Sunday, August 12, 2012
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Hobo Justice by Brandon Wallace
Winner of an Honorable Mention in the Lorian Hemingway Contest
Hobo Justice
Papa had just gotten a brand new radio. Big and solid oak, it made a huge impression in the parlor where Papa kept it so we could listen to it especially on Saturday afternoons. Papa had bought the first radio in the community almost eight years ago and since that time, every Saturday afternoon after four o’clock, come rain or shine, every Dick and Jerry from miles around crowded around our front porch to listen to the radio or take in the fight, if there was one. Papa obliged them all and as such kept his praises in the mouths of nearly everyone in the community. This new radio had come on Papa’s birthday, ordered directly from Sears and Roebuck and delivered special handling. Since the beginning of fall , however, the radio had been neatly put away, positioned back on its perch on the glass and marble end table in front of the parlor window. No one had a taste to listen to it and Papa didn’t think it wise to bring it out to play anymore. Only I snuck into the parlor whenever I could, after finishing chores or after finishing dinner, and turned the big knob to listen to Deford Bailey, Roy Acuff, and Maybelle Carter at the Grand Ol’ Opry. Papa regularly sat to listen to the radio on Sunday afternoons after church, listening to the news and to music. It was only between the two of us that the radio remained functional.
Things had gotten bad. The mill had closed and as summer approached there were hundreds of men out of work in our town. Their children were starving and people had started wandering. I nearly died of fright one late morning as summer started while I sat out breakfast for the cats. A man came walking past the house coming down from the railroad tracks that crossed our property past the apple, pear, and peach orchards. The man was tall and lanky, little more than skin and bones with a shirt and a pair of pants thrown over it. He carried a knapsack over his shoulder and as he passed the house, he looked at me with something between derision, pity, and contempt. He passed me by without uttering a word, but was so close to the house, I swung back inside and fastened the screen door shut after me. I told Mama about what happened. Mama sat me down and very sternly told me that if I ever saw any men walking down from the railroad track towards the house to not be afraid. I should stick close to the house, be kind and respectful, and offer them food if they asked for it. She said those men were wanderers, and called themselves hobos and they were looking for places to sleep and something to eat because they had nothing else going for them. They were wandering to and from town looking for work and food. Our house was the closest and quickest path from the rail line into town. She said I should always remember that she wasn’t that far from the house and just to call for her if I needed her. What she told me peaked my curiosity. Why were these men wanderers? I was determined to find out more about them and why they were wanderers.
I had just turned twelve as school let out. My older sister Margaret had just gone off to college and I was left all alone at the house before school resumed that fall. Mother usually spent her days in her garden, toiling in her few acres of vegetables and herbs on the other side of the hill, leaving after breakfast at half past six and not returning until late in the afternoon on the other side of four o’clock. That left me to fetch my own breakfast and occupy myself until mother came back home. Father wandered into the house at half past six every evening, rain or shine, and had done so every day of my life since I knew him. Being alone in our huge, rustic house , I let my imagination take reign. Armed with my new knowledge of the wanderers, I perched myself to find out whatever I could when the opportunity presented itself.
That first morning of my vacation, I turned over in my bed, my ears perched slightly as my mother wandered out from the house. Turning back over, I slept til well past eight then commenced to get up and take myself into the kitchen in order to make breakfast. My mother always baked biscuits every morning before leaving the house, cooking for her own breakfast, my father’s and ultimately mine. I was ever so grateful for those biscuits. I cracked eggs open and whisked away at them, adding pepper and salt, and threw strips of bacon in the skillet, but somehow those biscuits provided a comfort to me that I had something to eat, even if my little hands couldn’t make it. With my oven-warmed biscuits, eggs, bacon, and thermos of orange juice( I cheated when by myself: I never used a juice glass for breakfast, but took as much as I wanted, not knowing that the absence of juice would be noticed) I commenced to the front porch where I made myself a picnic, listening to the birds giving concerts and basking in the early morning sunshine. After breakfast, I was obliged just to sit back with my arms folded behind my head, laying against the wood floor of the porch, tapping my feet in time with the natural rhythm of the universe. I was lost in the euphoria of my youth and new found freedom. Every day seemed a mere extension of some magical universe. I had completely forgotten about the wanderers.
That Friday, I lay out on the porch staring up into space, as had become my custom, just me and my connection to the cosmic, when I heard the crunching of footsteps in the yard, moving along at a mechanical pace, like the ticking of a machine in a factory. At first I sucked in all my breath and was unable to move, my body paralyzed and stuck to the hard wood of the floor. Struggling and pushing, I forced my torso into an upright position and there I saw him. Again, he was tall and lanky-it must have been a trait peculiar to the wanderers- and wore ragged clothes merely pasted to his body. This one was attractive though. His hair was dark brunette and a whisp of it fell into his face in a little curlicue. His face was handsome, showed no sign of strain. His eyes were magnetic and warm and his tiny mouth puckered beautifully into a pouty bottom lip, all of it covered by the mask of his dark brown beard, which was soft and gave him the appearance of being a genteel young man somewhere in his late twenties or thirties.
He was a few yards away from the house when I finally stood up. Nodding my head in his direction, I muddled up enough sound in my throat to utter a weak greeting.
“Hello.” I nodded again and threw my hand in the air.
The man attempted something of a smile and threw his hand back up in the air at me. Almost at the house, he didn’t slow down and I wondered if he planned to ask for something to eat or not. He did not stop, but slowed greatly, ready to engage in conversation if so obliged.
“Are you a hobo?”
The man thought on it a minute.
“Why yes, I reckon I am.”
“That means you’re wandering. A hobo means wandering.”
His answer satisfied me for a minute. A smile sprang across my face in my satisfaction at discovering another hobo. After that, we stood together, several feet apart, in a long odd silence.
“Are you hungry? “ I asked somewhat prematurely.
“Why yes’m. I’d be much obliged of some victuals. I’m mighty hungry.”
“Come up to the porch and I’ll get you something to eat. “ I summoned him up with my hands and obliged him to stand at the bottom of the steps while I went back into the house. I debated on what I should feed him. Not knowing what to do, I turned on my heels and went back to the porch.
“When was the last time you had a meal?”
The man got a perplexed look on his face as he tried to figure the last meal he had eaten.
“I don’t rightly know.”
Shaking my head, assuming a maternal role, I gestured to him with my hand.
“Come up here to the porch and sit at this table, let me get you something to eat. “
Slowly, he obliged, climbing the eight steps to the porch and sitting at the table.
After he was seated, I went into the house and proceeded into the kitchen. Setting the skillet on the stove to get hot, I pulled off four pieces of bacon and put them in the fryer along with two eggs. While the bacon and eggs were frying, I placed a brown paper sack on the table and filled it with apples, oranges, some candy, a pear, a block of cheese and some crackers. I figured he could eat them while he wandered around doing whatever hobos did. I also took three cans of sardines out of the pantry and placed them in the bag. I hated sardines and despised whenever mother presented them to me for lunch. I got rid of as many cans as I could within reason. This man was going to have a good lunch.
When the bacon and eggs had finished frying, I sat two biscuits in the stove to get hot and shoveled them onto a plate along with another apple, which I figured rounded out the plate for a healthy breakfast. I got the cane syrup out of the cabinet and doused the plate with it then poured a healthy glass of orange juice. Once I finished up packing the paper bag, I grabbed the plate and the orange juice then proceeded out to the porch to the wicker table where I had left him sitting.
“ Here you go. I hope you’re mighty hungry this morning, because this is a good breakfast.” I smiled as I sat the plate and glass on the table. The man nodded his thanks to me silently and dug into the food with restrained relish. As he ate, I pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the table and folded myself into it, leaning into my elbows as I watched him eat.
“What’s your name?” I asked him, my fists stuck into my jaws.
“Hezekiah.”
“How old are you, Hezekiah?”
“28.”
I let that one sit on my mind a bit. He was more than twice my age. His face was young and gentle though.
“Why are you wandering? “
He looked up at the question, unsure of how to answer.
“At this point, I don’t even rightly know. But I do know my legs are tired, my body’s tired, and I’ve traveled a long way.”
“Where’d you come from?”
The man smiled and lowered his head at her question.
“I don’t even know that anymore.”
“Well how do you get to eat?”
“Sometimes I don’t.”
“That must be mighty hard.” I shook my head at the thought of having nothing to eat.
“It gets hard. The open road’s a hard life. There’s plenty of freedom, but you get rained on, you get tired. And you play by a different set of rules. Rules of the road meted out with hobo justice. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get taken advantage of.“
“What’s hobo justice?” I asked as he resumed eating.
He looked up from his plate and shook his head.
“Just rules of the road, young lady. A Hobo’s life with a hobo’s code of ethics.”
“It must be hard and dangerous living by the hobo rules.”
The man smiled, moved that I would engage him so in conversation.
“Want to hear a story about a hobo’s life?” He asked after a small pause.
“Sure!” I curled my knees further into the chair, digging in to listen at the story.
“Once, not even three months ago, a hobo was passing through a town and came to a small brick house on a quiet street. He was looking for food. He was hungry and had twenty five cents to his name, a nickel and two dimes. He was willing to give that nickel and two dimes to anybody who would spare him a morsel to eat. He came upon the house and noticed a young woman sweeping off the front step. She had two small children, around five or six years old, running at her heels. The house was decent and clean—had a piano near the window where it could be seen from the street. The upholstery was old, but it was neat and clean and appeared very well cared for. “
I drew my chair closer to him, intrigued by his story.
“So the man figured this woman would be kind and gentle. He could give her his money and have her fix him something to eat. He just wanted a small morsel, nothing fancy, not even enough to intrude on her grocery bill. He waited and then two hours later, after the woman had finished her chores and laid her children down for a nap, he went and rapped at her door. She answered and he made his proposal, to which she agreed. Excited, he gave her the twenty-five cents and told her he would wait under the tree in her front yard for his food. The lady took the money and closed the door. The man sat down under the tree with his knees under his chin. He could already taste the food in his mouth as he sat there. He wondered if it would be bacon and a piece of bread or a piece of fatback on a biscuit. His mouth watered. He waited. An hour passed. Then two hours. After two hours he rapped on the door again, this time to no avail. Going up to the window on the porch, he looked in. The house was as quiet as a mouse. The woman and her children were gone and the stove was as cold as stone. Angry, he was determined to sit there all night perched under her tree. It was less than an hour later, however, when the lady reappeared with her children at the front of the house, this time accompanied by a policeman. She had told the policeman that the man was loitering in her yard and she feared for her life. After failing to explain himself, he left willingly. He found shelter under a tree right at the edge of town, just a six minute walk from the woman’s house. His body was hungry and cold, but his soul was red hot. He was boiling over with the need for revenge. He waited there at the edge of town, under his tree, until Sunday. “
Hezekiah seemed fully absorbed in the story as he told it. His skin turned a bright red and his voice grew animated as each scene unfolded until he seemed to remember my presence. He paused for a moment, looked at me and sighed as the color left his skin. Slowly, he resumed telling his story.
“That Sunday, the woman dressed her two children in their Sunday best and made her way to church. He stood at a distance and watched them go. After they had left, the man made his way up the steps of the house and found the woman had left her kitchen window open. On the sill, sat a sleeve of matches from a fancy hotel the lady had saved as a souvenir. The man looked down at the book of matches. It had a pretty pink cover with fancy writing on it and it said it was from the Peabody Hotel, Atlantic City. For a minute, he just stood there and looked at the book of matches. Looking up briefly, his eye caught sight of a porcelain container filled with kitchen grease sitting on the counter by the window. A pan of biscuits sat next to the stove. His eyes went from the kitchen grease to the matches and from the matches to the kitchen grease. The more he looked, the angrier he grew. Breaking the window, the man reached inside the window and took the kitchen grease from the side counter and drizzled it all across the front of the porch and the inside of the window. He then broke out one of the matches, struck it against the lighting pad, and threw it against the house. The fire burned, but was contained only to the front part of the house under the window and the kitchen. Using his shoulder as a battling ram, he broke the door down and entered the house, kicking things over until he found a can of gasoline in the pantry. Hot venom spread through his fingers as he literally turned the can up and spread the contents of the can over everything he could reach. He then broke off another match, lit it, and threw it inside the house, barging outside after the deed was done. Flames roared inside the house, and soon the entire house was ablaze. Reaching inside his pocket, he felt a pencil, and a slip of paper lining his pockets. He walked up to the tree under which he had sat so many days before waiting for food and nourishment, his blood boiling so that he was almost an inch off of the ground. Taking the paper, he wrote on it. “This house cost twenty-five cents.” Then he stabbed the paper into the side of the tree with the pencil and left. “
I sat still as a mouse, completely drawn in by him and the dark unfolding of his story. His tale amazed me. Some part of me had grown listening to the story. After he finished the tale, I felt that I knew him. I had come to a deeper understanding about his life and about justice. I had learned something of human will and motivation. We sat there across from each other, a kind of sympathy reflecting from our eyes onto the other until finally he lowered his head and resumed his meal.
The next quarter of an hour was quiet as he noisily supped, sopping up the drippings from the plate with his biscuit. I went inside the house and fetched the paper sack that I had fixed for him. By the time I made it back out on the porch, he had finished eating.
“Here, this is for you too. It’s something to keep you while you’re out wandering.” I sat the bag on the table next to him. Boldly, I touched him, clapping him on the shoulder. Peering inside the bag, he nearly swallowed his tongue.
“Why thank you, ma’am. This is too much. Thank you. Thank you.” Tears threatened to well in his eyes. He fought bravely to keep the nice, congenial demeanor he had assumed. He licked his fingers as he roamed through the contents of the bag. He was outdone by his fortune. His eyes blinked as if to make him truly believe what his eyes saw sitting before him. Standing quickly, he moved to make his leave from the porch and back to his life as a wanderer. Grabbing the bag, he made his way down the steps. Just as suddenly, he turned on his heels and peered back up towards me. Again, our eyes connected.
“Here little girl, this is for you.” He reached his hand into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. It seemed to be something ripped out of a newspaper. I extended my hand down and accepted his gift. Opening up the torn out newspaper clipping, I read the headline. The paper was dated May 5, 1930 and the headline read “Woman’s House Burns Over Twenty-Five Cents.” I folded the clipping back and looked up at Hezekiah, a huge smile on my face.
“Thanks!”
Silently, he lifted his hat on his head to me then turned and continued walking towards town. I turned and went into the house. Later that night, I slipped into the parlor to listen to the radio. I’ll never forget the song that was playing. I fell asleep on the floor listening to the words:
May I sleep in your barn tonight, mister
It is cold lying out on the ground
And the cold north wind is a-howling
And I have no place to lie down
Hobo Justice
Papa had just gotten a brand new radio. Big and solid oak, it made a huge impression in the parlor where Papa kept it so we could listen to it especially on Saturday afternoons. Papa had bought the first radio in the community almost eight years ago and since that time, every Saturday afternoon after four o’clock, come rain or shine, every Dick and Jerry from miles around crowded around our front porch to listen to the radio or take in the fight, if there was one. Papa obliged them all and as such kept his praises in the mouths of nearly everyone in the community. This new radio had come on Papa’s birthday, ordered directly from Sears and Roebuck and delivered special handling. Since the beginning of fall , however, the radio had been neatly put away, positioned back on its perch on the glass and marble end table in front of the parlor window. No one had a taste to listen to it and Papa didn’t think it wise to bring it out to play anymore. Only I snuck into the parlor whenever I could, after finishing chores or after finishing dinner, and turned the big knob to listen to Deford Bailey, Roy Acuff, and Maybelle Carter at the Grand Ol’ Opry. Papa regularly sat to listen to the radio on Sunday afternoons after church, listening to the news and to music. It was only between the two of us that the radio remained functional.
Things had gotten bad. The mill had closed and as summer approached there were hundreds of men out of work in our town. Their children were starving and people had started wandering. I nearly died of fright one late morning as summer started while I sat out breakfast for the cats. A man came walking past the house coming down from the railroad tracks that crossed our property past the apple, pear, and peach orchards. The man was tall and lanky, little more than skin and bones with a shirt and a pair of pants thrown over it. He carried a knapsack over his shoulder and as he passed the house, he looked at me with something between derision, pity, and contempt. He passed me by without uttering a word, but was so close to the house, I swung back inside and fastened the screen door shut after me. I told Mama about what happened. Mama sat me down and very sternly told me that if I ever saw any men walking down from the railroad track towards the house to not be afraid. I should stick close to the house, be kind and respectful, and offer them food if they asked for it. She said those men were wanderers, and called themselves hobos and they were looking for places to sleep and something to eat because they had nothing else going for them. They were wandering to and from town looking for work and food. Our house was the closest and quickest path from the rail line into town. She said I should always remember that she wasn’t that far from the house and just to call for her if I needed her. What she told me peaked my curiosity. Why were these men wanderers? I was determined to find out more about them and why they were wanderers.
I had just turned twelve as school let out. My older sister Margaret had just gone off to college and I was left all alone at the house before school resumed that fall. Mother usually spent her days in her garden, toiling in her few acres of vegetables and herbs on the other side of the hill, leaving after breakfast at half past six and not returning until late in the afternoon on the other side of four o’clock. That left me to fetch my own breakfast and occupy myself until mother came back home. Father wandered into the house at half past six every evening, rain or shine, and had done so every day of my life since I knew him. Being alone in our huge, rustic house , I let my imagination take reign. Armed with my new knowledge of the wanderers, I perched myself to find out whatever I could when the opportunity presented itself.
That first morning of my vacation, I turned over in my bed, my ears perched slightly as my mother wandered out from the house. Turning back over, I slept til well past eight then commenced to get up and take myself into the kitchen in order to make breakfast. My mother always baked biscuits every morning before leaving the house, cooking for her own breakfast, my father’s and ultimately mine. I was ever so grateful for those biscuits. I cracked eggs open and whisked away at them, adding pepper and salt, and threw strips of bacon in the skillet, but somehow those biscuits provided a comfort to me that I had something to eat, even if my little hands couldn’t make it. With my oven-warmed biscuits, eggs, bacon, and thermos of orange juice( I cheated when by myself: I never used a juice glass for breakfast, but took as much as I wanted, not knowing that the absence of juice would be noticed) I commenced to the front porch where I made myself a picnic, listening to the birds giving concerts and basking in the early morning sunshine. After breakfast, I was obliged just to sit back with my arms folded behind my head, laying against the wood floor of the porch, tapping my feet in time with the natural rhythm of the universe. I was lost in the euphoria of my youth and new found freedom. Every day seemed a mere extension of some magical universe. I had completely forgotten about the wanderers.
That Friday, I lay out on the porch staring up into space, as had become my custom, just me and my connection to the cosmic, when I heard the crunching of footsteps in the yard, moving along at a mechanical pace, like the ticking of a machine in a factory. At first I sucked in all my breath and was unable to move, my body paralyzed and stuck to the hard wood of the floor. Struggling and pushing, I forced my torso into an upright position and there I saw him. Again, he was tall and lanky-it must have been a trait peculiar to the wanderers- and wore ragged clothes merely pasted to his body. This one was attractive though. His hair was dark brunette and a whisp of it fell into his face in a little curlicue. His face was handsome, showed no sign of strain. His eyes were magnetic and warm and his tiny mouth puckered beautifully into a pouty bottom lip, all of it covered by the mask of his dark brown beard, which was soft and gave him the appearance of being a genteel young man somewhere in his late twenties or thirties.
He was a few yards away from the house when I finally stood up. Nodding my head in his direction, I muddled up enough sound in my throat to utter a weak greeting.
“Hello.” I nodded again and threw my hand in the air.
The man attempted something of a smile and threw his hand back up in the air at me. Almost at the house, he didn’t slow down and I wondered if he planned to ask for something to eat or not. He did not stop, but slowed greatly, ready to engage in conversation if so obliged.
“Are you a hobo?”
The man thought on it a minute.
“Why yes, I reckon I am.”
“That means you’re wandering. A hobo means wandering.”
His answer satisfied me for a minute. A smile sprang across my face in my satisfaction at discovering another hobo. After that, we stood together, several feet apart, in a long odd silence.
“Are you hungry? “ I asked somewhat prematurely.
“Why yes’m. I’d be much obliged of some victuals. I’m mighty hungry.”
“Come up to the porch and I’ll get you something to eat. “ I summoned him up with my hands and obliged him to stand at the bottom of the steps while I went back into the house. I debated on what I should feed him. Not knowing what to do, I turned on my heels and went back to the porch.
“When was the last time you had a meal?”
The man got a perplexed look on his face as he tried to figure the last meal he had eaten.
“I don’t rightly know.”
Shaking my head, assuming a maternal role, I gestured to him with my hand.
“Come up here to the porch and sit at this table, let me get you something to eat. “
Slowly, he obliged, climbing the eight steps to the porch and sitting at the table.
After he was seated, I went into the house and proceeded into the kitchen. Setting the skillet on the stove to get hot, I pulled off four pieces of bacon and put them in the fryer along with two eggs. While the bacon and eggs were frying, I placed a brown paper sack on the table and filled it with apples, oranges, some candy, a pear, a block of cheese and some crackers. I figured he could eat them while he wandered around doing whatever hobos did. I also took three cans of sardines out of the pantry and placed them in the bag. I hated sardines and despised whenever mother presented them to me for lunch. I got rid of as many cans as I could within reason. This man was going to have a good lunch.
When the bacon and eggs had finished frying, I sat two biscuits in the stove to get hot and shoveled them onto a plate along with another apple, which I figured rounded out the plate for a healthy breakfast. I got the cane syrup out of the cabinet and doused the plate with it then poured a healthy glass of orange juice. Once I finished up packing the paper bag, I grabbed the plate and the orange juice then proceeded out to the porch to the wicker table where I had left him sitting.
“ Here you go. I hope you’re mighty hungry this morning, because this is a good breakfast.” I smiled as I sat the plate and glass on the table. The man nodded his thanks to me silently and dug into the food with restrained relish. As he ate, I pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the table and folded myself into it, leaning into my elbows as I watched him eat.
“What’s your name?” I asked him, my fists stuck into my jaws.
“Hezekiah.”
“How old are you, Hezekiah?”
“28.”
I let that one sit on my mind a bit. He was more than twice my age. His face was young and gentle though.
“Why are you wandering? “
He looked up at the question, unsure of how to answer.
“At this point, I don’t even rightly know. But I do know my legs are tired, my body’s tired, and I’ve traveled a long way.”
“Where’d you come from?”
The man smiled and lowered his head at her question.
“I don’t even know that anymore.”
“Well how do you get to eat?”
“Sometimes I don’t.”
“That must be mighty hard.” I shook my head at the thought of having nothing to eat.
“It gets hard. The open road’s a hard life. There’s plenty of freedom, but you get rained on, you get tired. And you play by a different set of rules. Rules of the road meted out with hobo justice. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get taken advantage of.“
“What’s hobo justice?” I asked as he resumed eating.
He looked up from his plate and shook his head.
“Just rules of the road, young lady. A Hobo’s life with a hobo’s code of ethics.”
“It must be hard and dangerous living by the hobo rules.”
The man smiled, moved that I would engage him so in conversation.
“Want to hear a story about a hobo’s life?” He asked after a small pause.
“Sure!” I curled my knees further into the chair, digging in to listen at the story.
“Once, not even three months ago, a hobo was passing through a town and came to a small brick house on a quiet street. He was looking for food. He was hungry and had twenty five cents to his name, a nickel and two dimes. He was willing to give that nickel and two dimes to anybody who would spare him a morsel to eat. He came upon the house and noticed a young woman sweeping off the front step. She had two small children, around five or six years old, running at her heels. The house was decent and clean—had a piano near the window where it could be seen from the street. The upholstery was old, but it was neat and clean and appeared very well cared for. “
I drew my chair closer to him, intrigued by his story.
“So the man figured this woman would be kind and gentle. He could give her his money and have her fix him something to eat. He just wanted a small morsel, nothing fancy, not even enough to intrude on her grocery bill. He waited and then two hours later, after the woman had finished her chores and laid her children down for a nap, he went and rapped at her door. She answered and he made his proposal, to which she agreed. Excited, he gave her the twenty-five cents and told her he would wait under the tree in her front yard for his food. The lady took the money and closed the door. The man sat down under the tree with his knees under his chin. He could already taste the food in his mouth as he sat there. He wondered if it would be bacon and a piece of bread or a piece of fatback on a biscuit. His mouth watered. He waited. An hour passed. Then two hours. After two hours he rapped on the door again, this time to no avail. Going up to the window on the porch, he looked in. The house was as quiet as a mouse. The woman and her children were gone and the stove was as cold as stone. Angry, he was determined to sit there all night perched under her tree. It was less than an hour later, however, when the lady reappeared with her children at the front of the house, this time accompanied by a policeman. She had told the policeman that the man was loitering in her yard and she feared for her life. After failing to explain himself, he left willingly. He found shelter under a tree right at the edge of town, just a six minute walk from the woman’s house. His body was hungry and cold, but his soul was red hot. He was boiling over with the need for revenge. He waited there at the edge of town, under his tree, until Sunday. “
Hezekiah seemed fully absorbed in the story as he told it. His skin turned a bright red and his voice grew animated as each scene unfolded until he seemed to remember my presence. He paused for a moment, looked at me and sighed as the color left his skin. Slowly, he resumed telling his story.
“That Sunday, the woman dressed her two children in their Sunday best and made her way to church. He stood at a distance and watched them go. After they had left, the man made his way up the steps of the house and found the woman had left her kitchen window open. On the sill, sat a sleeve of matches from a fancy hotel the lady had saved as a souvenir. The man looked down at the book of matches. It had a pretty pink cover with fancy writing on it and it said it was from the Peabody Hotel, Atlantic City. For a minute, he just stood there and looked at the book of matches. Looking up briefly, his eye caught sight of a porcelain container filled with kitchen grease sitting on the counter by the window. A pan of biscuits sat next to the stove. His eyes went from the kitchen grease to the matches and from the matches to the kitchen grease. The more he looked, the angrier he grew. Breaking the window, the man reached inside the window and took the kitchen grease from the side counter and drizzled it all across the front of the porch and the inside of the window. He then broke out one of the matches, struck it against the lighting pad, and threw it against the house. The fire burned, but was contained only to the front part of the house under the window and the kitchen. Using his shoulder as a battling ram, he broke the door down and entered the house, kicking things over until he found a can of gasoline in the pantry. Hot venom spread through his fingers as he literally turned the can up and spread the contents of the can over everything he could reach. He then broke off another match, lit it, and threw it inside the house, barging outside after the deed was done. Flames roared inside the house, and soon the entire house was ablaze. Reaching inside his pocket, he felt a pencil, and a slip of paper lining his pockets. He walked up to the tree under which he had sat so many days before waiting for food and nourishment, his blood boiling so that he was almost an inch off of the ground. Taking the paper, he wrote on it. “This house cost twenty-five cents.” Then he stabbed the paper into the side of the tree with the pencil and left. “
I sat still as a mouse, completely drawn in by him and the dark unfolding of his story. His tale amazed me. Some part of me had grown listening to the story. After he finished the tale, I felt that I knew him. I had come to a deeper understanding about his life and about justice. I had learned something of human will and motivation. We sat there across from each other, a kind of sympathy reflecting from our eyes onto the other until finally he lowered his head and resumed his meal.
The next quarter of an hour was quiet as he noisily supped, sopping up the drippings from the plate with his biscuit. I went inside the house and fetched the paper sack that I had fixed for him. By the time I made it back out on the porch, he had finished eating.
“Here, this is for you too. It’s something to keep you while you’re out wandering.” I sat the bag on the table next to him. Boldly, I touched him, clapping him on the shoulder. Peering inside the bag, he nearly swallowed his tongue.
“Why thank you, ma’am. This is too much. Thank you. Thank you.” Tears threatened to well in his eyes. He fought bravely to keep the nice, congenial demeanor he had assumed. He licked his fingers as he roamed through the contents of the bag. He was outdone by his fortune. His eyes blinked as if to make him truly believe what his eyes saw sitting before him. Standing quickly, he moved to make his leave from the porch and back to his life as a wanderer. Grabbing the bag, he made his way down the steps. Just as suddenly, he turned on his heels and peered back up towards me. Again, our eyes connected.
“Here little girl, this is for you.” He reached his hand into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. It seemed to be something ripped out of a newspaper. I extended my hand down and accepted his gift. Opening up the torn out newspaper clipping, I read the headline. The paper was dated May 5, 1930 and the headline read “Woman’s House Burns Over Twenty-Five Cents.” I folded the clipping back and looked up at Hezekiah, a huge smile on my face.
“Thanks!”
Silently, he lifted his hat on his head to me then turned and continued walking towards town. I turned and went into the house. Later that night, I slipped into the parlor to listen to the radio. I’ll never forget the song that was playing. I fell asleep on the floor listening to the words:
May I sleep in your barn tonight, mister
It is cold lying out on the ground
And the cold north wind is a-howling
And I have no place to lie down
Monday, July 23, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
U.S. Poverty On Track To Rise To Highest Since 1960sR
Read Here
The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.
Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.
The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.
Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.
"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.
Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.
Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.
In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.
"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.
He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalization, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionization that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 percent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.
"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.
Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.
The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.
The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 percent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 percent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.
Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.9 percent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.
Demographers also say:
_Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 percent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels – 15 percent to 16 percent – will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 percent and weak wage growth.
_Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 percent, will increase again in 2011.
_Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 percent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.
_Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.
_Child poverty will increase from its 22 percent level in 2010.
Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 percent.
"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent.
Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.
"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.
The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as noncash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.
An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.
A new census measure accounts for noncash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.
Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 percent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 percent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.
Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 percent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.
The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.
His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.
Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."
___
Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Lakewood, Colo., Ken Ritter and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.
Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.
The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.
Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.
"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.
Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.
Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.
In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.
"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.
He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalization, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionization that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 percent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.
"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.
Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.
The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.
The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 percent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 percent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.
Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.9 percent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.
Demographers also say:
_Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 percent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels – 15 percent to 16 percent – will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 percent and weak wage growth.
_Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 percent, will increase again in 2011.
_Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 percent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.
_Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.
_Child poverty will increase from its 22 percent level in 2010.
Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 percent.
"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent.
Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.
"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.
The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as noncash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.
An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.
A new census measure accounts for noncash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.
Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 percent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 percent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.
Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 percent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.
The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.
His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.
Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."
___
Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Lakewood, Colo., Ken Ritter and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
For Colored Girls...
Ok....I just made myself watch Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls...I must say he didn't mess it up and I don't have to crucify....as a matter of fact.....it was pretty good...I give it a B. The adaptation done in the 80s was great.....perhaps this should be redone every generation....
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Friday, July 06, 2012
Why is Mitt Romney on vacation?
What has he done that he needs to be on vacation? How many people in the US have had a vacation in the past five years?
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
From Steven Argue
THE LAKEVIEW SIT-IN HAS BEEN RAIDED!!!
Dozens of cops raided the Lakeview Sit-in this morning of July 3rd, kicking out a bunch of families and teachers. Two people were arrested including one parent and former student.
A rally was held at the Lakeview steps at 5pm. Stay tuned for more.
For over two weeks the Lakeview Sit-In and People's School for Public Education has been running a free summer program out of occupied Lakeview Elementary, serving over 30 children with programming in social justice, art, PE, and gardening. That sit-in is demanding that Tony Smith and the School Board:
* Reopen all five closed elementary schools!
* Repudiate the state debt!
* Stop busting teacher and school workers' unions!
* Reverse the cuts to special education!
* Fully fund public education for every student!
Here are statements of the Oakland Education Association and the Alameda Labor Council in support of the sit-in:
Support Community Sit In
The Alameda Labor Council supports and encourages affiliates to engage as is individually appropriate for the "Community Sit In" at Lakeview Elementary School in Oakland which was recently closed by the OUSD. Various union members, parents and the community have rallied against this and other school closures. Please see OEA Statement on Lakeview Sit In.
OAKLAND EDUCATION ASSOCIATION STATEMENT ON LAKEVIEW SIT-IN
June 23, 2012: On June 20, the OEA Executive Board voted to support the efforts of the Lakeview Sit-In and the People’s School for Public Education. We also endorsed these demands:
•Don’t close the 5 schools. Keep all neighborhood schools open.
•Stop union busting: defend the OEA and all school worker unions
•Repudiate the state debt
•Fully fund quality public education for all
Oakland Unified School District’s closure of five public elementary schools has displaced over 1,000 students, mostly children of color, and destabilitized entire communities. Some of these school buildings are slated to be turned into district administration offices, while others have already been given over to non-union, privately controlled charter schools. One, Santa Fe, has been leased to Emeryville, leaving an entire zip code without a public school – and resulting in the loss of $157,000 for the next three years in Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA) funding, money directly targeted for class size reduction.
This process has taken place without the full input of the communities involved, and without addressing the numerous alternatives that were raised by OEA and members of the community after the closures were announced on October 26, 2011. At that time, OEA issued a statement that included the following:
“When the Board of Education adopted a set of criteria for closing schools in late August, OEA countered with a set of our own. These included closing poorly-performing charter schools, getting rid of outside consultant contracts, and decreasing the number of administrative positions. We called on the Board to do whatever was necessary before moving to close any schools, and to do this in a way that was transparent and involved the community. Instead, they have moved ahead with their plans, despite vocal opposition from all affected communities.
Therefore, OEA stands in opposition to the closure of Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park, and Santa Fe, all schools serving predominantly children of color. We call on the district to abandon their plan and work with the many teachers, students, and community leaders who have come to the past few Board meetings with creative ideas for keeping their schools open. If this plan goes forward, the Board is essentially refusing to listen to the voice of their constituents and is instead encouraging even more bleeding from the district as families leave in disgust and more schools opt to convert to charters.”
We urge all labor and community partners to join with us in supporting the courageous efforts of the Lakeview Sit-In – this is an action with significance that goes far beyond one school in Oakland and strikes at the very heart of the attempts to starve and then privatize public education.
Subscribe free to Liberation News for updates and future actions
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Dozens of cops raided the Lakeview Sit-in this morning of July 3rd, kicking out a bunch of families and teachers. Two people were arrested including one parent and former student.
A rally was held at the Lakeview steps at 5pm. Stay tuned for more.
For over two weeks the Lakeview Sit-In and People's School for Public Education has been running a free summer program out of occupied Lakeview Elementary, serving over 30 children with programming in social justice, art, PE, and gardening. That sit-in is demanding that Tony Smith and the School Board:
* Reopen all five closed elementary schools!
* Repudiate the state debt!
* Stop busting teacher and school workers' unions!
* Reverse the cuts to special education!
* Fully fund public education for every student!
Here are statements of the Oakland Education Association and the Alameda Labor Council in support of the sit-in:
Support Community Sit In
The Alameda Labor Council supports and encourages affiliates to engage as is individually appropriate for the "Community Sit In" at Lakeview Elementary School in Oakland which was recently closed by the OUSD. Various union members, parents and the community have rallied against this and other school closures. Please see OEA Statement on Lakeview Sit In.
OAKLAND EDUCATION ASSOCIATION STATEMENT ON LAKEVIEW SIT-IN
June 23, 2012: On June 20, the OEA Executive Board voted to support the efforts of the Lakeview Sit-In and the People’s School for Public Education. We also endorsed these demands:
•Don’t close the 5 schools. Keep all neighborhood schools open.
•Stop union busting: defend the OEA and all school worker unions
•Repudiate the state debt
•Fully fund quality public education for all
Oakland Unified School District’s closure of five public elementary schools has displaced over 1,000 students, mostly children of color, and destabilitized entire communities. Some of these school buildings are slated to be turned into district administration offices, while others have already been given over to non-union, privately controlled charter schools. One, Santa Fe, has been leased to Emeryville, leaving an entire zip code without a public school – and resulting in the loss of $157,000 for the next three years in Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA) funding, money directly targeted for class size reduction.
This process has taken place without the full input of the communities involved, and without addressing the numerous alternatives that were raised by OEA and members of the community after the closures were announced on October 26, 2011. At that time, OEA issued a statement that included the following:
“When the Board of Education adopted a set of criteria for closing schools in late August, OEA countered with a set of our own. These included closing poorly-performing charter schools, getting rid of outside consultant contracts, and decreasing the number of administrative positions. We called on the Board to do whatever was necessary before moving to close any schools, and to do this in a way that was transparent and involved the community. Instead, they have moved ahead with their plans, despite vocal opposition from all affected communities.
Therefore, OEA stands in opposition to the closure of Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park, and Santa Fe, all schools serving predominantly children of color. We call on the district to abandon their plan and work with the many teachers, students, and community leaders who have come to the past few Board meetings with creative ideas for keeping their schools open. If this plan goes forward, the Board is essentially refusing to listen to the voice of their constituents and is instead encouraging even more bleeding from the district as families leave in disgust and more schools opt to convert to charters.”
We urge all labor and community partners to join with us in supporting the courageous efforts of the Lakeview Sit-In – this is an action with significance that goes far beyond one school in Oakland and strikes at the very heart of the attempts to starve and then privatize public education.
Subscribe free to Liberation News for updates and future actions
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Nikki Giovanni: Adulthood
“I usta wonder who I’d be
when I was a little girl in Indianapolis
sitting on doctors porches with post-dawn pre-debs
(wondering would my aunt drag me to church sunday)
i was meaningless
and i wondered if life
would give me a chance to mean
i found a new life in the withdrawal from all things
not like my image
when I was a teenager I usta sit
on front steps conversing
the gym teachers son with embryonic eyes
about the essential essence of the universe
(and other bullshit stuff)
recognizing the basic powerlessness of me.
but then I went to college where i learned
that just because everything i was was unreal
i could be real and not just real through withdrawal
into emotional crosshairs of colored bourgeoisie intellectual pretensions
but from involvement with things approaching reality
i could possibly have a life
so catatonic emotions and time wasting sex games
were replaced with functioning commitments to logic and
necessity and the gray area was slowly darkened into
a black thing
for a while progress was being made along with a certain degree
of happiness cause i wrote a book and found a love
and organized a theatre and even gave some lectures on
Black history
and began to believe all good people could get
together and win without bloodshed
then
hammaskjold was killed
and diem was killed
and kennedy was killed
and malcolm was killed
and evers was killed
and schwerner, chaney and goodman were killed
and liuzzo was killed
and stokely fled the country
and le roi was arrested
and rap was arrested
and pollard, thompson and cooper were killed
and king was killed
and kennedy was killed
and i sometimes wonder why i didn’t become a debutante
sitting on porches, going to church all the time, wondering
is my eye make-up on straight
or a withdrawn discoursing on the stars and moon
instead of a for real Black person who must now feel
and inflict
pain”
when I was a little girl in Indianapolis
sitting on doctors porches with post-dawn pre-debs
(wondering would my aunt drag me to church sunday)
i was meaningless
and i wondered if life
would give me a chance to mean
i found a new life in the withdrawal from all things
not like my image
when I was a teenager I usta sit
on front steps conversing
the gym teachers son with embryonic eyes
about the essential essence of the universe
(and other bullshit stuff)
recognizing the basic powerlessness of me.
but then I went to college where i learned
that just because everything i was was unreal
i could be real and not just real through withdrawal
into emotional crosshairs of colored bourgeoisie intellectual pretensions
but from involvement with things approaching reality
i could possibly have a life
so catatonic emotions and time wasting sex games
were replaced with functioning commitments to logic and
necessity and the gray area was slowly darkened into
a black thing
for a while progress was being made along with a certain degree
of happiness cause i wrote a book and found a love
and organized a theatre and even gave some lectures on
Black history
and began to believe all good people could get
together and win without bloodshed
then
hammaskjold was killed
and diem was killed
and kennedy was killed
and malcolm was killed
and evers was killed
and schwerner, chaney and goodman were killed
and liuzzo was killed
and stokely fled the country
and le roi was arrested
and rap was arrested
and pollard, thompson and cooper were killed
and king was killed
and kennedy was killed
and i sometimes wonder why i didn’t become a debutante
sitting on porches, going to church all the time, wondering
is my eye make-up on straight
or a withdrawn discoursing on the stars and moon
instead of a for real Black person who must now feel
and inflict
pain”
Monday, June 11, 2012
Statement From Lauryn Hill
It was reported yesterday that Ms. Lauryn Hill has been charged with three counts of misdemeanor failure to file taxes. These charges were incurred for the years of 2005-2007, during a time in which Ms. Hill had removed herself and her family from society, in order to keep them safe, healthy, and free from danger. In response to these charges, Ms. Hill has issued the following statement:
“For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda. Having put the lives and needs of other people before my own for multiple years, and having made hundreds of millions of dollars for certain institutions, under complex and sometimes severe circumstances, I began to require growth and more equitable treatment, but was met with resistance. I entered into my craft full of optimism (which I still possess), but immediately saw the suppressive force with which the system attempts to maintain it’s control over a given paradigm. I’ve seen people promote addiction, use sabotage, black listing, media bullying and any other coercion technique they could, to prevent artists from knowing their true value, or exercising their full power. These devices of control, no matter how well intentioned (or not), can have a devastating outcome on the lives of people, especially creative types who must grow and exist within a certain environment and according to a certain pace, in order to live and create optimally.
I kept my life relatively simple, even after huge successes, but it became increasingly obvious that certain indulgences and privileges were expected to come at the expense of my free soul, free mind, and therefore my health and integrity. So I left a more mainstream and public life, in order to wean both myself, and my family, away from a lifestyle that required distortion and compromise as a means for maintaining it. During this critical healing time, there were very few people accessible to me who had not already been seduced or affected by this machine, and therefore who could be trusted to not try and influence or coerce me back into a dynamic of compromise. Individual growth was expected to take place unnaturally, or stagnated outright, subject to marketing and politics. Addressing critical issues like pop culture cannibalism or its manipulation of the young at the expense of everything, was frowned upon and discouraged by limiting funding, or denying it outright. When one has a prolific creative output like I did/do, and is then forced to stop, the effects can be dangerous both emotionally and psychologically, both for the artist and those in need of that resource. It was critically important that I find a suitable pathway within which to exist, without being distorted or economically strong-armed.
During this period of crisis, much was said about me, both slanted and inaccurate, by those who had become dependent on my creative force, yet unwilling to fully acknowledge the importance of my contribution, nor compensate me equitably for it. This was done in an effort to smear my public image, in order to directly affect my ability to earn independently of this system. It took a long time to locate and nurture a community of people strong enough to resist the incredibly unhealthy tide, and more importantly see through it. If I had not been able to make contact with, and establish this community, my life, safety and freedom, would have been directly affected as well as the lives, safety and freedom of my family. Failure to create a non toxic, non exploitative environment was not an option.
As my potential to work, and therefore earn freely, was being threatened, I did whatever needed to be done in order to insulate my family from the climate of hostility, false entitlement, manipulation, racial prejudice, sexism and ageism that I was surrounded by. This was absolutely critical while trying to find and establish a new and very necessary community of healthy people, and also heal and detoxify myself and my family while raising my young children.
There were no exotic trips, no fleet of cars, just an all out war for safety, integrity, wholeness and health, without mistreatment denial, and/or exploitation. In order to liberate myself from those who found it ok to oppose my wholeness, free speech and integral growth by inflicting different forms of punitive action against it, I used my resources to sustain our safety and survival until I was able to restore my ability to earn outside of it!
When artists experience danger and crisis under the effects of this kind of insidious manipulation, everyone easily accepts that there was something either dysfunctional or defective with the artist, rather than look at, and fully examine, the system and its means and policies of exploiting/’doing business’. Not only is this unrealistic, it is very dark in its motivation, conveniently targeting the object of their hero worship by removing any evidence that they ‘needed’ or celebrated this very same resource just years, months or moments before. Since those who believe they need a hero/celebrity outnumber the actual heroes/celebrities, people feel safe and comfortably justified in numbers, committing egregious crimes in the name of the greater social ego. Ironically diminishing their own true hero-celebrity nature in the process.
It was this schism and the hypocrisy, violence and social cannibalism it enabled, that I wanted and needed to be freed from, not from art or music, but the suppression/repression and reduction of that art and music to a bottom line alone, without regard for anything else. Over-commercialization and its resulting restrictions and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of the individual. I Love making art, I Love making music, these are as natural and necessary for me almost as breathing or talking. To be denied the right to pursue it according to my ability, as well as be properly acknowledged and compensated for it, in an attempt to control, is manipulation directed at my most basic rights! These forms of expression, along with others, effectively comprise my free speech! Defending, preserving, and protecting these rights are critically important, especially in a paradigm where veiled racism, sexism, ageism, nepotism, and deliberate economic control are still blatant realities!!!
Learning from the past, insulating friends and family from the influence of external manipulation and corruption, is far more important to me than being misunderstood for a season! I did not deliberately abandon my fans, nor did I deliberately abandon any responsibilities, but I did however put my safety, health and freedom and the freedom, safety and health of my family first over all other material concerns! I also embraced my right to resist a system intentionally opposing my right to whole and integral survival.
I conveyed all of this when questioned as to why I did not file taxes during this time period. Obviously, the danger I faced was not accepted as reasonable grounds for deferring my tax payments, as authorities, who despite being told all of this, still chose to pursue action against me, as opposed to finding an alternative solution.
My intention has always been to get this situation rectified. When I was working consistently without being affected by the interferences mentioned above, I filed and paid my taxes. This only stopped when it was necessary to withdraw from society, in order to guarantee the safety and well-being of myself and my family.
As this, and other areas of issue are resolved and set straight, I am able to get back to doing what I should be doing, the way it should be done. This is part of that process. To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.”
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
What is Going on with Die Linke?
German Left Party congress exposes divisions and crisis
By Lucas Adler
6 June 2012
The Third Congress of the German Left Party, held last weekend in Göttingen, exposed sharp divisions and a deep crisis. The two-day meeting was marked by bitter clashes between opposing factions centered on the election of a new leadership.
The congress took place against the backdrop of a series of dramatic election defeats for the party and dwindling membership rolls. In 2009, the Left Party polled 11.9 percent in federal elections. Now, according to opinion polls, the party would have difficulty meeting the 5 percent threshold for gaining representation in the German parliament (Bundestag).
In a letter to delegates, the party’s senior council presented a grim vision of the state of the party. The party program adopted last year had hardly played a role in the life of the party and had been partly undermined, the letter declared. “Elections have been lost, there is a loss of 8,000 members, a loss of political influence, a lack of transparency in inner-party life,” the council complained.
In his speech to the congress, the outgoing chairman, Klaus Ernst, a leader of the faction centered in the west of the country, described the condition of the party. “We have approval ratings of 6 percent at the federal level,” he said. “We failed by a large margin to enter the state parliaments in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. In Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia we were tossed out unceremoniously. Our poll numbers are crumbling in the east. Overall, we have lost 9,000 members since 2009. Entire district organizations in the west have dissolved. We have signs of decay in our party.”
At the congress, the party demonstrated its inability to confront and discuss the political roots of this decline. Instead, the opposing wings attacked one another once again, claiming that each side was responsible for the deplorable state of the party.
For Klaus Ernst, the problem lay in the fact that the party had failed to establish a strong centre to counter the centrifugal forces within the party. “The only future for our party is to stay and fight together,” he told the delegates.
Ernst was followed by the chairman of the parliamentary group, Gregor Gysi, who heads the faction based in the east. In an angry speech, Gysi expressed his frustration over the infighting between the opposing wings of the party.
Gysis complained in particular about a criticism raised by members from the former West Germany which, he said, reminded him of the “western arrogance that prevailed following the unification of our country.” He continued: “But there is also hatred in our group in the Bundestag. For years, I have found myself standing between two locomotives moving towards each other, and I know that one can end up being crushed. For years, I have been in a situation where I had to make myself unpopular with one group or another, and I’m fed up with it.”
Gysi threatened to split the party. “Either we are able to choose a cooperative leadership that integrates and organizes the party, so that we are once again a major political force,” he said, “or we are not in a position to do so.” He continued, “In that case I say openly: It is better to separate cleanly rather than stay together with hatred, trickery and behind-the-back blows in a thoroughly ruined marriage.”
Most of the media reports on the congress depicted the debate as a conflict between a left wing based mainly in western Germany and led by the former party chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, and a right wing with its base in what had been East Germany, headed by Gysi and the party’s former national director, Dietmar Bartsch.
This presentation is misleading. The conflict within the party is between two right-wing factions with only marginal differences in terms of policy. Less than a year ago the delegates of both wings voted by 97 percent in favour of a joint policy statement that defended all the pillars of capitalism.
The media claim that the Lafontaine wing is not prepared to cooperate with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and participate in bourgeois governments is false. Lafontaine said so himself at the party congress. “Who made the offer in Hesse to form a government? It was the Left Party in Hesse,” he said. “Who made it possible for the government (the SPD-Green Party minority government in North Rhine-Westphalia) to constitute itself in the first place? It was the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia. Who offered on television to support the SPD taking over the premiership of the state after their successful election? I did.”
The intra-party dispute revolves, in fact, around the issue of how best to support the SPD.
Lafontaine was a leading member of the SPD for forty years until he quit in 1999 because he had concluded that the policy of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was unnecessarily undermining workers’ support for the SPD. Lafontaine is convinced that what is needed is a party capable of controlling workers and suppressing the class struggle. He is a student of Willy Brandt, the SPD chancellor who defused radical demonstrations in the 1970s with the slogan “dare more democracy” and a significant expansion of the universities and public services. At the same time, he introduced reactionary laws aimed at suppressing any serious opposition.
Lafontaine was the architect of the merger in 2007 between the group of prominent trade union officials and ex-social democrats organised in the Election Alternative (WASG) and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the ruling East German Stalinist party. Lafontaine’s aim from the start was to divert political radicalization among workers into harmless channels. He did so primarily by encouraging the illusion that it was possible to return to the type of social democratic reforms that had characterised the Brandt era, simply ignoring the process of globalization and the increased domination of the international financial markets over political life.
The Lafontaine wing is just as conservative and supportive of the bourgeois state as the Bartsch wing. Lafontaine’s supporters have been recruited from long-time union officials with links to the SPD and former petty-bourgeois radicals whom the Left Party offered an opportunity to gain public office, with the attendant privileges. Ernst, the outgoing chairman and Lafontaine’s right-hand man, was a full-time district secretary with the IG Metall trade union in Schweinfurt. His successor, Bernd Riexinger, comes from the same region and is a district secretary with the Verdi public service union.
Lafontaine believes the Left Party can fulfill its task only if adopts a radical tone verbally and keeps a certain distance from the SPD, at least during elections and when the SPD is in opposition. But like Bartsch, his main aim is to assist the SPD in coming to power as soon as the Left Party has achieved the necessary influence.
The Bartsch faction objects to Lafontaine’s radical rhetoric and occasional digs at the SPD due its roots in the Stalinist apparatus and its extensive involvement in government at the state and local level in eastern Germany. In the east of the country, the Left Party shares power with the SPD (as well as the conservative Christian Democratic Union—CDU) in numerous local administrations, and the eastern-based faction therefore regards Lafontaine’s rhetoric as disruptive to its daily functioning and its harmonious relations with the political establishment. Its motto is taken from the text book of Stalinist governance: “Adherence to public order is the highest civic duty.”
The intensification of the capitalist crisis has revealed the basic right-wing orientation of the Left Party. This is the reason for its current decline and the fierce infighting that erupted over the issue of a new party leadership.
Lafontaine wanted to prevent at all costs the election of Bartsch as co-chairman (the constitution of the Left Party provides for a duel chair, including at least one woman), but was not prepared to air his differences publicly. Instead, he employed all sorts of maneuvers and back-room deals to prevent the election of Bartsch. To this end he had to exert all of his influence within the party.
Initially, he had proposed his own candidacy as chairman on the condition that Bartsch withdraw his candidacy. Bartsch refused to play along and Lafontaine withdrew from the race in favour of his close confidante, Bernd Riexinger. Lafontaine’s girlfriend, Sarah Wagenknecht, also reserved the right to compete against Bartsch.
Following the election of Katja Kipping (east faction) by delegates, Wagenknecht made a speech in which she withdrew her own nomination while strongly advising delegates not to pick Bartsch as co-chairman.
In a run-off vote, the largely unknown Riexinger, with 53.5 percent of the vote, was able to squeeze out Bartsch (45.2 percent). This leaves the Left Party in the hands of Kipping and Riexinger, each representing one of the two warring factions. Both have in common, however, their loyalty to the bourgeois state and their profound contempt for the working class.
Kipping is a member of the group “Institute for a Modern Solidarity,” which she founded in early 2010 together with representatives from the SPD and the Greens. The aim of the institute is to provide the basis for closer cooperation between the three parties based on the subordination of the issue of growing social inequality to lifestyle questions and fostering the self-gratification of the petty-bourgeoisie.
Riexinger, 56, is an experienced trade union bureaucrat. He trained to be a banker and throughout the 1980s was union representative at the Leonberger Building Society. He became a trade union secretary in 1991 and is currently a full-time Verdi official in Baden-Württemberg.
The party congress has resolved nothing for the Left Party. The internal conflicts intensify as the crisis deepens. A split is quite possible.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to write off the party prematurely. As the crisis develops, the ruling class may feel obliged to breathe new life into the organization. The sister party of the Left Party in Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), also went through a severe crisis and split before it was propped up by the media and gained political support following the collapse of the social democratic PASOK. Now it stands ready to take power following elections later this month and enforce austerity measures dictated by the international banks against the Greek population.
By Lucas Adler
6 June 2012
The Third Congress of the German Left Party, held last weekend in Göttingen, exposed sharp divisions and a deep crisis. The two-day meeting was marked by bitter clashes between opposing factions centered on the election of a new leadership.
The congress took place against the backdrop of a series of dramatic election defeats for the party and dwindling membership rolls. In 2009, the Left Party polled 11.9 percent in federal elections. Now, according to opinion polls, the party would have difficulty meeting the 5 percent threshold for gaining representation in the German parliament (Bundestag).
In a letter to delegates, the party’s senior council presented a grim vision of the state of the party. The party program adopted last year had hardly played a role in the life of the party and had been partly undermined, the letter declared. “Elections have been lost, there is a loss of 8,000 members, a loss of political influence, a lack of transparency in inner-party life,” the council complained.
In his speech to the congress, the outgoing chairman, Klaus Ernst, a leader of the faction centered in the west of the country, described the condition of the party. “We have approval ratings of 6 percent at the federal level,” he said. “We failed by a large margin to enter the state parliaments in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. In Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia we were tossed out unceremoniously. Our poll numbers are crumbling in the east. Overall, we have lost 9,000 members since 2009. Entire district organizations in the west have dissolved. We have signs of decay in our party.”
At the congress, the party demonstrated its inability to confront and discuss the political roots of this decline. Instead, the opposing wings attacked one another once again, claiming that each side was responsible for the deplorable state of the party.
For Klaus Ernst, the problem lay in the fact that the party had failed to establish a strong centre to counter the centrifugal forces within the party. “The only future for our party is to stay and fight together,” he told the delegates.
Ernst was followed by the chairman of the parliamentary group, Gregor Gysi, who heads the faction based in the east. In an angry speech, Gysi expressed his frustration over the infighting between the opposing wings of the party.
Gysis complained in particular about a criticism raised by members from the former West Germany which, he said, reminded him of the “western arrogance that prevailed following the unification of our country.” He continued: “But there is also hatred in our group in the Bundestag. For years, I have found myself standing between two locomotives moving towards each other, and I know that one can end up being crushed. For years, I have been in a situation where I had to make myself unpopular with one group or another, and I’m fed up with it.”
Gysi threatened to split the party. “Either we are able to choose a cooperative leadership that integrates and organizes the party, so that we are once again a major political force,” he said, “or we are not in a position to do so.” He continued, “In that case I say openly: It is better to separate cleanly rather than stay together with hatred, trickery and behind-the-back blows in a thoroughly ruined marriage.”
Most of the media reports on the congress depicted the debate as a conflict between a left wing based mainly in western Germany and led by the former party chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, and a right wing with its base in what had been East Germany, headed by Gysi and the party’s former national director, Dietmar Bartsch.
This presentation is misleading. The conflict within the party is between two right-wing factions with only marginal differences in terms of policy. Less than a year ago the delegates of both wings voted by 97 percent in favour of a joint policy statement that defended all the pillars of capitalism.
The media claim that the Lafontaine wing is not prepared to cooperate with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and participate in bourgeois governments is false. Lafontaine said so himself at the party congress. “Who made the offer in Hesse to form a government? It was the Left Party in Hesse,” he said. “Who made it possible for the government (the SPD-Green Party minority government in North Rhine-Westphalia) to constitute itself in the first place? It was the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia. Who offered on television to support the SPD taking over the premiership of the state after their successful election? I did.”
The intra-party dispute revolves, in fact, around the issue of how best to support the SPD.
Lafontaine was a leading member of the SPD for forty years until he quit in 1999 because he had concluded that the policy of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was unnecessarily undermining workers’ support for the SPD. Lafontaine is convinced that what is needed is a party capable of controlling workers and suppressing the class struggle. He is a student of Willy Brandt, the SPD chancellor who defused radical demonstrations in the 1970s with the slogan “dare more democracy” and a significant expansion of the universities and public services. At the same time, he introduced reactionary laws aimed at suppressing any serious opposition.
Lafontaine was the architect of the merger in 2007 between the group of prominent trade union officials and ex-social democrats organised in the Election Alternative (WASG) and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the ruling East German Stalinist party. Lafontaine’s aim from the start was to divert political radicalization among workers into harmless channels. He did so primarily by encouraging the illusion that it was possible to return to the type of social democratic reforms that had characterised the Brandt era, simply ignoring the process of globalization and the increased domination of the international financial markets over political life.
The Lafontaine wing is just as conservative and supportive of the bourgeois state as the Bartsch wing. Lafontaine’s supporters have been recruited from long-time union officials with links to the SPD and former petty-bourgeois radicals whom the Left Party offered an opportunity to gain public office, with the attendant privileges. Ernst, the outgoing chairman and Lafontaine’s right-hand man, was a full-time district secretary with the IG Metall trade union in Schweinfurt. His successor, Bernd Riexinger, comes from the same region and is a district secretary with the Verdi public service union.
Lafontaine believes the Left Party can fulfill its task only if adopts a radical tone verbally and keeps a certain distance from the SPD, at least during elections and when the SPD is in opposition. But like Bartsch, his main aim is to assist the SPD in coming to power as soon as the Left Party has achieved the necessary influence.
The Bartsch faction objects to Lafontaine’s radical rhetoric and occasional digs at the SPD due its roots in the Stalinist apparatus and its extensive involvement in government at the state and local level in eastern Germany. In the east of the country, the Left Party shares power with the SPD (as well as the conservative Christian Democratic Union—CDU) in numerous local administrations, and the eastern-based faction therefore regards Lafontaine’s rhetoric as disruptive to its daily functioning and its harmonious relations with the political establishment. Its motto is taken from the text book of Stalinist governance: “Adherence to public order is the highest civic duty.”
The intensification of the capitalist crisis has revealed the basic right-wing orientation of the Left Party. This is the reason for its current decline and the fierce infighting that erupted over the issue of a new party leadership.
Lafontaine wanted to prevent at all costs the election of Bartsch as co-chairman (the constitution of the Left Party provides for a duel chair, including at least one woman), but was not prepared to air his differences publicly. Instead, he employed all sorts of maneuvers and back-room deals to prevent the election of Bartsch. To this end he had to exert all of his influence within the party.
Initially, he had proposed his own candidacy as chairman on the condition that Bartsch withdraw his candidacy. Bartsch refused to play along and Lafontaine withdrew from the race in favour of his close confidante, Bernd Riexinger. Lafontaine’s girlfriend, Sarah Wagenknecht, also reserved the right to compete against Bartsch.
Following the election of Katja Kipping (east faction) by delegates, Wagenknecht made a speech in which she withdrew her own nomination while strongly advising delegates not to pick Bartsch as co-chairman.
In a run-off vote, the largely unknown Riexinger, with 53.5 percent of the vote, was able to squeeze out Bartsch (45.2 percent). This leaves the Left Party in the hands of Kipping and Riexinger, each representing one of the two warring factions. Both have in common, however, their loyalty to the bourgeois state and their profound contempt for the working class.
Kipping is a member of the group “Institute for a Modern Solidarity,” which she founded in early 2010 together with representatives from the SPD and the Greens. The aim of the institute is to provide the basis for closer cooperation between the three parties based on the subordination of the issue of growing social inequality to lifestyle questions and fostering the self-gratification of the petty-bourgeoisie.
Riexinger, 56, is an experienced trade union bureaucrat. He trained to be a banker and throughout the 1980s was union representative at the Leonberger Building Society. He became a trade union secretary in 1991 and is currently a full-time Verdi official in Baden-Württemberg.
The party congress has resolved nothing for the Left Party. The internal conflicts intensify as the crisis deepens. A split is quite possible.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to write off the party prematurely. As the crisis develops, the ruling class may feel obliged to breathe new life into the organization. The sister party of the Left Party in Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), also went through a severe crisis and split before it was propped up by the media and gained political support following the collapse of the social democratic PASOK. Now it stands ready to take power following elections later this month and enforce austerity measures dictated by the international banks against the Greek population.
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