Thrown Under The Bus Again?

Anticipated publication at CounterPunch the week of May 1, 2017.

Thrown under the bus again?

Common sense needs to inform those on the left that hitching our collective and individual aspirations to the Democratic Party is like throwing oneself under a proverbial bus and expecting to come out of the catastrophe unscathed. The latter happens with about the same regularity and predictability as trains that ran during Mussolini’s rule.

After witnessing the decades of abandonment of left causes and ideals by the Democratic Party establishment, we need to have learned a lesson. The political duopoly in the U.S. is nothing less than a great and spectacular failure. The party that says it is the champion of both the working class and middle class is full of more hot air than a balloon.

The latest example of the failure of Wall Street interests and the permanent warring class within the Democratic Party is the presidential campaign of 2016. Rigged from the beginning within the Democratic National Committee, the idealism and energy that fueled the Sanders campaign never had a chance. The neoliberals who supported Hillary Clinton would not allow the Sanders campaign to be successful at the polls. And indeed with the forces of neofascism in play, the outcome of a matchup between Sanders and Trump would have been completely unpredictable.

And now we have the unity campaign of the Democrats, with the deputy chair of the DNC, Keith Ellison, and Bernie Sanders working their way across the country at rallies and stops in support of candidates they believe can win elections throughout the country at all levels of government, which is also one of the objectives of Our Revolution, a spinoff of the Sanders campaign.

On one stop of the “Unity Tour,” Senator Sanders rallied for Heath Mello, a candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Mello, who as a state senator in Nebraska supported a bill requiring that women be informed that they have a “right” to a fetal ultrasound before having an abortion. At least the favored words of the antichoice right, “unborn child,” weren’t in the bill.

In Nebraska, the politics of the traditional base of the Democratic Party and the party’s leadership clashed like the storms of spring.

Readers would do well to read Ashely Smith’s May 2015 article in the Socialist Worker, “The problem with Bernie Sanders.” The article is prescient and accurately predicts much of what would happen in the presidential campaign of 2016.  Of particular interest is Smith’s cataloging of Sanders’ record on war and peace. This is especially important to consider when the warmongering that has gone unabated since the September 2001 attacks is front and center once again in the Trump administration:

“His foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats. Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that gave the administration a green light to launch the war on Afghanistan. While he did vote against Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly supported funding resolutions for both U.S. occupations. He is also a Zionist who supports Israel consistently, even after its recent escalations of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In fairness to Senator Sanders, when issues were presented to him that diverged from the traditional cant of the Democratic Party establishment, he did, to a degree, incorporate those policy positions in his 2016 presidential campaign. He was the only candidate not to appear at the 2016 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference (“Bernie’s bold move: Sanders only candidate to skip AIPAC pro-Israel conference, Salon, March 18, 2016). Sanders remains the most popular politician in the U.S. today according to a Harvard-Harris survey (“Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in the Country, Poll Says,” Mother Jones, April 2017).

In a Democracy Now interview (“Cornel West & Former Sanders Staffer on Movement to Draft Bernie for a New ‘People’s Party’ in U.S.,” April 25, 2017), Professor Cornel West and former Sanders staffer Nick Brana make an impassioned case for a People’s Party to challenge the duopoly in the 2020 general election. The appeal makes perfect sense except for the fact that the two-party system is hardwired into most people’s mindset and it merits noting that false economic populism and fear mongering carried the election in 2016. Without a multiparty tradition in the U.S., and candidates success, to an extent, dependent on fear and loathing that is underwritten by the two-party system, the ideal of a People’s Party is a very, very distant prospect.

The track record of third-party candidates on the left has not been promising. Candidates like Ralph Nader and Jill Stein faced daunting obstacles in their campaigns, while third-party candidates on the right have done much better.

The daily outrages of the Trump administration continue ad nauseam, and the Democratic Party would like people to believe that Wall Street and individual donors from the 1% are the only source of campaign funding. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is not necessarily so.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

Hope, Lost Along the Road of Electoral Politics

Campaign headquarters in Upstate New York. Photo by Howie Lisnoff.

 

Hope, Lost Along the Road of Electoral Politics

What History Says About Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

From blog.edu.ecu

What History Says About Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The newspaper lay on the cement apron of the step to our home in the early 1950s. I did not know how to read then, but I clearly remember the enormous size of the newspaper’s headline and the fact that whatever news that paper related, it caused tremendous upset in my home. Years later I would learn that it told of the execution of the so-called atomic spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on June 19, 1953, on the charge of conspiracy to transmit the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The echoes of the Rosenberg spy case come cascading down through the decades. From the perspective of the New Left, the Rosenbergs, members of the Old Left, were framed by the U.S. government during the worst period of Cold War hysteria. It was an accepted premise on the Left that the U.S. government invented false charges against the Rosenbergs in the midst of the Cold War— and the hot war in Korea—then convened a kangaroo court to convict the couple. But the end of the Cold War brought the release of historical records, particularly the Venona project (1943-1980), a counter-intelligence program that was begun by the U.S. Army and later involved the CIA. The information from Venona was corroborated by Soviet intelligence records. Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy according to the historical record. But, he was not a spy in the way the government of the U.S. prosecuted Ethel and him.

Now Michael and Robert Meeropol, the adopted name of the Rosenberg sons, want their mother, Ethel, exonerated. They’ve gone to Barack Obama with their request. There is absolutely no evidence that Ethel Rosenberg took part in the so-called conspiracy to transmit the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, the spying on which the Rosenbergs were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, were convicted, and sentenced to death. And there is no evidence that Julius transmitted the co-called secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. His spying did involve giving the U.S. ally, the Soviet Union, secrets about radar, the proximity fuze, and other military information that qualifies as espionage, but not of the kind that would have justified execution under the law with which the Rosenbergs were tried. The Soviet Union was an ally of the U.S. at the time Julius transmitted secrets to them during World War II. And the Soviet Union, along with the Allies, were largely instrumental in stopping the murderous Nazi military juggernaut that had destroyed Europe and most of European Jewry. Julius was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union on behalf of the communist party in the U.S., but he had no expertise or information about the Manhattan Project to have given anything useful about the so-called secret for the development of an atomic bomb.  He did, however, recruit an engineer involved in the Manhattan Project who provided information from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a facility that produced bomb-grade uranium.  The famous drawing of the bomb that Julius’ brother-in-law David Greenglass gave the spy Harry Gold was useless. Some say that that drawing, combined with other drawings, helped the Soviets develop their own atomic bomb. But the Soviets developed the bomb largely because they also had highly trained scientists.

Some historians believe that released Soviet documents show that Ethel knew of Julius’ spying activities for the Soviets, that Ethel evaluated potential recruits for spying, and performed other functions helpful to the Soviets (“What 60 Minutes Got Wrong About Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” The Washington Free Beacon, October 20, 2016). The question must be asked again, however, if spying for an ally as a possible co-conspirator merits the death penalty when the specific act that Ethel was charged with was one she did not commit?

Some historians have also left out the fact that Ethel Rosenberg was never given a code name from Soviet intelligence. Most damaging to Ethel, however, was the fact that her brother, David Greenglass, perjured himself at trial by falsely testifying that Ethel had typed notes on spying activities for the Soviets. In truth, his testimony was to  save his wife Ruth, who actually typed those notes, and that led Greenglass to testify falsely against his sister.

The hysteria generated by the Cold War must have been frightening for anyone caught in its grips. Thousands of teachers, professors, social workers, unionists, and others lost their jobs across the U.S. McCarthyism was the order of the day. The Rosenbergs were blamed for the carnage of the Korean War and held responsible by some for the 33,652 American deaths there.

No comparable accounting of blame was leveled at any policy maker in the U.S. for between 90,000 to 146,000 deaths from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or between 39,000 to 80,000 dead at Nagasaki. Those deaths were justified in order to save the lives that would have been lost if the Allies had invaded Japan. Here, history records that Japan was ready to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped.

The prevalence of anti-Semitism also cannot be discounted when considering the Rosenbergs’ fate. Anti-Semistim was at its zenith during and after the war and the Rosenbergs took on the negative stereotype of radical Jews.

Reading the comment section of an article published in the Boston Globe following Michael and Robert Meeropol’s appearance on 60 Minutes (“The Rosenberg Boys: The Cold War’s Most Famous Orphans,” October 16, 2016), a reader might conclude that this nation was still in the midst of a communist conspiracy that must be stopped. Here are four individual comments from the Globe (“In new twist in Rosenberg spy saga, sons seek mother’s exoneration,” October 19, 2016) that are fairly representative of the animosity toward Ethel and Julius Rosenberg all of these decades later:

•“She was on board…”

•“… how disturbed… I felt that American  Jews could show any allegiance to the Russian state.”

•“Ethel was guilty and by her actions helped Stalin kill and prepare to kill…”

•“Ethel was also guilty, but less so.”

The Rosenbergs lived through the Great Depression and believed that Soviet communism was a means toward achieving a better world, particularly a world where economic and social differences would be addressed. They may have been blinded by their political philosophy. They believed that by aiding the Soviets, and through the Soviets achieving parity in weapons, a better world could come about. Many in the Old Left would not accept the truth about Stalin’s Great Purge, but decades later millions were swayed by their political beliefs in their endorsement of Richard Nixon’s and Lyndon Johnson’s murderous rampage through Southeast Asia and George W. Bush’s war policies and nation building in the Middle East. Following the attacks of 2001, the War on Terror carried with it many of the fears that were part of the Cold War.

The Rosenbergs would also not name the names of their political allies, something that was most obviously on the mind of the federal government as they tried to break Julius by the imprisonment of Ethel and the potential of the death penalty. But Ethel would not take part in that plan, as dedication to one’s associates and each other was highly valued in their political belief system.

There are no good answers when looking at the fate of the Rosenbergs all of these decades later. Questions pile up upon questions and the wretched condition of humanity in a state of perpetual warfare goes on and on. The bodies of the dead and the innocent pile up in the charnel house of history.

Here are selected totals of war dead during World War II. Six million Jews… U.S. war dead: 407,316… U.S.S.R. war dead: 26,600,000. Worldwide war dead: Over 60,000,000.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

The Case of One Homeless Person

The Case of One Homeless Person

Dappled Sunlight on August Woodpile

Woodpile photo by Howie Lisnoff.

 

Dappled Sunlight On August Woodpile

Wood stacked for fall and winter, perhaps a cold spring… catches the warm dappled afternoon sun and south wind… It is early August… Too soon to contemplate the pain and inevitability of leave-taking.

Par 4 Near the Killing Fields

Rainy scene from a Vietnamese restaurant on Madison Avenue, Albany, NY. Photo by Howie Lisnoff.

 

Par 4 Near the Killing Fields

Rain pools and flows into east rivers down Madison Avenue in Albany after so many weeks of crackling blue skies and heat. From the window of the Vietnamese restaurant, forty-one years past the mayhem and murder of Southeast Asian children and crimes of grotesque war… They murdered kids at Kent and Jackson, too… They are still killing for power and glory and wealth and God, the kids of Africa and the Middle East and the places between… It does not end… A classic piano solo plays in ever-rising beauty against the gray day as an answer to the madness… It does not work… The sons of bitches have turned this planet into a battlefield for the hell of it. Retirees are golfing near the killing fields.

High Summer

Cumulus clouds… Photo by Howie  Lisnoff.

 

High Summer

 

Great endless trailing masses of white billowing cumulus ride in on a west wind.

Street Scene/Greenwich Village

 

 

 

Photo of Judson Tower, Washington Square Park by Howie Lisnoff.

 

Street Scene/Greenwich Village

You burst with unbridled confidence and unadorned beauty

Onto the 60s’ scene of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park

Coming from work on Wall Street

To the heart of the counterculture

It was summer

You wore a white dress with a floating multicolored balloon motif

Everything was in motion

Your hair catching in radiance the shimmering sun near Judson Tower

This was your summer of the Russian novel

It could have been Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Crime and Punishment

Long, plodding works of much illumination

Did all of this happen in a single, fleeting moment in time?

Was there great hope and change?

Did we have such impeccable ideals?

And unbounded caring?

Late Summer

Summer scene, Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, N.Y. Photo by Howie Lisnoff.

 

Late Summer

You walked on Charles Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, your signature sandals against the wet pavement. Our steps echoed magically within the endless city noise. I thought, too cold for bare feet, but you persevered long into the waning season. Perseverance would become your moniker. These were the days of great change and great hope when idealism and fearlessness were indistinguishable. I look across the room at you today, still beautiful in a world of unspeakable horror and ugliness.

In The Sun

View of the Providence’s downtown from the East Side. Photo by Howie Lisnoff.

In the Sun

You lay on the lounge chair on the patio outside of Andrews Hall off of Bowen Street on Providence’s East Side. Your skin glistening with tanning lotion in the late-spring sun, its fragrance of an ocean beach, the sky a robin’s egg blue. It was the perfection of nature and the reality of beauty. It is good to be able to remember amid the chaos of the world that all of this existed for a brief moment and could be preserved in memory.