socio-economic kind that kept Jews out of the professions and certain areas of higher education. It’s still there in certain well connected law and development companies (and other Corporate entities). Like a number of other ethnic communities – Chicanos, Blacks, Italians come to mind – Denver’s Jews have had to organize to fight for their rights and to do so in coalition with other social forces because they couldn’t make gains on their own.
The record is mixed.
Although Denver historian Phil Goodstein knows more about this than do I, from what I have read – which is a fair amount – Denver Jews were not especially in the forefront of fighting the state’s powerful KKK in the 1920s. In part this is because the KKK in Colorado mostly targeted Catholics – Italians, Irish and Chicanos in particular with a special vengeance. Some Jews were part of the movement against the Klan, but many preferred to, when then could, retain a low profile. But in the 1930s, 40 s and 1950s, Jews were key players in social movements here as they worked, with others, to try to knock down the barriers to discrimination. Many of the alliances that formed in those years – with the Black Community, with labor, have held until today although much of the former militancy and solidarity – that sense of social justice – has, if not disappeared, waned.
The point here is that for its own survival and prosperity, necessity required that Denver Jews ban together and fight for their rights – which they did, that they learn to make alliances and to be effective political infighters. They did this quite well and have every reason to be proud. It is also the case because of the profoundly progressive origins of the community that save our favorite issue – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that these progressive traditions remain alive in Denver’s Jewish Community which has strong social programs, believes in racial tolerance, opposes bigotry in the main, and the separation of church from state. None of these values have died here.
As the Jewish Community prospered, it diversified along class lines. The sources of Jewish wealth here – sporting goods (Gart Brothers), printing (Hirshfield Printing), luggage (Samonsite), some Oklahoma oil tycoons (Marvin Davis), and developers (Larry Mizel, Perlmutter’s family among others). As they did elsewhere, Denver Jews made significant contributions to law, medicine and academia as well. For all that it is a community that has a tradition of fighting for its gains and having to counter the anti-semitism that has always existed among the largely WASP upper classes here and still exists albeit it more subtly than in the past.
The political vehicle for fighting for Jewish interests in Denver has long been the Democratic Party, the party of social progressives, labor and immigrants. As with other groups vying for power among the Dems, Jewish influence in Denver’s Democratic Party took a very long time to come by and from what I can tell, does not emerge with full force until the late 1960s and early 1970s by which time the Community was flourishing economically. Many of the alliances made in the civil rights movement here just carried over into deal cutting and political maneuvring within the Democratic Party itself.
Brownstein and Farber
It would be a stretch to say that Denver’s Jews run the city’s Democratic Party because there are too many diverse factors that come together to make up the party’s constituency…but they have a lot of clout, a lot of real power. And while in the same way, there are different elements vying with each other within the Jewish Community that have a say, sooner or later, much of the power broking both in the community itself and in the city’s Democratic Party is laid at the doorstep of a local law firm with a long reach: Brownstein, Farber and Hyatt. Anyone in the know in Colorado politics knows these players and knows that without their blessing, it is very unlikely for a candidate to win. The key players in the firm are Norm Brownstein and Steve Farber. They in turn belong to a reform synagogue – one of Denver’s biggest and most socially active – Temple Emmanuel, whose chief rabbi, Stephen Foster, is one of the more politically active Jewish figures (as is his wife) in city politics.
Although not all of Denver’s more prosperous Jews belong to Temple Emmanuel (there are several other very powerful and rich synagogues) many of them do, especially a number of quite prosperous developers. Together, the developers, rabbis and lawyers have become a strong power block. They have considerable influence within Denver’s Democratic Party and because the influence of Denver Democrats goes beyond the city’s borders, Brownstein and Farber have a great deal of influence on the state (and it turns out national) level as well. Actually through their personal connections at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the 1960s Brownstein and Farber also have influence and connections within the state’s Republican Party through their lifelong friendship and collaboration with Hank Brown, who earlier in his career worked for Monfort (the meatpacking firm), then went on to become a US Senator and is now the President of the University of Colorado (and one of the key players calling for the firing of Ward Churchill, on whom I will reflect in some detail in a later blog).
It is not the place here to go into details about Farber and Brownstein (although I will in the future), beyond saying that they are powerful behind the scenes players, local power brokers in the Democratic Party – far more important and significant politically from what I can tell, than the city’s more visible and politically active rabbis who have more a public posture (but far less actual power). These two are the great deal makers and have been working with the Chicano, Black and labor constituencies to influence local politics for decades. They are effective and tough players and virtually impossible to get around. They recently suffered what I believe was a minor set back when Chris Gates, state party chair who was close to them, lost his position to a more liberal opponent, Pat Wauk.
Gates might be gone – he ran the state party with a pretty heavy hand and in close tandem with Brownstein and Farber – but there is still not much that can happen in Colorado’s Democratic Party, certainly here in Denver, without their participation and approval. And the influence of Farber and Brownstein extends beyond Colorado to the national Democratic Party policies. They are particularly close or have been to the Clintons. Once, during his presidency, Bill Clinton referred to Norm Brownstein as `the 51st member of the Senate’. This pyrrhic title was mostly a result of Brownstein’s extraordinary fund-raising abilities for Clinton’s two presidential campaigns in which Brownstein effectively mobilized a national network of friends and acquaintances to raise big bucks for Clinton. The Clintons, Brownsteins and Farbers have close personal ties as well. Farber and Brownstein were key players in winning Democratic Party approval for Denver as the 2008 convention site and in overcoming labor opposition, both locally and nationally, for chosing non-union facilities (local hotels) for events and lodging. Although I would not say that all this makes Hillary a shoe-in – the national trends will be determined beyond Colorado – it certainly doesn’t hurt her chances that the convention will be here in Denver.
…………more soon.
4881 words.
Below is a letter Steve Laudeman wrote to US Congresswoman Diana De Gette opposing the proposed arms deal. I hope others will do likewise.
There are a few points of clarification:
1. Steve is right – the deal is at least $63 billion. That includes $20 billion (minimun) purchase of Saudi arms, $30 billion in military aid to Israel and $13 billionin military aid to Egypt. From what the press is saying these are `low ball’ figures.
2. I especially appreciate how Steve calls for canceling the WHOLE package, not just aid to Israel. I noticed that the Campaign To End The Occupation just speaks of opposing the military aid to Israel. The whole package should be opposed.
3. Just outside of Denver is one of the main headquarters and facilities of Lockheed Martin that produces the F-35 fighter jet that the Israelis would get as a part of the deal. I believe that Lockheed Martin is in Ed Perlmutter’s district.
Thanks Steve.
RJP
Dear Congresswoman De Gette:
I implore you do do all in your power to derail the Middle East arms deal currently being discussed. The addition of $63 billion in arms to this volatile region can only add to instability and increase risks to American soldiers and American interests.
While the ruling regimes in the nations which will receive this aid are ostensibly our allies, it is not beyond comprehension that these arms could fall into the hands of those who do not support American goals. We do not want to, yet again, find militant extremists using American made weapons to further their own goals.
Furthermore, it is widely recognized that there is not a military solution to the problems we face in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group had a number of well thought out options to move this issue forward. Providing massive military aid to Iran’s enemies was most defininitely not on the list.
Please introduce or co-sponsor legislation to stop this unnecessary and dangerous deal.
Thank you.
Steve Laudeman
New Series: Denver 2008…Stay Tuned
It turns out, that little Denver is soon to have a big event, the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention. Not sure it’s up to the challenge. Already, the eye of the nation – and the world -is on our not-so-fair city. Indications are that the attention will certainly grow over the next 12 months until the Convention itself. Every national organization of every conceivable kind will have a presence here in one way or another. Given the great possibility that the next president will be Democrat (- unless they screw it up yet again as they have the past two elections – don’t underestimate the Democratic Party’s potential to read the mood of the country incorrectly enough to lose for yet a third time -) the results of the convention will have repercussions for the nation and the world. A Spanish friend was telling me how unfair it is that the rest of the world can’t vote in US presidential elections since the outcome affects people far beyond the country’s borders.
Whether a person is a member of the Democratic Party or not really is not important. We’ll all be effected. There is so much to think about…how it was that Denver was `chosen’ in the first place and what it means to the State’s Democratic Party, the recent developments among Colorado Dems (Be The Change, Mike Miles and how they challenged the party’s old guard and scared them, at least for a minute or two), different approaches to the Convention including national and local intense maneuvring, how the media is trying to shape the events, etc. etc. There is also the eternal – rather boring – issue of whether the left should work within or outside the Democratic Party that has been with us for at least the 40 years that I have been politically semi-conscious.
The deeper issue is:how are we going to approach this political tsunami which is about to hit our city…and, from my persective, can `we’ (i’ll leave that undefined) both go into and come out of that convention with a stronger peace program (my particular interest) both within and without the Democratic Party. By the way, I don’t know the answer. So, once again, we have before us both an opportunity for growth and to deepen a progressive agenda for the country on the one hand and a chance to let the occasion pass us up or worse, to really screw things up on the other.
I have thought of a couple of irreverent titles for this series, among them `Denver: Cowtown Not Quit Come of Age’, `Watch the Dems Blow It For the Third Time’ , `Imagine: A Not So Great City’,`The Dems of 2008: Faking Left, Moving Right’, `High Noon Between Hillary and Obama: Much To Do About Nothing'(my current favorite). I can’t help the cynicism. Actually it’s NOT cynicism, more like realism. For all that, let’s not underestimate the potential, and the importance of participating in the kind of genuine dialogue both here and nationally that can help change the nation’s politically agenda. And if we do that, then maybe, maybe despite having the ugliest designed modern art museum (from the outside) , one of the pettiest state Democratic parties in the nation, we can, with the help of all those trade unionists, peace activists, Blacks, Chicanos, women, gays, coming from Nome to Naples (Florida) wipe the `cowtown’ image of the map…and replace it with something more dignified…and while we’re at it, let’s change the names of our baseball and football stadiums.
more soon.
Weapons of mass consequence
Rogers on US-Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian-Omani-Kuwaiti-UAEer-Bahraini-and-Who-Knows-Who-Else Arms Deal
(Note: Paul Rogers is a professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University in UK. I find his columns almost always `enlightening’ and his political analysis very sharp. The piece that follows is on the political implications of the proposed huge arms deal that the US is currently crafting. A few paragraphs are below, for the entire article simply click at the end of the selection. The whole piece will come up. rp)
Paul Rogers
Note: This column appears at Open Democracy
The huge United States military deal with Arab states and Israel will benefit domestic friends and overseas adversaries. 3 – 08 – 2007
The United States’ plan to provide its Arab allies and Israel with military aid, announced on 31 July 2007, is large-scale by any standards. It includes the provision of $20 billion-worth of precision-guided bombs, aircraft upgrades, new warships and other equipment to Saudi Arabia; $13 billion-worth of military supplies to Egypt; and smaller quantities of arms to other close allies such as Kuwait and Oman. The biggest transaction of all involves Israel, whose $30 billion-worth of contracts over the 2007-17 period represents a 30% increase over the last decade.
As with most arms agreements of this magnitude – the controversial al-Yamamah deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia, currently under US investigation – is a prime example – the political as much as the commercial dimensions are significant. In this case, Washington is seeking to bolster its interests in the middle east via a delicate balancing-act: assuaging Israeli concerns over the increased sales to the country’s Arab neighbours with the scale of the bilateral deal with Tel Aviv, giving itself leverage to pressurise Riyadh over Iraq, and consolidating its alliances with friendly (or subordinate) Arab states. (for the complete article – click here)
Calling the now $63 billion arms deal to Israel, Saudia Arabia and Egypt a `source of stability and peace’ in the Middle East, Under Secretary of State Nicolas Burns defended the deals as necessary to counter Iran’s regional influence. As Burns’ was repeating this lie in the Washington to an accepting CNN reporter, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates chimed in as a part of the same chorus at the beginning of their Middle East tour. The tour really makes for great `pretend theater’. It’s all worked out: Gates and Rice can pretend that there is this imminent Iranian threat to Riyadh, Tel Aviv, London, New York and Colorado Springs. It’s gotta be an IMMINENT threat or it doesn’t count! Weapons sales go up proportionately when `imminence’ is suspected. In response, the Saudis and others can pretend that the threat is genuine and that the anti-Iranian front actually still exists once Gates and Rice leave the room so as not to unduly embarrass them.
A new detail that emerged today is that the $63 billion deal does not include any arrangements that are yet to be made with other Gulf countries with Bahrein, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. These countries are targeted (so to speak) by the Bush Administration for billion-dollar arms purchases as well. No one is talking yet about possible deals with Jordan or Turkey both key regional allies. Turkey needs to be bought off to keep it from attacking northern Iraq. Perhaps the latest Turks provocations and bellicost language towards Iraq’s Kurds was simply its way of pressuring Washington into some sweeter arms deal? Let’s see if it works. It’s just not fair to give Israel $30 billion, the Saudi’s 20 billion, Eygpt $13 billion and poor Turkey nada. I mean common decency and proper arms deal etiquette almost demands a token deal of at least $5 billion, which the Turks, being tough negotiators, should be able to least double, as the Saudi’s did.
Then there’s Jordan, currently flooded with a good many of the 4 million refugees from Iraq – the world’s largest refugee and humanitarian crisis at present – that the US media is downplaying. How many more billions will be shelled out to keep those allies in line?
The implication emerging is that what was first marketed as a $20 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia could be, when all the rockets are unleashed, a $75 billion or $100 billion deal after all the checks are cashed. Maybe more, if you consider spare parts and maintenance over 10 years. We’ll know more as the Gates-Rice trip proceeds. As the saying goes…it’s not over until the thin lady plays the piano.
(note: this piece has been some what revised from earlier today as I came across many of the details of the French-Libyan deal to build a nuclear power plant)
Jamal Dajani reporting for Link TV’s Mosaic Program (see http://www.linktv.org/mosaic for July 27) tells a touching tale about Libyan president Muammar Khadafi that rings true. It seems that Khadafi was greatly shaken by watching the US military find and capture a somewhat disoriented Saddam Hussein hiding in an Iraqi cave. As Dajanai tells it. Khadafi saw his own future humiliation in that morbid scene and was moved to take action.
How accurate this story is we’ll never know, but it has a certain air of truth about it. Almost immediately thereafter, the author of the Green Book (Khadafi’s version of Mao’s Red Book for Libyan Moslems) had something of a political epithany. There is nothing quite like seeing the downfall of a close ally to focus the mind on original political gestures to avoid a similar fate. Khadafi’s gesture – the first of many – was to announce that Libya would immediately abandon its nuclear weapons development program. The US might not have found a nuclear weapons program to dismantle in Iraq, a bit of an embarrassment which Khadafi helped alleviate by offering up his nuclear program instead. The Bush Administration took note and desperate for some positive p.r. and not finding solace in the sitution in Iraq, claimed political victory in Libya (a contorted claim at best: the argument went something along the lines that it was US policy in Iraq that forced Khadafi’s hand.)
Let’s leave out the fact that the Libyan nuclear program had not been modernized for 21 years (since 1982 when economic sanctions were imposed), that it was obsolete and had long been mothballed. Showing an unusual level of politeness and of letting bygones be bygones with the putrid smell of oil and gas in the air, the US and the UK acted dumb and forgiving. Khadafi could pretend that Libya was giving up a great deal by ending a program it had not developed for twenty years and the United States and Britain could pretend that they had just scored a political coup by pressuring Libya to dismantle its non-existent – but exceedingly dangerous nuclear program that no doubt threatened Manhattan. It just shows how oil and gas can be key ingredients in conflict resolution!
While the US and UK were at the business of forgiving and forgetting, they seemed to throw a few other measures in to sweeten the pot, `confidence building measures’, they’re called in the conflict resolution lingo. The US was more than willing to drop its claims against the Libyans accused of a 1896 bombing of a nightclub in W. Berlin. The Brits, always flexible when oil contracts come into play decided not to pursue the last payment owed to the Lockerbie survivors. The sanctions against Libya were lifted, the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor convicted of giving the AIDs virus to several hundred Libyan children and sentenced to death, first had their death sentence lifted and then were released and Tony Blair agreed to take Khadafi’s daughter as his second wife! (Ok, he didn’t, but who knows, he might have if asked, if it produced contracts for BAE, Britain’s high tech arms manufacturer.)
Was all this just about oil? The short and unambiguous answer is, yes, of course. What else?
France, looking on, tried to figure a way to worm in on the oil and the contracts. It too was willing to `forgive and forget’. The French-Libyan spat over Chad – where, in the 1980s, the two countries were actually in a low level war with each other – is history. The blowing up of a DC 10 French air carrier in 1981 (in which Libya was implicated) was also written off, with French President Nicolas Sarkazy instead calling on the two countries to `look to the future’.
France has been in trouble since the US led invasion of Iraq started. Paris was one of the big losers when its Arab policy designed and implemented by De Gaulle in the 1960s to buy Iraqi oil and sell Iraq weapons and nuclear plants was reduced to tatters. One of Sarkozy’s goals was to replace that old French-Iraqi relation with a French-Libyan one. He seems to have succeeded. First he sent his wife to Tripoli to negotiate the release of Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor imprisoned on charges of having purposely injected 400 Libyan children with HIV tainted blood. The initiative appears to have especially angered the Germans who had done most of the diplomatic footwork to free the nurses and doctors through the auspices of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, working for the European Union.
Sarkozy was not averse to stealing Germany’s thunder (and some key commercial contracts as well) by horning in at the last minute to give the appearance of having pulled the whole thing off. It suggests a pattern that Sarkozy is likely to follow in the future of piggy backing on EU diplomatic initiatives to promote the more narrowly defined French commercial and energy interests. This parallels exactly what Tony Blair is doing, fronting as the representative of the Quartet in the current Palestinian -Israeli negotiations, while essentially sniffing out commercial and military contracts for British industry with Bush’ permission. No surprise, that is exactly what he was doing as prime minister. Same job, different hat.
Sarkozy and wife faired rather well in the deal. Madame Sarkozy’s visit laid the ground work for the president himself to visit Tripoli. Khadafi, always the gracious host appeared a little cooler than usual according to the French press, but was still kind enough to give Sarkozy a tour of the remains of his Tripoli palace destroyed by US F-16 fighters in April of 1986, killing his six month old adopted daughter. The message seemed to be: I’ll forget this if you stop raising the issues of Chad and the 1981 downed DC 10. Sarkozy obliged. Khadafi then politely pretended that France had settled the Bulgarian nurse deal, and Sarkozy pretended that he wasn’t an impatient cut throat opportunist looking to cut cynical corporate deals, but a guy with a heart who could shed a tear for injustice especially if France could come away with a contract to build a nuclear power plant.
After this diplomatic bullshit had finished and the dust had settled, Libya and France had signed major commercial contracts, the jewel of which is France’s agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Libya to be used to power a major de-salination program in the water thirsty Saharan country. Entitled `Memorandum d’entente sur la cooperation dans le nucleare civile’, the agreement gives France new life in the Middle East and the possibility to position itself to win further contracts in intra structural development, hotel construction, the refurbishing and upgrading of Libya’s extraordinarily rich archelogical sites (like Leptis Magna) while screwing the Germans out of the deal at the same time. De Gaulle would have been proud!
Of course the French are already defending its plans to build a nuclear power plant in Libya the same way they defended helping Israel’s nuclear power program off the ground in the 1950s – that led to the production of Israel’s nuclear weapons’ arsenal – and the same way they defended building Iraq’s nuclear program at Osirak in the 1970s (only to be destroyed by their former nuclear client Israel in 1981). Completely ignoring Iranian claims to be developing nuclear energy for peaceful uses under the auspices of the IAEA, the French are very pleased to be developing Libya’s nuclear potential.
It was this deal that particularly irritated the Germans who had hoped through Steinmeier’s EU mission to achieve the same (or a similar) result. That the Germans got stung in the deal will play very well in France in boost Sarkozy’s popularity at home. It does not bode well for better German-French E.U. cooperation but it’s too early to make too much of this yet. Still, the Germans – that is the whole country – as this was all well publicized in both places – are taking note.
Letting France into such big commercial deals was clever of Khadafi. France is only Libya’s sixth trading partner behind Italy, Germany and UK in Europe. This deal gives the French a chance to catch up. Not wanting to put his eggs or his oil in one basket, Khadafi appeared more than willing to share his oil and military contracts with the French and not let the US and other EU countries monopolize the trade in both. In the past, Saddam Hussein followed a similar policy playing France off against the USSR. Such a policy has obvious political as well as economic consequences. Once against the main lines of the Kissinger deal described below appear to be working here
Wotinhell Has Happened To Our Country?
Arlene Watkins `socks it to’ the Dems
(Arlene Watkins is an 82 old woman from Englewood. What follows below is a response to the `Speak Out’ column by Ibrahim Kazerooni and myself that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News supplement to the Sunday Denver Post [July 29, 2007]. The op ed can be found in the archived blogs on July 29, 2007.
I have noticed lately that a number of friends who are getting on in years have a propensity to `tell-it-like-it-is-no-holes-barred’. Irving Greenbaum of Boulder comes to mind among others. In any case, Arlene Watkins packs a pretty strong punch. Her letter to Ibrahim and myself is reproduced unedited below)
———————————
To: Bob Prince and Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni
Boy! We finally got an editorial that makes sense. My opinion of the Dems: they are a bunch of wimps. Some time ago I wrote a note to the Democratic Nat’l Commitee to take my name off their mailing list. (I’ve voted Dem all of my life and I’m 82 now)
I intend to vote independent (or not at all).
I’m `madder than hell’ about what’s going on – this d—– unnecessary war gets to me. We’re losing a bunch of our troops. I think of the many survivors and I weep (not literally) for them. Wotinhell [pretty neat word rjp] has happened to our country? It’s Cheney-Bush-Cheney who love torture and Bush who obviously loves his war. That’s what he proudly calls it (his war).
This turkey has got to go!…but the Dem wimps will not call for an impeachment. I think he (Bush) is NUTS or back to drinking booze again. Is there sucha thing as a DOUBLE impeachment? Cheney has to go too.
You tell it like it is (which is grim).
I’ve turned into a cynic. We’re stuck between a boulder and a hard place.
Sincerely yours
Arlene Watkins.
note: I wouldn’t want to mess with this lady. rjp.
View from the Left Bank: Rob Prince's Blog 