Category: Anti-Government Protests – U.S.

Troublemaker

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Troublemaker, A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties” by Bill Zimmerman, published in 2011. The author was a true activist– he sacrificed his livelihood and risked his life to work for causes he believed in. Kudos to him.

In his twenties, the author made a major life-decision that made him look like a righteous prick (excuse the crudeness). He opposed the powers-that-be via participating in street demonstrations and civil disobedience. Later on, he felt he was more likely to change the world via engaging in humanitarian actions and working within the system.

Born in December 1940, Zimmerman grew up on Chicago’s West Side. In 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, he helped African Americans register to vote. In May 1966, the author and other anti-Vietnam-War protesters occupied the administration building at the University of Chicago. He learned from an experienced activist, what to do in connection with making demands of the school officials, to get what they wanted.

President LBJ was running out of cannon fodder (who were mostly non-white, poor men) for his war in Vietnam. So he had the Selective Service System (the government’s military-draft authority) do away with students’ ability to defer their service until after graduating.

The older generation of men– WWII veterans– viewed draft dodgers as cowardly, unpatriotic and selfish. They were unaware that their tax dollars were paying for the U.S. military’s committing of atrocities; one kind involved torturing pairs of enemy soldiers (National Liberation Front guerrilla fighters) by taking them up in a helicopter, and throwing one out the door so the other would be terrorized into revealing his side’s State secrets.

The author wrote, “Flower power [a 1960’s idea pushed by antiwar activists and people in the counter-culture] meant freeing men from outdated norms of masculinity that sapped their sensitivity, their poetry, and their urge to share instead of dominate.”

It was widely known even then, that the three major ways to redistribute societal wealth, consist of: 1) reforming campaign financing practices so that election winners are those who get the most votes, not those who are wealthiest; 2) having the least unfair tax system– encouraging citizens to start entrepreneurial ventures via financial assistance while also taxing the super-rich on the back-end for having taken advantage of existing infrastructure and front-end incentives; and 3) having a social safety net for those individuals who have unluckily been born into sucky situations, and providing opportunities for everyone, as far as egalitarianism is possible.

As is well known, in the first half of the 1970’s, there were lots of behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving president Nixon’s sidekick Henry Kissinger, with his secret diplomatic missions and his role at the Paris Peace Talks, to purportedly end the Vietnam war. South Vietnam’s leader, Nguyen Van Thieu, ran a corrupt regime, and he was eventually forced into exile, compliments of American taxpayers.

That theme– the propaganda-suffused, and CIA-assisted ousting of various dictators around the world– had already become a cliche since the 1950’s. A Mad Lib could be made of it: “He then consoled himself by fleeing to ______ [a place that would accept him] with $_______ [money he had looted from his homeland that supplemented his offshore financial stashes, that also might serve as tax shelters if he had U.S. income] stolen from the aid the U.S. had given to _______ [his former territory].” In recent decades, for obvious reasons, there has been less of this Cold War nonsense.

Anyway, as is also well known, the Japanese in WWII dogmatically would have fought to the last man, guerrilla-style. It was known that America’s supposed enemies in Vietnam had the same mentality. Yet, regarding Vietnam, the unbloodied elites and chickenhawks in the U.S. government failed to take a lesson from both the WWII’s Japanese and from the French in Dien Bien Phu.

Fortunately, the vast majority of current world leaders have had enough of genocide and atrocities, and are ready to sit down at the bargaining table to negotiate the distribution of rare resources (especially those that will fulfill their energy needs) crucial to their homelands’ economic development for decades to come. Slowly but slowly, the world is making progress in the humanitarian arena.

Nevertheless, worldwide, human beings have evolved so that the super-rich now own:

  • show business;
  • professional sports teams;
  • gambling entities;
  • Silicon Valley, and
  • Wall Street.

They have become one big, incestuous network, married to politics. The situation has spawned excessive (especially in the United States):

  • pardoning of criminals;
  • lawsuits;
  • deregulation;
  • smearing;
  • lies;
  • conflicts of interest, and
  • deception via AI-generated images, and pre-recorded video clips (especially of the president!)

This calls for a funk reggae fusion rock parody.

ELITIST REVENUE

sung to the tune of “Electric Avenue” with apologies to Eddy Grant and whomever else the rights may concern.

[Ploys. Ploys.]

Now ov’r resources, there is violence.
And profi-TEER-ing to be done.
One hand washes the others.
And in charge, are fortunate sons. Oh, no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Abortion, wars, and the border.
Can’t bear to watch a thing on TV.
In their world, it’s a challenge,
to push the envelope infinitely. Good God?

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

We’ve gone extreme in this country.
Money and revenge are job-one.
Lawyering and manipulation,
and our Constitution is done. Oh no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Oh, Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

AI is Fox’s playground, on the dark side all-around.

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh yeah

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

$ $ $

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Zimmerman’s life and times.

Flying Close to the Sun

The Book of the Week is “Flying Close to the Sun” by Cathy Wilkerson, published in 2007.

Born in January 1945 in Hartsdale, a northern suburb of New York City, the author spent most of her childhood in Connecticut. At a young age, she was drawn to politics. At Swarthmore College, she joined the group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and engaged in political activism for decades. Many young people were brainwashed into thinking that the revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba had been successful in creating a societal paradise.

In turbulent 1960’s America, the counter-cultural attitude was:

“If corporations were stealing from us and selling us products that killed, then we too could steal from them and support the movement.”

As is well known, during the Vietnam War, more than a few American companies were cooperating with the U.S. government to supply the U.S. military with napalm and agent orange, two chemicals toxic to vegetation as well as humans.

In June 1969, SDS held a convention for its chapters across the country. However, there was lots of infighting over ideology and the direction of the movement. Later that month, a few SDS members wrote a paper that said that the United States government should be overthrown because it was imperialist, and oppressed blacks and the poor. The plan was that the revolutionaries would impose Marxist-Leninist socialism so that Americans in the new world order could live happily ever after.

The paper inspired some SDS members, including Wilkerson, to form a new group which called itself the Weatherman. She began to think that the only way to change the world was through revolution. Weatherman started to provoke the local Chicago police the way the Black Panthers had been doing. The former became very focused on the Black Power movement, at the expense of the women’s movement.

Wilkerson gave talks that advocated working with women of all ages around issues of domestic violence and workplace harassment. She was bullied at a self-criticism meeting about not being more against racism. She was told she was being selfish; that blacks were being treated worse than women. SDS leaders said that’s why blacks deserved more attention. The group should focus on the blacks and when they achieved equality, then women’s equality would follow.

In summer 1969 in Columbus, Ohio, two dozen SDSers recruited high schoolers in their hangouts such as streets, beaches, bars, etc. In three not-so-great neighborhoods, they incited blacks to riot and commit violence against the police. Unsurprisingly, the mayor called in the National Guard.

That same summer, SDS member Mike Klonsky resigned. He had realized that violence was a childish way to resolve conflicts, and suggested that instead, people work through their anger about injustice by pressuring politicians to combat racism, and raise awareness in workplaces.

The late 1960’s and early 1970’s saw incidents of unrest that scarred the American psyche; the most well-publicized included: Columbia University in spring 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, San Francisco State College beginning in late 1968, and Kent State in Ohio in May 1970. Wilkerson and others in the “movement” thought that these incidents indicated that activists were catching on and making progress.

As a low-level member of Weatherman, Wilkerson lived in the collective, and did what they did. She learned martial arts, exercised, and discussed and argued for hours about the agenda of the organization. The collective voted to do away with monogamy, as that would allow full participation of all members. The group wanted to have a collective sense of humanity– it was bigger than oneself.

Read the book to learn of a game-changing event that occurred in March 1970 involving Wilkerson, that radically changed her group’s and her circumstances, and of much more about her life and times.

L.A. Justice – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “L.A. Justice, Lessons from the Firestorm” by Robert Vernon, published in 1993.

In 1954, the author joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Through the decades of his career, he watched the LAPD become corrupted by the worst aspects of human nature. By the early 1990’s, the department had scrapped the civil service system in favor of using patronage in awarding promotions. This necessitated pleasing local politicians. Always a bad idea.

So at the tail end of April 1992, when the verdict was announced in the Rodney King legal case, law enforcement was unprepared for the rioting that broke out in South-Central Los Angeles.

The author, lately named assistant chief of police of Los Angeles, bragged about helping start a community program in 1990– successful at the book’s writing. It was called “Operation Cul-de-Sac” and involved transforming a high-crime neighborhood into a gated community. It was implemented in about seven hundred households in South Central Los Angeles. The author wrote, “… changing behavior must begin by influencing a belief system.”

The program must have done so, as it created support networks of families and friends, significantly reduced crime, and significantly increased school attendance.

Unfortunately, despite its success, the program was not to last much longer. The reason? It was funded by the LAPD– not special-interest political groups in the community. So local politicians were left out of the loop– unable to hand out patronage jobs.

Read the book to learn of all kinds of other frustrations suffered by the author in his experiences with the LAPD.

Underground

The Book of the Week is “Underground, My Life With SDS and the Weathermen” by Mark Rudd, published in 2009.

March 1969 saw the start of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against Cambodia. The author wrote, “I was so sure I knew better than my parents; after all, their generation had brought the world to this state of affairs, if only by their acquiescence.”

Rudd became the poster boy for the media as a protest leader at Columbia University during its period of violent unrest in the spring of 1968. He started his degree there in the autumn of 1965. At the time, the school employed African American female maids to clean the dorm bathrooms, a service included with the boarding fee.

Rudd joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in March 1966. He had grown up in a suburban Jewish family. His father had fought in the Second World War, during which Hitler was perceived as “Absolute Evil.” The United States used its powers for good to defeat the latter. However, twenty years later, when Lyndon Johnson’s war crimes began to be revealed, Rudd became disillusioned with his own country.

Rudd and his contemporaries didn’t support any presidential candidate in 1968 because “Electoral politics was beneath our concern.” He and his fellow political activists were concerned, however, about the deleterious effects of a senseless war perpetrated by the federal government, along with the university’s related and other nefarious activities.

For at least the last half century, hypocritical liberals have sought to “… co-opt the energy of radical young people into working for meaningless reforms…” However, with Vietnam, some would say the protests were justified. For, the American president started a needless war that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and ruined lives– recruiting cannon fodder against their will. The stubborn, arrogant president didn’t take a lesson from the stubborn, arrogant French, who epically failed in clinging to their fast-fading colonialism in mid-1950’s Indochina.

Columbia University had secret contracts with the U.S. government– researching both war weaponry for the Pentagon and war policy for the execution of the war. In spring 1968, this accounted for 46% (!) of the nation’s budget. The university was also abusing eminent domain in planning both to construct a segregated sports complex in Morningside Park, and more dormitories on West 114th Street off of Broadway near its campus. For years, it had quashed the formation of a union of black and Latino cafeteria workers.

Rudd and his fellow activists held rallies and went on protest marches. He wrote to school publications. The protesting led to occupations of campus buildings by, eventually, thousands of activists in the last week of April 1968.

Although Rudd’s became the most recognized name and face associated with the historical event (possibly because he was a white male), there were plenty of other activist organizations of different ethnicities whose members were arrested and got beaten up by law enforcement sent in by New York City Mayor John Lindsay; those fighting for civil rights, black-power, and peace.

The New York Times propagandized that the destructive and immature hooligans provoked the police; the police were the good guys. It should have come as no surprise to the cynical that the university was in bed with the newspaper. The school’s board of trustees claimed the newspaper’s publisher as one of their own. He was also an alumnus. The Times’ employees were alumni of the Columbia School of Journalism. Nevertheless, the university actually met about half of the six-odd demands of the activists.

After he was expelled from Columbia, Rudd became a recruiter for SDS, visiting various chapters and speaking at universities around the nation. The two major issues were always Vietnam and racism. Various groups within and without SDS, including the Weathermen (a spinoff of SDS), the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, the Black Panthers and the Revolutionary Youth Movement began arguing among themselves and with each other at conferences they jointly held in the next few years.

Rudd was in the Weathermen. He believed that the way to rebel against “the man” was through armed struggle. According to his FBI dossier, he urged college kids to kill cops. But his group was anti-racist, pro-Communist and anti-reactionary.

In the summer of 1969 in New York City, he and his fellow revolutionaries came across as so violent, they turned people off when they spoke at a Central Park rally. The other SDS factions thought the Weathermen (or, as they had renamed themselves, the Weather Bureau) were anarchistic, chauvinistic, masochistic and Custeristic.

In Chicago, there were clashes between sadistic cops and radical protestors. “Cook County Jail was overflowing with the addition of almost three hundred Weathermen, the total number arrested over the three days. The period was named ‘Days of Rage.’ ” After that, Rudd’s group went underground and broke off from SDS.

Rudd’s group’s heroes continued to be: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers.

By the mid-1970’s, Rudd’s group had claimed responsibility for more than twenty-four bombings, which were intended to destroy only property. There occurred three accidental deaths of its own radicals from a botched bomb-making operation in Greenwich Village in spring 1970.

Read the book to learn a wealth of other details of the tenor of the times, the mentalities of Rudd’s contemporaries, and how Rudd fared after his Chicago arrest.