Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Forty Years Ago

Happy New Year

2008 is the Fortieth Anniversary of the 1968 Revolution.

And once again the Amerikan Empire is in the throes of a foreign war and a Presidential Election. While a new activist movement has arisen in opposition to Imperialism, Globalization and Capitalism. What goes around comes around....Of course some folks dread that.

Tet Offensive

http://www.vietnamwar.com/tetoffensive.jpg

The Tet Offensive (Tet Mau Than) or Tong Cong Kich/Tong Khoi Nghia (General Offensive, General Uprising) was a three-phase military campaign launched between 30 January and 23 September 1968, by the combined forces of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, or derogatively, Viet Cong) and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The purpose of the operations, which were unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity, was to strike military and civilian command and control centers throughout the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and to spark a general uprising among the population that would then topple the Saigon government, thus ending the war in a single blow.

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http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/USPics5/71757a.jpg

http://www.history.army.mil/books/Vietnam/Comm-El/Photos/Map5.jpg



Paris

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.
The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.


Communiqué


Comrades,

Considering that the Sud-Aviation factory at Nantes has been occupied for two days by the workers and students of that city,

and that today the movement is spreading to several factories (Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne in Paris, Renault in Cléon, etc.),

THE SORBONNE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE calls for

the immediate occupation of all the factories in France and the formation of Workers Councils.

Comrades, spread and reproduce this appeal as quickly as possible.


Sorbonne, 16 May 1968, 3:30 pm




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" The only safeguard against authority and rigidity setting-in is a playful attitude."
Raoul Vaneigem.

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/graphics/pdf/paris68.gif




Chicago





Chicago: demonstrators gather at grant park (Aug. 1968).
photo: Fred W. McDarrah


Theatre of fear: one on the aisle
A view from the Chicago Democratic Convention riots by Richard Goldstein

"You afraid?" I asked a kid from California. He zipped his army jacket up to his neck, and filled his palm with a wad of Vaseline. "I dunno," he answered. "My toes feel cold, but my ears are burning."

We were standing together in Lincoln Park, not long after curfew on Tuesday night, watching an unbroken line of police. Around us were 1000 insurgents: hippies, Marxists, tourists, reporters, Panthers, Angels, and a phalanx of concerned ministers, gathered around a 12-foot cross. Occasionally a cluster of kids would break away from the rally to watch the formation in the distance. They spoke quietly, rubbing cream on their faces, and knotting dampened undershirts around their mouths. Not all their accoutrements were defensive. I saw saps and smoke bombs, steel-tipped boots and fistfuls of tacks. My friend pulled out a small canister from his pocket. "Liquid pepper," he explained.

Watching these kids gather sticks and stones, I realized how far we have come from that mythical summer when everyone dropped acid, sat under a tree, and communed. If there were any flower children left in America, they had heeded the underground press, and stayed home. Those who came fully anticipated confrontation. There were few virgins to violence in the crowd tonight. Most had seen—if not shed—blood, and that baptism had given them a determination of sorts. The spirit of Lincoln Park was to make revolution the way you make love—ambivalently, perhaps but for real.

The cops advanced at 12:40 a.m., behind two massive floodlight-trucks. They also had the fear; you could see it in their eyes (wide and wet) and their mouths. All week, you watched them cruise the city—never alone and never unarmed. At night, you heard their sirens in the streets, and all day, their helicopters in the sky. On duty, the average Chicago cop was a walking arsenal—with a shotgun in one hand, a riot baton (long and heavy with steel tips) in the other, and an assortment of pistols, nightsticks, and ominous canisters in his belt. At first, all that equipment seemed flattering. But then you saw under the helmets, and the phallic weaponry, and you felt the fear again. Immigrant to stranger, cop to civilian, old man to kid. The fear that brought the people of Chicago out into the streets during Martin Luther King's open housing march, now reflected in the fists of these cops. The fear that made the people of Gage Park spit at priests, and throw stones at nuns, now authorized to kill. And you realized that the cops weren't putting on that display for you; no—a cop's gun is his security blanket, just as Vaseline was yours.

Then the lights shone brilliant orange and the tear gas guns exploded putt-putt-puttutt, and the ministers dipped their cross into a halo of smothering fog. The gas hit like a great wall of pepper and you ran coughing into the streets, where you knew there would be rocks to throw and windows to smash and something to feel besides fear.

The soldiers stood on all the bridges, sealing off Grant Park from the city streets. The kids couldn't be gassed anymore, because the wind was blowing fumes across the guarded bridges and into every open pore of the Conrad Hilton, and the hotel was filled with good people who had tears in their eyes. So the soldiers just stood with their empty guns poised against the tide. And they were frowning at the kids who shouted "put down your guns; join us." A few hid flowers in their uniforms, and some smiled, but mostly, they stood posing for their own death masks.

"Wouldn't you rather hold a girl than a gun?" asked one kid with his arm around two willing chicks.

"You don't understand," the soldier stammered, moving his tongue across his lips. "It's orders. We have to be here."

That was Wednesday—nomination day—and the city was braced for escalation. At the afternoon rally, an American flag was hauled down, and the police responded by wading into the center of the crowd, with clubs flying. The kids built barricades of vacated benches, pelted the police with branches, and tossed plastic bags of cow's blood over their heads. . . .

With every semblance of press identification I owned pinned to my shirt, I set out across the mall. But most of the crowd had the same idea. Across on Michigan Avenue, I could hear the shouts of demonstrators who were re-grouping at the Hilton. I stopped to wet my undershirt in a fountain and ran down the street. My hands were shaking with anticipation and I could no longer close my eyes without seeing helmets and hearing chants. So my body was committed, but my head remained aloof.
http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/imagefolder/knifedchicago.jpg



Czechoslovakia


The Soviet Invasion
of Czechoslovakia: August 1968

Materials from
the Labadie Collection
of Social Protest Material

Soviet tank in front of the Czechoslovak Radio building, photo: CTKSoviet tank in front of the Czechoslovak Radio building, photo: CTK

In the morning hours of August 21, 1968, the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia along with troops from four other Warsaw Pact countries. The occupation was the beginning of the end for the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring.

This web site contains material from the days immediately following the invasion, and they reflect the atmosphere in Czechoslovakia at the time: tense, chaotic, uncertain, full of pathos, fear, and expectation...





SDS: Anarchist Libertarian Alliance




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  • SDS Bulletin - July, 1964 (Vol 2, Nr 10)
  • New Left Notes - May 13, 1968 (Vol 3, Nr 17)
  • New Left Notes - March 8, 1969 (Vol 4, Nr 9)


  • First-phase SDSers hadn’t talked much about values. But as anti-war activity heated up during the second phase, SDSers were looking for new worldviews, indulging in new tastes and lifestyles. Pardun, for whom LSD was practically religion, took the hippie lifestyle as a facet of the movement.

    But neither critique nor lifestyle, without political gains, were enough by late 1967, when second-phase leaders began to worry about the realism of their project. Pardun puts its succinctly: "Protesting the war," he writes, "assumed that it was a mistake and that if we could convince the war makers of that then the war would end."

    Escalations in ground forces and bombing–his book recounts them, brigade by brigade, ton by ton–told SDS that the war wasn’t simply a "mistake" and that hawks would not be persuaded–until and unless doves could take power away from them.

    Several prairie leaders, notably Carl Oglesby, Greg Calvert, and Carl Davidson, began to concoct theories to deal with the task. Three elements were common to their formulations: the notion of a "New Working Class," of "resistance," and of youth as a powerful and independent force. The "New Working Class" was a highly technical, white-collar proletariat, whose members, proponents of the theory insisted, were going to replace the blue-collar industrial workforce. "Resistance" was a vaguer idea, which took practical form in a campaign to sabotage and derail the military draft. Youth were "revolutionary" because they weren’t sworn to doctrines about racial supremacy and My Country, Right or Wrong. They also smoked pot.


    Consciousness and Social Life - Google Books Result

    by David H. DeGrood - 1976 - Philosophy - 112 pages
    Now Karl Marx was being referred to, help! theory!45 By the Summer of 1967 ... the Spring of 1968 opportunists such as Carl Oglesby were urging SDS to drop ...

    Building a New Libertarian Movement

    [The following, which I co-authored with the late Samuel Edward Konkin III, originally appeared in slightly different form under the title “Smashing the State for Fun & Profit!” in Tactics of the Movement of the Libertarian Left (Vol. 5, No. 1), May Day 2001. I offer it here as a clarification of “Libertarian Leftism,” an illuminating piece of political revisionist history, and a contribution to Tom Knapp’s ongoing Symposium on Building a New Libertarian Movement. I apologize for its length.]
    What was the New Left in 1965 was conducive to an alliance with Libertarians. Indeed, the New Left and the nascent Libertarian Movement reached out for each other to battle the common enemy, Corporate Liberal Imperial Leviathan. Libertarian Movement founder Murray N. Rothbard traded votes with Maoists at New York Peace & Freedom Party conventions. Rothbard and historian Leonard Liggio started
    Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought to help forge a Libertarian alliance with the New Left. Carl Oglesby, 1965 president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), wrote an analysis of the U.S. Empire, Containment and Change, in which his prescription for defeating the Empire called explicitly for a coalition with the Libertarian “Old Right” as led by Rothbard and Liggio. And Karl Hess, speechwriter for the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964, determined by 1968 that he had more in common with the New Left than Buckley’s Right and penned his stirring “Death of Politics” Libertarian manifesto for Playboy magazine.

    But those “Old Left” commune-statists were not, to use that familiar Trotskyist phrase, “decisively defeated on the proletarian terrain.” By the time of its 1969 convention, SDS expelled its anarchists and split between Maoists and WeatherMaoists. After a brief exhibition of street violence, the “vanguard” collapsed underground with an occasional eruption over the years. Also in 1969, Libertarian Rightists, inspired by Rothbard and led by Hess, walked out of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) convention to join the New Left. And unfortunately, even the first Libertarian Con that year in New York, which brought together disenfranchised SDS decentralists and YAF free-marketeers, also split — not on Left-Right lines but on revolutionary rage vs. quite academic movement-building lines.

    YIPPIE!

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    The Youth International Party (whose adherents were known as Yippies, a variant on "Hippies") was a highly theatrical political party established in the United States in 1967. An offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the Yippies presented a more radically youth-oriented and countercultural alternative to those movements. They employed theatrical gestures—such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for President in 1968—to mock the social status quo.They have been described as a highly theatrical youth movement of “symbolic politics.”


    It was during the conventions in 1968 that the Yippies really made a national splash.


    At the turbulent Democratic gathering in Chicago, Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin presented their candidate for president – "Pigasus the Immortal," a real pig.

    But the scene at the convention turned ugly as Chicago police, and then the National Guard, clashed with antiwar protesters. In the aftermath, Hoffman and Rubin were among seven protesters arrested and charged with conspiring to incite violence.

    During the trial of the so-called "Chicago Seven," Hoffman and Rubin continued to play to the media, one day showing up for court in judicial robes. Ultimately, the charges against the defendants were dismissed.

    Paul Krassner, who was among the founding members of the Yippies with Hoffman and Rubin, said the party came about because "the whole antiwar effort seemed dreary. .. We wanted to add some color and fun to the demonstrations."

    Abbie Hoffman.


    Yippie Workshop Speech by Abbie Hoffman (1968)

    Cops are like Yippies-you can never find the leaders... You just let 'em know that you're stronger psychically than they are. And you are, because you came here for nothin' and they're holdin' on to their fuckin' pig jobs 'cause of that little fuckin' paycheck and workin' themselves up, you know. Up to what? To a fuckin' ulcer. Sergeant. We got them by the balls. The whole thing about guerrilla theatre is gettin' them to believe it. Right.

    Theatre, guerrilla theatre, can be used as defense and as an offensive weapon. I mean, I think like people could survive naked, see. I think you could take all your fuckin' clothes off, a cop won't hit ya. You jump in Lake Michigan, he won't go after you, but people are too chickenshit to do that. It can be used as an offensive and defensive weapon, like blood. We had a demonstration in New York. We had seven gallons of blood in little plastic bags. You know, if you convince 'em you're crazy enough, they won't hurt ya. With the blood thing, cop goes to hit you, right, you have a bag of blood in your hand. He lifts h is stick up, you take your bag of blood and go whack over your own head. All this blood pours out, see. Fuckin' cop standin'. Now that says a whole lot more than a picket sign that says end the war in wherever the fuck it is you know. I mean in that demonstration, there was a fuckin' war there. People came down and looked and said holy shit I don't know what it is, blood all over the fuckin' place, smokebombs goin' off, flares, you know, tape recorders with the sounds of machine guns, cops on horses tramplin' Christmas shoppers. It was a fuckin' war. And they say, right, I know what the fuck you're talkin' about. You're talkin' about war. What the fuck has a picket line got to do with war? But people that are into a very literal bag, like that heavy word scene, you know, don't understand the use of communication in this country and the use of media. I mean, if they give a ten-page speech against imperialism, everybody listens and understands and says yeah. But you throw fuckin' money out on the Stock Exchange, and people get that right away. And they say, right, I understand what that's about. And if they don't know what you're doin', fuck 'em. Who cares? Take this, see, you use blank space as information. You carry a sign that says END THE. You don't need the next word, you just carry a sign that says END, you know. That's enough. I mean the Yippie symbol is Y. So you say, why, man, why, why? Join the Y, bring your sneakers, bring your helmet, right, bring your thing, whatever you got. Y, you say to the Democrats, baby, Y that's not a V it's a Y. You can do a whole lotta shit. Steal it, steal the V, it's a Y. It's up the revolution like that. Keeping your cool and having good wits is your strongest defense.

    If you don't want it on TV, write the work "FUCK" on your head, see, and that won't get on TV, right? But that's where theatre is at, it's TV. I mean our thing's for TV. We don't want to get on Meet the Press. What's that shit? We want Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson show, we want the shit where people are lookin' at it and diggin' it. They're talking about reachin' the troops in Viet Nam so they write in The Guardian! [An independent radical newsweekly published in New York.] That's groovy. I've met a lot of soldiers who read The Guardian, you know. But we've had articles in Jaguar magazine, Cavalier, you know, National Enquirer interviews the Queen of the Yippies, someone nobody ever heard of and she runs a whole riff about the Yippies and Viet Nam or whatever her thing is and the soldiers get it and dig it and smoke a little grass and say yeah I can see where she's at. That's why the long hair. I mean shit, you know, long hair is just another prop. You go on TV and you can say anything you want but the people are lookin' at you and they're lookin' at the cat next to you like David Susskind or some guy like that and they're sayin' hey man there's a choice, I can see it loud and clear. But when they look at a guy from the Mobilization [against the War in Vietnam] and they look at David Susskind, they say well I don't know, they seem to be doing the same thing, can't understand what they're doin'. See, Madison Avenue people think like that. That's why a lot SDS's don't like what we're doin'. 'Cause they say we're like exploiting; we're usin' the tools of Madison Ave. But that's because Madison Ave. is effective in what it does. They know what the fuck they're doin'. Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Issues and Answers-all those bullshit shows, you know, where you get a Democrat and a Republican arguin' right back and forth, this and that, this and that, yeah yeah. But at the end of the show nobody changes their fuckin' mind, you see. But they're tryin' to push Brillo, you see, that's good, you ought to use Brillo, see, and 'bout every ten minutes on will come a three-minute thing of Brillo. Brillo is a revolution, man, Brillo is sex, Brillo is fun, Brillo is bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl. At the end of the show people ain't fuckin' switchin' from Democrat to Republicans or Commies, you know, the right-wingers or any of that shit. They're buying Brillo! And the reason they have those boring shows is because they don't want to get out any information that'll interfere with Brillo. I mean, can you imagine if they had the Beatles goin' zing zing zing zing zing zing zing, all that jump and shout, you know, and all of a sudden they put on an ad where the guy comes on very straight: "You ought to buy Brillo because it's rationally the correct decision and it's part of the American political process and it's the right way to do things." You know, fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they won't buy the Brillo.

    We taped a thing for the David Susskind Show. As he said the word hippie, a live duck came out with "HIPPIE" painted on it. The duck flew up in the air and shat on the floor and ran all around the room. The only hippie in the room, there he is. And David went crazy. 'Cause David, see, he's New York Times head, he's not Daily News freak. And he said the duck is out and blew it. We said, we'll see you David, goodnight. He say, oh no no. We'll leave the duck in. And we watched the show later when it came on, and the fuckin' duck was all gone. He done never existed. And I called up Susskind and went quack quack quack, you motherfucker, that was the best piece of information: that was a hippie. And everything we did, see, non-verbally, he cut out. Like he said, "How do you eat?" and we fed all the people, you know. But he cut that out. He wants to deal with the words. You know, let's play word games, let's analyze it. Soon as you analyze it, it's dead, it's over. You read a book and say well now I understand it, and go back to sleep.

    The media distorts. But it always works to our advantage. They say there's low numbers, right? 4000, 5000 people here. That's groovy. Think of it, 4000 people causin' all this trouble. If you asked me, red say there are four Yippies. I'd say we're bringin' another four on Wednesday. That's good, that freaks 'em out. They're lookin' around. Only four. I mean I saw that trip with the right wing and the Communist conspiracy. You know, you'd have 5000 people out there at the HUAC demonstrations eight years ago in San Francisco and they'd say there are five Communists in the crowd, you know. And they did it all. You say, man that's pretty cool. So you just play on their paranoia like that. Yeah, there're four guys out around there doin' a thing. So distortion's gonna backfire on them, 'cause all of a sudden Wednesday by magic there are gonna be 200,000 fuckin' people marchin' on that amphitheater. That's how many we're gonna have. And they'll say, "Wow. From 4000 up to 200,000. Those extra four Yippies did a hell of a good job." I dig that, see. I'm not interested in explainin' my way of life to straight people or people that aren't interested. They never gonna understand it anyway and I couldn't explain it anyway. All I know is, in terms of images and how words are used as images to shape your environment, the New York Times is death to us. That's the worst fuckin' paper as far as the Yippies are concerned. They say, "Members of the so-called Youth International Party held a demonstration today." That ain't nothin'. What fuckin' people read that? They fall asleep. 'Cause the New York Times has all the news that's fit to print, you know, so once they have all the news, what do the people have to do? They just read the New York Times and drink their coffee and go back to work, you know. But the Daily News, that's a TV set. Look at it, I mean look at the picture right up front and the way they blast those headlines. You know, "Yippies, sex-loving, dope-loving, commie, beatnik, hippie, freako, weirdos." That's groovy, man, that's a whole life style, that's a whole thing to be, man. I mean you want to get in on that.


    ABBIE HOFFMAN

    1936-1989

    This site is dedicated to the memory and spirit of Abbie Hoffman.

    "Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."

    Abbie Hoffman

    Soon to be a Major Motion Picture

    abbie hoffman
    by Alex Burns (alex@disinfo.com) - May 29, 2001

    Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) was a complex and deeply paradoxical social activist and media celebrity, whose legendary culture-jamming exploits have come to characterise the period's para-political turmoil and counter-culture.

    His early 1950s experiences as a Brandeis student and sexual experienced aesthete marked Hoffman as a future American Rebel (Outsider). Under the tutelage of famous humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, Hoffman conceived of political protest as a positive and life-affirming self-actualising process.

    During the early 1960s, Hoffman was involved with civil rights activism as an organiser in Mississipi for the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee. In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Hoffman became involved with the Diggers (actors turned social activists), distributing free food and organising accomodation.

    He first came to national exposure with Jerry Rubin during the infamous 1967 New York Stock Exchange "money-burning" incident. Through his involvement with anti-Vietnam War protests and the Chicago Eight trial which resulted from 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots, Hoffman became a counter-culture icon and the face of American radical dissidence.

    Hoffman mixed with many of the leading protesters, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Tom Hayden, Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, and was notable for fusing creativity with righteous fury and savage humour. He pioneered many tactics of guerilla survival and personal autonomy.

    Drifting into an outlaw life-style, Hoffman was implicated in a 1973 cocaine deal gone wrong, and busted by undercover agents. Fleeing, Hoffman lived underground for six years, working on environmental campaigns.

    Re-surfacing in 1980, Hoffman served a brief prison sentence, before returning to social activism. Hoffman battled many fronts, but his demons were largely personal, in an environment that had dramatically changed since the demise of the Counter-culture. Psychosis, substance abuse and relationship breakdowns created a messy personal life.

    The rise of the Moral Majority as a political force, increased on-campus student conservatism and a critical re-appraisal of New Left radicalism countered his many attempts to re-mobilise university campus and environmental progressive forces into raising hell.

    Hoffman also encountered a media backlash against his clown persona and culture-jamming legacy, as many critics claimed that he had betrayed his earlier ideals.

    But despite his deep flaws, Hoffman remained committed to progressive campaigning, and criticised the Reagan administration's War on Some Drugs.

    Hoffman's social revolution ideals were finally realised through the 1989 collapse of Eastern European 'puppet' Communist states, but plagued by manic depression, Hoffman had died by suicide.

    Sadly, he did not live to see the resurgence of his ideas and radicial dissidence in the 1990s by a variety of individuals and progressive foundations.

    Hoffman's legacy has been chronicled in several excellent biographies: Marty Jezer's American Rebel (1992); Damien Simon and Jack Hoffman's Run Run Run (1994); Jonah Raskin's For the Hell of It and Larry 'Ratso' Sloman's Steal This Dream (1998).



    Who is Jerry Rubin?

    the co-founder of the Yippies

    IPB Image

    Jerry C. Rubin was perhaps the most outlandish figure to ever defended American civil liberties. A revolutionary and anti-war activist, his voice and zany stunts were heard and seen throughout the world. Rubin was a master of media sensationalism, exposing American injustice through outrageous spectacles and whimsical press conferences. His outrageousness and free style made him a household name, and soon every politician's worst nightmare.

    During the 70's Rubin reflected about his past deeds and thoughts. In essays he would admit his wrongs, explaining how sexism, homophobia, racism, and drug abuse shaped his beliefs. Once believing homosexuality was a sick behavior, he now understood it as a valid sexual expression. He also thanked women for the role they played in creating his public image: women were the ones who typed his manuscripts, handled his clerical work, and labored behind the scenes. He abandoned his "Kill You Parents" mantra and encouraged people to accept the "Love Your Parents" wisdom.

    In the 80's Rubin slowly removed himself from the media spotlight, complaining, "To live inside a media image is like a prison. Living for your image means sacrificing your true self." He made a few guest appearances with Abbie Hoffman and appeared in the movies "Growing Up in America" (1987), "Rude Awakening" (1989), and "Panther" (released 1995).

    Rubin died on November 28, 1994 when he was struck by a car while jay walking in Los Angeles. He was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California.

    Anita Hoffman: 16 March, 1942 - December 27, 1998


    The Yippies didn't just want to sit around and smoke pot. They sought to pull Uncle Sam's pants down in public, to show that revolution could be conducted in a spirit of festive nonviolence.

    Dubbing her the "Queen of the Yippies," the U.K.'s Economist (not exactly a radical publication) had this to say of Anita Hoffman and her husband Abbie: "Perhaps the most famous song of the 1960s was Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A'Changin'', in which 'senators, congressmen' and others stuck in the past were warned of the 'battle outside raging.' No one fought the battle with more enthusiasm than the Hoffmans, Abbie and Anita."

    > The Hoffmans became the symbols of an era of resistance against racism, capitalism and war.


    Steal this millennium!

    Yippie Stew Albert sits down with R.U. Sirius to plan the revolution and remember Abbie Hoffman.

    - - - - - - - - - - - -
    By R.U. Sirius



    Stew Lives!

    Activist Stew Albert's quest for social and economic justice found its path in the Yippie movement of the late 1960s

    By Michael Simmons

    Photo by Judy Gumbo Albert

    HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE: Yippie Stew Albert, 1939-2006.

    "My politics have not changed."

    So read the simple blog entry by Stew Albert on Jan. 28. Two days later, he died in his sleep at his home in Portland, Ore., surrounded by his wife Judy Albert, daughter Jessica and friends. Suffering from cancer and unable to write at length, he was clearly determined to make a statement - a last stand - that blended the legendary Yippie's defiance and wit. As if his politics would ever change!

    For the Yippies - the Youth International Party - the word "party" meant both political group and outrageously good times. The Yippies merged leftwing activism and freak culture in the late 1960s. One of the "non-leaders" along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner was another party animal - equally irresponsible for the chaos and comedy: Stew Albert, a fierce soldier for justice as well as a subversive prankster.



    Yippies on Wall Street (1)

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    http://static.flickr.com/36/75282044_4dc36a22e1.jpg


    http://www.cafes.net/ditch/shards.jpg



    This guy was not a YIPPIE!

    http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet/kerry.jpg

    SEE

    Gay Old Communists

    The Summer of Love

    40 Years Later; The Society of the Spectacle

    Year of the Pig

    Black and Redmonton

    Paul Goodman

    Military Industrial Complex

    SOME REMARKS ON WAR SPIRIT



    Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
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    2008 Year Of Corporate Welfare

    The corporate tax holiday that begins today and will only continue on a downward trend promises the Harper. So you have to ask who pays to make up for this? Why you and I off course. In 1960 the 41% tax rate made up over 60% of all government revenues. As it declined that need to make up the difference shifted to Joe and Jane Canuck.

    In the nineties the Liberals discovered that in order to balance their deficit budget they could dig into payroll taxes, and re-jigged Unemployment Insurance renaming it Employment Insurance and restricting workers access to it. The resulting savings they made off the backs of Canadian workers created the federal surpluses. Which the Conservatives have inherited and continue to use to offset the corporate tax breaks they give to their Bay Street pals.

    Profits have risen for corporations thanks to these tax breaks but instead of plowing them into productivity they have continued to rely on cutting production costs; that is laying off workers, to create more with less, while investing their cash in the stock market.

    Tax breaks for corporations is welfare for the less needy, or as my pal Larry Gambone calls it Socialism for the Rich.


    The image “http://myblahg.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/corp-taxrate.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Graph courtesy of My Blahg.


    SEE:

    Flaherty's Tax Deception

    Flaherty's Smoke and Mirrors

    Tax Cuts For All

    Tax Cuts For The Rich Burden You and Me

    Tax Fairness For The Rich

    Who Pays


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    Monday, December 31, 2007

    Jasper National Park Centennial

    When I was in Jasper this past weekend I learned that the National Park was 100 years old this year. It is still a jewel in the Rockies. In comparison to Banff which is the West Edmonton Mall of National Parks, this is a quiet, quaint, rustic little town, which you can walk through in thirty minutes at a quick gait. There were banners up in town announcing the centennial, but little else to note the event. No special T-Shirts, mugs, or other tourist bric a brak one usually finds. Very underplayed, unfortunately.

    I have always liked Jasper since camping there in my younger years. Not much has changed in Jasper , unlike the commercialized corporate 'tourist' town of Banff. And even their centennial was muted and not given much publicity. A shame really, because Jasper in many ways reminds me of what Whyte Avenue used to be, before the boom in bars and trendy yuppification.

    The tourists are from all over, Korea, Japan, though not as many as in Banff, Russia, Austria, Germany, Australia, etc. etc. Staff this year in the motels seemed to be a mix of Canadians and Australians, with fewer Quebecois this season. I don't often go in the summer, I prefer the early part of December when the rates are cheap and Ski season has not yet kicked in. Even at Xmas we got a great rate for two of us and two dogs. Three days for three hundred bucks.

    Worrying though was the lack of snow. The Eastern face of the Pallisades was bare. And the Western face was a brown snow, spattered across gray rock face.
    The rivers were barely frozen in spots, and the snow was a dirty brown across the fields and road ways.

    Elk and caribou along with big horn were lowling about grazing the still plentiful standing dead grasses.

    The signs warning of fire dangers from last summer were not changed, portending perhaps another bad fire season as climate change impacts even the Rockies.

    The first recorded visit to the Athabasca Valley was by surveyor David Thompson in 1810. The North West Company built a supply depot on Brule Lake in 1813, a settlement which later became known as Jasper House after North West Company clerk Jasper Hawes. With the decline of the fur trade, Jasper House was abandoned in 1884. The Dominion Government established Jasper Forest Park in 1907, setting aside an area of some 13,000 sq km. By 1911 the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway had reached Fitzhugh (now Jasper) Station. The Jasper-Edmonton road opened in 1928. In 1930, Jasper Forest Park was officially established as a Jasper National Park. Today more than 3 million visitors pass through the park gates each year, and more than 1.8 million stop to experience this unique wilderness and World Heritage Site.



    Location

    Jasper is located in Jasper National Park near the British Columbia/Alberta border, 863 km from Vancouver, British Columbia and 414 km from Calgary, Alberta.


    http://www.rockyworldtours.com/home/images/site71_000.JPG


    SEE:

    Return Of The Work Camps II

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    2008 Year Of Constitutional Change

    Harper likes to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Especially when it comes to the Quebec Nation.

    Stephen Harper apparently has been telling the Quebec media (in La Presse specifically) the following:

    “Stephen Harper souhaite que la résolution qui reconnaît les Québécois comme une nation soit incluse dans la Constitution canadienne”

    Translation: Stephen Harper hopes that the resolution recognizing the “Québécois” as a nation can be included in the Canadian Constitution!
    Not only does he want to REFORM the Senate but now he wants to include Quebec as a Nation in the Constitution. Talk about pandering. The reality is that if he wants to reform the Constitution so do we all. Many of us want a new parliamentary system with proportional representation and the elimination of the Senate.

    Which should be done as was originally proposed by Louis-Joseph Papineau back in 1867, through a Constituent Assembly of Canadians, not by Parliament or Legislatures.

    This is Harpers cynical ploy to win votes in Quebec nothing less nothing more. Like his predecessor Brian Mulroney, Harper is treading a dangerous path, that will earn him the same boot in the butt as BM got. Which ironically was a boot with the name Reform Party of Canada on it.



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    Harper Recycles


    Stephen Harper, taking a page from Ralph Klein, is recycling old promises and announcements. Guess that's what he considers being Green.

    PM kicks off final GST cut at electronics store

    Mr. Harper wound up 2007 by holding a news conference at a Mississauga store on Monday to trumpet tax cuts his government has made and which take effect at midnight.

    As the year turns, the GST will drop to 5 per cent, something that Harper's government announced months ago.

    Mr. Harper said Canadians should not expect further tax cuts in 2008, adding that his government will be cautious on tax relief or new spending.

    Even this is not as big a tax break as the corporations are getting thanks to Harpers generosity with our tax money. And what you save in GST you pay back in payroll taxes.

    Starting Jan. 1, Canada's corporate tax rate will be trimmed to 19.5 per cent from the current 22.12 per cent. This rate is slated to come down each subsequent year until it is reduced to 15 per cent on Jan. 1, 2012.

    As well, the tax rate on small businesses with incomes under $400,000 drops to 11 per cent from the scheduled 11.5 per cent rate.

    Of course, what the government giveth, it often takes away and Ottawa has also brought in a slight increase in so-called payroll taxes.

    The taxpayers federation estimates that employees will pay an additional $50.43 in 2008 on employment insurance and the Canada Pension Plan, while employers will pay $46.02 more per worker.

    And it is the payroll taxes, EI specifically that creates the record Government Surpluses whether that government is Liberal or Conservative.

    And note that workers still pay more than employers. Time to abolish taxes on the working class!

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    Gone But Not Forgotten

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    Gone is Andrew Anderson's THE CANADIAN BLOG EXCHANGE one of the best aggregators of political blogs left and right in Canada. For about a month it was being petulant about uploading stories, now it is gone off line for good. Andrew was looking for someone to take over the page for months now. Though it was announced a new site had been found the CBE is gone. Too bad. It was a good way to see political bloggers of all stripes, including the independents who belong to groups.

    Here is what is left of links to CBE

    The Canadian Blog Exchange on Technorati

    Tailrank - Posts for 'The Canadian Blog Exchange'

    And here is the Google Cache for Andrew's Bound By Gravity.

    For those interested in a non partisan replacement aggregator check out;

    Opinions Canada



    SEE:

    Canadian Blog Exchange Kaput?


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    Sunday, December 30, 2007

    Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

    While the pseudo democrats of the Bush and Harper regimes bemoan the passing of Benazir Bhutto let us not forget that she, her family and their political party do not reflect a movement of democracy but rather the entrenched feudal interests of Pakistan's ruling classes.

    To one side of the villa is the town of Nau Dero itself; to the other, the family's expansive estates, mirroring the separation between Pakistan's political elite and the country's teeming millions. Today, under the portraits of her hanged father and dead brothers, her testament will be read by Bilawal, her grieving 19-year-old son.

    The family's franchise on political leadership will be handed on. The will's contents will determine the future not simply of her party, the Pakistan People's Party, but of Pakistan. But whether it contains enough to stop the violence is, perhaps, out of the Bhutto family's hands as the nation teeters on the edge of perhaps the worst bloodletting since Partition in 1947.

    TIME reports that Benazir Bhutto’s son will likely be named on Sunday as new Pakistan People’s Party leader


    As Georg Luckas points out in History and Class Consciousness, his seminal ultra left text which should be mandatory reading for all who claim a revolutionary class struggle perspective , this is the political reification of feudalism, that the poor and oppressed identify not with their class interests but with the landlord class.


    It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.


    In effect there has been no bourgeois revolution in Pakistan that would allow it to evolve a modern capitalist democratic state. The creation of modern Pakistan sixty years ago was a still born
    bourgeois state.

    The coming civil war is the failure of the bourgeois class struggle in Pakistan, to create the conditions for a modern capitalist state. Class War Not Civil War!

    See:

    Pakistan A Fascist State


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    Thursday, December 27, 2007

    Pakistan A Fascist State

    I am still in Jasper on vacation. Yesterday I saw this headline which I had to comment on;

    Iran behind flood of weapons to Taliban, MacKay charges


    Showing once again the quisling toadying the Harpocrite government engages in by parroting the U.S. political line. I said to my partner what a load of crap, the real threat is Pakistan, not Iran when it comes to succor and aid to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden Inc.

    Sure enough even the Afghanistan government agrees;
    No proof Iranian gov't behind IEDs: Afghan diplomat


    This morning the headlines are that Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in Pakistan. CTV News Net has had Eric Margolis on commenting on it pointing out she was more of a threat to the
    Musharraf regime than to the Islamist opposition.

    Pakistan is not a democracy but a fascist state, one that engages in supporting both clandestine and state terror and has nuclear weapons, unlike Iran. Blame will be placed upon the Islamic opposition and the Taliban, but the reality is that like the earlier attack on Bhutto it is more than likely an act by the State Security Intelligence Service, an agency that has promoted terrorist acts against Afghanistan, Baluchistan and India.

    The political assassination of Bhutto is further proof that Pakistan is a rogue nation, far more dangerous than Iran could ever be. But since it is a client state of the U.S. it will be protected from criticism, boycotts, etc. And of course it will not be on MacKay's agenda for criticism like Iran , nor will it be boycotted by the Harpocrites as they have done with the Hamas led Palestinian state.


    With Bhutto's death the Terror State of
    Pakistan under Musharraf is exposed for what it is; a Bonapartist regime that is now a fascist state. Far more dangerous to its neighbours than Iran can ever be. Assassination of one's political opponents, the setting up of a Reichstag Fire last summer with the raid on the Red Temple all these are the politics of fascism. And of course the war on terror is exactly what fascists used to justify their authoritarian regimes in the past.


    SEE

    Musharraf's Coup

    The Economist Agrees With Me

    Afghanistan A Failed State

    Pakistan Speaks For the Taliban

    I Was An IslamoFascist For MI6

    Harpers Silence Over Musharraf

    Winning Friends

    How To Create Terrorists

    Say It Ain't So

    Brief Cases vs Batons


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    Monday, December 24, 2007

    Merry Christmas, Happy Yule

    The First Christmas Card

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    In the early 19th century it was common practice to hand write seasonal messages on calling cards or in letters. In 1843, in order to save himself having to hand-write dozens of Christmas messages, Sir Henry Cole had his friend, John Calcott Horsley, design and print a batch of cards. The words printed on the card were 'A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year' much the same is still found in cards today.


    As Habermas points out in his seminal work on the Public Sphere, the post office and communications are key to not only the development of capitalism but also the concept of public space that is public communications arising out of private communications. This post card reflects the reality making public what had been a private matter, that is letter writing. The result would then be a whole communications industry devoted to greeting cards, which then created the conditions for public holidays and the resulting mass consumer society of department stores and mass advertising.

    Donalda and I are taking our dogs; Trooper and Tami, off for a jaunt in the mountains for Xmas. So I won't be blogging for several days.

    We are going to Jasper. Like Banff a national park created by slave labour, after WWI, using Ukrainian Internees. I will raise a glass in their memory.

    Have a great Yule all. Drink a cup o' cheer to keep away the winter cold.

    Here are links to my previous articles for this season.

    Fiat Lux


    Bad Headline


    Virgin Birth Announced


    WWI Xmas Mutiny

    Christmas In the Trenches


    Merry Christmas Red Baron

    Merry Christmas


    Cat Carol


    Santa's Sweat Shop

    Tannebaum

    Rebel Jesus


    Chavez Puts Christ In Christmas


    Merry Christmashkah


    Keeping the 'X' in X-Mas

    Chuck Jones Explains It All


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