How did the debate make you feel?
25 % . . .. "I puked for hours."
25 % . .. . "It left a vein standing out on my forehead you could tow a jeep with."
25 % . . . . "I was happier when I had an electric drill bearing down on my exposed molar."
25 %. . .. "I shot the pollster."
A month after Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported along with another 238 "aliens" and suspected anarchists (December 1919) the United States political police celebrated the new year by beating and arresting thousands of immigrants throughout the country on suspicion they were about to violently overthrow the government, the usual claim of police engaged in wholesale human rights violations. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post recorded in his diary that there did seem to be a movement afoot to overthrow the government, but it was coming from law enforcement agents persecuting "workingmen of good character" who objected to "government of the people by Tories and financial interests." In short, then as now the wealthy classes were determined to overthrow democracy in order to perpetuate their dominant economic position. (Philip S. Foner, Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920, International Publishers, 1988 pps. 28-9.)
1920: Nationwide
The Palmer Raids
The knock at the door is followed by a rush of police. They have no warrants.
They haul men out of bed and line them up to be searched. They seize all their papers and smash up their furniture and books. They swarm over dance halls, clubbing, kicking, and knocking musicians to the floor. They grab bowlers in bowling alleys and drag diners out of restaurants. They stage mass round-ups in pool halls, homes, and cafes. They arrest an entire orchestra and all the dancers at a left-wing dance. In a Connecticut town, they arrest anyone who comes to visit the “radicals” they have previously corralled.
Throughout the country grateful citizens gather on street corners to shake hands and salute Attorney General Palmer’s good work.
“Well, now we’ll be rid of these agitators for good...So they got the Reds! The damned traitors!”
1920: Nationwide
The Palmer Raids (2)
The parade of bandaged heads, black eyes, and blood-spattered clothes weaves through police stations from coast to coast. Handed confessions to sign and beaten if they refuse, the victims are thrown in overcrowded jails and detention centers for weeks on end while their property is destroyed, their jobs are taken away, and their new lives in America ruined.
The much-discussed weapons cache for violent revolution—the pretext for the raids—turns out to be three pistols. In New Jersey several iron bowling balls, too, are confiscated as “bombs.”
The raid’s mastermind, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, warns against the “alien filth” subverting the country, easily detected in the form of “sly and crafty eyes...lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features.” Such traits, says Palmer, reflect “cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime.”
Palmer’s prospects for capturing the White House go on the rise.
1920: Washington
The “Fighting Quaker” On The Great Peril
“Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution is sweeping over every American institution of law and order. It is eating its way into the homes of the American workman; its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat are licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society. There can be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideas of the radicals and their actual violations of our national law. The government is in jeopardy!”
—Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
1920: Chicago
How To End Radicalism
“If you want to get rid of every socialist, of every communist, of every trade unionist, of every agitator, there is one way to do it, and that is to cure the ills of society. You can’t do it by building jails; you can’t make jails big enough or penalties hard enough to cure discontent by strangling it to death. No revolution is possible, no great discontent is possible unless down below it all is some underlying cause for this discontent; men are naturally obedient, too almighty obedient.”
—Clarence Darrow
1920: New York City
The Land of Fear
“The wholesale raids of immigrant aliens by representatives of the Department of Justice, by immigration officials and by chambers of commerce, has struck fear into the souls of millions of aliens in this country whose patriotism is above reproach. They are in terror. The Government has come to mean to them arrest often without warrant, the breaking up of families, the imprisonment and detention incommunicado. It means that they are not wanted in America. And they are going back. I believe they are going back by the hundreds of thousands, probably by millions. As soon as transportation facilities are available, I expect vast armies of central and southern European peoples to return to their homes. Many, possibly a majority, will say as we would say under similar circumstances: ‘We want to live among our friends. We want to live in peace and in quiet. We want to have some assurance of safety, both for our persons and our property. And whatever the physical discomforts of old Europe may be, we prefer to bear them rather than the apprehension, the fear of arrest, and fear of deportation that haunts us by day and by night in America.’”
1920
An Immigrant’s View of The U.S.
“When I come to this country, I come loving it. I am going right off to get to be citizen, I think. How proud I am when I sail up the harbor! Pretty soon this is my country, I think, pretty soon I buy me house. You know what the first English I learn is? ‘Damn hunky.’ That’s what I learn, that’s what they call me, but when war come, hunky good enough to fight. ‘Americans All,’ then. You hear what fella say is difference between government in Austria and government here? He say there kaiser rule, here mill boss rule. That’s true. We do what mill boss say. If we join union, mill boss call us ‘Damn hunky’ and kick us out. Is that free country?
“Is it free country when they take fella out of his house and send him off? That John Dudash, next door to me, they come in middle night, they smash his trunk with ax, they look for gun, he ain’t got any. They throw his things, they take him away. Where is he? No one can know. His wife and children cry. By and by he come back. What for they take him? He don’t know; no one knows.
“Maybe next time they come my house. Priest ask John did they have warrant? Don’t need warrant when they search hunky house. Now I go home. My uncle he’s old; my cousin he get kill in war; my uncle he write, ‘Mike, you come and help me on farm.’ What money I have I take. I vote in my own country. I ain’t ‘damn hunky’ there; no, sir. No one call my kids ‘hunky’ there. In my country no one break in my house.”
Sources:
Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (Columbia University Press, 1963) pps. 217-33
Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow For The Defense (Signet, 1941) pps. 417-19, 421
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl (International Publishers, 1955), pps. 255-7
Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse - The Life of an American Insurgent (Temple University, 1989) pps. 161-2
Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America (Schenkman, 1978) pps. 157-8
Mary Heaton Vorse, A Footnote To Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse, (Farrar and Rinehard, 1935) pps. 311-12
1955: Money
Sweet Land of Liberty
Fourteen-year old Emmett Till is found floating in the Tallahatchie River, a seventy-four pound cotton gin lashed around his neck, the bullet that killed him lodged in his head. His bloated body has been half-eaten by fish. His bashed-in skull has only one eye.
Visiting Mississippi from Chicago, Till is said to have committed a grave crime: whistling at a white woman, calling her "baby," and asking for a date.
The undertaker reports that he cannot restore his face to human resemblance. Till's mother, Mrs. Mamie Bradley, insists on an open coffin for the funeral so that "people can see what they have to fight."
At the funeral service a woman faints looking at Till's remains. Mrs. Bradley cries out to her sobbing black neighbors: "See for yourselves what they might do to your son and make up your minds to put an end to it."
In an area two-thirds black, an all-white jury is selected and the case is rushed to trial in Sumner. The white defendants are amused at the inexplicable fuss raised over the death of a black child, smirking and laughing at the proceedings while their lawyer insists they are being framed by the NAACP. The press concurs, intimating that the guilty are not Till's murderers, but those who seek to hold them accountable for the crime.
Acquitted, the killers cash in, selling their story to Look magazine. Defendant J. W. Millam, proudly confessing that he repeatedly pistol-whipped Till before shooting him through the ear, promises more of the same: "As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place."
Sources:
Vollers, Maryanne, "Ghosts of Mississippi," (Little, Brown, 1995) p. 65-7
James Campbell, "Talking At The Gates - A Life of James Baldwin," (Viking, 1991) p. 122
Berrigan, Philip, with Fred A. Wilcox, "Fighting The Lamb's War: Skirmishes With The American Empire," (Common Courage, 1996) p. 47
I. F. Stone, "The Haunted Fifties," (Vintage, 1963), pps. 107-9
Belfrage, Cedric, "The American Inquisition," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973) p. 241
"As of 1999, more than 43 million people in the United States did not hold any form of public or private health insurance, while health-care expenditures totaled more than one trillion dollars annually, equivalent to about 14 percent of the gross domestic product. Many people with insurance coverage still experienced major barriers to access, due to copayments or other deductible provisions. Most strikingly, every proposal for a national health care program in the United States, intended to address the problems of inadequate access and highcosts, failed. As the United States enters the new millennium, it remains the only economically developed country without a national health program that ensures universal access to care . . . . The structures of oppression and the social origins of illness . . . have emerged as even greater problems as corporate penetration of health care has increased."
------Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness
"But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees or a healer of the sick?"
------Plato, The Republic
Is private profit achieved by selling at the market the best way to benefit the greatest number of people and if so, how come so many people are homeless, unemployed, poor, without health care, while market forces accumulate trillions for war and billions for pets?
Speaking of war, if mass murder, blasting bodies to bits, crushing and burning them to death, destroying cities, reducing nations to rubble with populations of cripples and refugees and such are all legal outcomes and not “war crimes”, what the hell is wrong with machine gunning your annoying neighbor, raping his children and setting fire to his house?
If Biden is a murderous sexist maniac for rubbing women’s backs in public is Trump a murderous sexist maniac for leaving the toilet seat up, as recently revealed by the 35th hooker to write a book about his toilet habits? Which immediately became a best seller?
Which of the major parties of capital’s candidates can put together a paragraph of reasonable, coherent, unrehearsed thought expressed in reasonable coherent English in response to a question from an unpaid citizen without first taking meds and reading from a teleprompter?
What is the meaning of life?
Is Israel more, less, or just as important to you as New York, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Alabama, and you know, those other American places?
When making love to your wife do you ever allow her to get on top?
Do either of you favor expulsion from society of all those public figures – political leaders, talk show hosts, sex workers, street vendors and such - who claimed Trump could not/would not be elected in 2016, considering them a detriment to American mental capacity, already in a condition judged by some experts as terminally critical and near total brain death?
And if not, candidate Biden should you be elected will you select some of them for your cabinet? And candidate Trump, should you be elected will you select some to be executed?
Would either of you ever dare to debate the Green party candidate for president, publicly, with questions submitted to you from an audience of Americans with less than a quarter of a million in the bank?
Have you ever heard of the Green Party?
Have you ever heard of Americans with less than a quarter million in the bank?
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from action central: Washington Post ya know, jeff bezos's newsletter?
"U.S. stocks wrap up a monster month, with S&P 500 posting its best August in more than 30 years |
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The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index capped a remarkable five-month winning streak as improving labor data, central bank maneuvers and Big Tech’s continuing dominance helped fuel a succession of milestones on Wall Street, even as the wait continues for a coronavirus vaccine and full economic recovery. The month’s advances propelled the S&P 500 to record levels, ending the shortest bear market in history"
See? Everything is fine..if you own any of the 500 stocks on the S&P..don't we all? |