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Geekery Today: posts tagged Illinois
The CALL for Chicagoland Anarchy (posted 9 June 2008)
There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
—Last words of August Spies (1887-11-11), Chicago anarchist, organizer, and Haymarket martyr
Via Bob Kaercher:
I and The One Who Is Called
Soviet Onionhave recently been discussing via e-mail the prospects for founding a Chicago area chapter of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I for one think it would be a tremendous achievement to establish an ALL chapter in a city rich in the history of American radical politics. CALL (Chicago Alliance of the Libertarian Left) strikes me as a particularly cool acronym.But we’re not just looking for like-minded left-libertarians in the Chicago metropolitan area. If you live anywhere in northern Illiniois, northwestern Indiana or southern Wisconsin, we’d love to hear from you.
What do I mean by “like-minded”? As Charles W. Johnson (of RadGeek.com) sums it up on the web site for the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left, we are looking for
[I]ndividualists, agorists, market anarchists, mutualists, voluntary socialists, and others on the libertarian left. We oppose statism, militarism, sexism, racism, and the prevailing state capitalism fraudulently labeled
the free market.We are for peace, individual freedom, truly freed markets, solidarity, voluntary cooperation, and mutual aid. We fight for liberation…using education, nonviolent direct action, and cooperative counter-institutions—not petitions, symbolic protests or electoral politics. We are working to build a new society within the shell of the old.If you’re interested and in the northern Illinois/southern Wisconsin/northwestern Indiana area, by all means drop me a line at the e-mail address to your right. Charles has already been kind enough to set up a web site domain for us. All we need now is a fancy new web site to park in it.
Once we can get some folks together electronically, we can then proceed to gather everyone physically at the most convenient location—perhaps a place we can grab a bite to eat, a drink, or at least a cup of coffee—and discuss how to proceed.
Agora! Anarchy! Action!
—Bob Kaercher, The Postmodern Tribune (2008-06-05): CALLing ALL Chicago Area Libertarian Lefties
No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter…. (posted 6 May 2008)
But wait, there’s more.
In Tulare County, California, the county sheriff’s office has formed a new, dedicated Gang Unit
to engage in saturation patrols
of the south end of town, to pull over suspicious cars
(any guess on what color suspicious
drivers are likely to be), get in the faces
of suspect
young men (any guess on what the color of those faces will be?), and generally to make sure that certain members of the public are afraid to use public spaces. By putting more heavily-armed police officers on the streets, they claim to be taking weapons off the streets.
Gang Unit mouthpiece Sergeant Harold Liles says that the purpose of all this letting them know we are here, and the streets belong to us.
In Wilmington, Delaware, a new charter school is in the planning stages. It will enroll as many as 600 inner-city high school students — or rather, Cadets
— for training in jobs for the front lines in the Nation’s [sic] homeland security.
The Academy
will require its teenaged cadets
to wear uniforms, give them extensive physical training during and after school, offer homeland security training
as an after-school activity, and offer a choice of vocational curricula ranging from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator.
Meanwhile, in the great northwest, Montana Highway Patrol used to carry M14 rifles in the trunks of their patrol cars in case of an emergency. Soon they will all be carrying AR-15 assault rifles strapped to the front seat of the car. Montana Highway Patrol mouthpiece Jerril Ren says that For the most part, they’re trying to make them [high-powered assault rifles] more readily available to the officer
and said that the higher-powered guns were necessary for now-common tactical situations.
Inner-city patrol cops in Miami have also been carrying assault rifles for the past few months, at the behest of city Police Chief John Timoney.
Johnson City, Tennessee patrol cops were already armed with handguns and shotguns. Now they have started a new weapons program to ensure that at least some patrol cops are carrying other, special weapons
on every patrol shift. They won’t say in public what those weapons are or how many they are putting onto the streets.
And if you’re wondering why all these stories have suddenly hit the news so close to each other, over just the last month, in so many different cities and counties, my suspicion is that you’ve got the answer right there: the United States federal government, which spent the past 30 years or so involving itself in state and local law enforcement agencies through the use of tax-funded training, grants, and equipment sales for paramilitary SWAT
teams and anti-terrorism
task forces, now seems to be making use of those same grants to more heavily arm and more thoroughly militarize ordinary patrol cops on the highway, in the inner city, and in rural sheriff’s offices.
Do you feel safer now?
See also:
- GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?
- GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
- GT 2008-02-18: Cops are here to protect you.
- GT 2008-04-25: We need government cops because private protection forces would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people.
- GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over
May Day 2008 (posted 1 May 2008)
There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
—Last words of August Spies (1887-11-11), immigrant, anarchist, and Haymarket martyr
Fellow workers:
Today is May Day, or International Workers’ Day, a holiday created by Chicago workers—most of them anarchists—to honor the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and to celebrate the struggle of workers for freedom, for a better life, and for control over the conditions of their own labor. It was created during the radical phase of the struggle for an eight-hour day: after legislative campaigns by the Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union failed, labor radicals in Chicago — organizers like Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, August Spies — declared that workers should take matters into their own hands, in the form of direct action on the shop floor. Workers would no longer try to get an eight-hour day by promising a useful and compliant voter base in return for patronage from politicians. To get an eight-hour shift, workers would make their own: in many shops, workers in the International Working People’s Association would bring their own whistle to work and blow it at the end of an eight hour shift — at which point most or all of the workers on the floor would just get up and just walk off, like the free people they were, whether or not the boss demanded more hours of labor. At the height of the struggle, they organized a General Strike, in defiance of the bosses and in spite of repeated violence from the Law.
Today is also the third annual day of rallies, strikes and marches against the criminalization of immigrant workers. A day which immigrant workers have chosen for actions against the bigotry of nativist bullies, the violence of La Migra, and the political system of international apartheid, as contemptible as it is lethal. A day to proudly proclaim We are not criminals
and We are not going anywhere,
to demand the only political program that recognizes it — open borders and unconditional amnesty for all undocumented workers.
And it is a joy for me to read that today is also a day of strikes against the bosses’ war in Iraq, which will shut down all the sea ports on the west coast of the United States, as an act of defiance against the State war machine and against the worthless political opportunists who promise to end it while voting, over and over again, to sustain it:
Amid this political atmosphere, dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all U.S. West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers’ Day, to call for an end to the war.
This decision came after an impassioned debate where the union’s Vietnam veterans turned the tide of opinion in favor of the anti-war resolution. The motion called it an imperial action for oil in which the lives of working-class youth and Iraqi civilians were being wasted and declared May Day a
no peace, no workholiday. Angered after supporting Democrats who received a mandate to end the war but who now continue to fund it, longshoremen decided to exercise their political power on the docks.
The Longshore workers have the explicit support of postal workers in New York and San Francisco, and I hope this will be only the beginning of ongoing, widespread industrial action to end a war that political action — even after two election cycles, after hundreds of millions of dollars, after countless hours of lobbying and electioneering, after a change in government, and with the backing of an overwhelming supermajority of the populace — has proven completely incapable of ending.
This is May Day as it is and ought to be. A Day of Resistance against the arrogance and power of bosses, bordercrats, bullies, and the Maters of War, who would harass us, intimidate us, silence us, exploit us, beat us, jail us, deport us, extort us, and do anything else it takes to stop us from coming into our own. A day to celebrate workers’ struggles for dignity, and for freedom, through organizing in their own self-interest, through agitating and exhorting for solidarity, and through free acts of worker-led direct action to achieve their goals, marching under the banners of We are all leaders here
and Dump the bosses of your back.
A day to remember:
There Is Power In A Union
There is power, there is power,
In a band of working folk,
When we stand
Hand in hand.—Joe Hill (1913)
Radio Bilingüe has a list of immigration marches and rallies across the country today. I plan to be at the mitin in Las Vegas tonight:
- Las Vegas immigrant rights mitin (rally)
- Tonight, May 1, 2008, 7:00 PM
- Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Blvd S.
Meanwhile, in the news, some useless idiot is wandering around Washington proclaiming Law Day
, accosting hundreds of millions of complete strangers to tell them to put on ceremonies
in praise of his own power to do the beating, jailing, deporting, etc. In Istanbul, organized workers marched to Taksim Square in defiance of the Turkish government, which has declared their free assembly illegal,
and which has deployed government riot cops to attack them with firehoses and tear gas. In Harare, organized workers are holding rallies today to call attention to the devastating effect of the government’s hyperinflationary money monopoly on workers’ wages—and an apparatchik of the Zimbabwean government—one of the most violently anti-worker governments in the world—is taking the opportunity to wear a concerned expression and assure that Government would at all times endeavour to make sure that workplaces were monitored through inspections to minimize hazards that might injure or kill them.
(No word yet on whether the hazards
the inspectors will be inspecting for include the Zimbabwe Republic Police or the Central Intelligence Organization.) We must never forget what this band of creeps and fools is doing their best to remind us of — that the State is the most deadly weapon of our enemies, and that it is a weapon that we will never be able to wield for ourselves without chaining ourselves to politics and destroying the very things we meant to fight for.
In this season and in these days, in the midst of Babel during its most raucous festival—when so much of what we see and hear are the endless shouts of professional blowhards who know of no form of social change other than political change, and who know of no site of political change other than the gladiatorial arena of electoral politics, and who seem to know of no form of electoral politics other than polling, horse-trading, and endlessly shouting about a series of nomenklatura-contrived issues,
which boil down to little more than a media-facilitated exchange of racist, sexist, ageist, and authoritarian barbs among the nomenklatura-approved serious candidates
—it’s important to remember that, in spite of all the noise and spectacle, the most significant events for labor and for human freedom are happening in the streets of cities all over the country and all over the world, where workers are organizing among themselves, demanding their rights, fighting for their lives, and defying or simply bypassing the plutocrats and their so-called laws. In the U.S.A., while the punch-drunk establishmentarian labor movement reels from one failure to another, some of the most dynamic and successful labor struggles in the past few years have been fought by a grassroots union organized along syndicalist lines without NLRB recognition, using creative secondary boycott tactics which would be completely illegal if they had submitted to the regulatory patronage of the Wagner-Taft-Hartley system. There is a lesson here—a lesson for workers, for organizers, for agitators, and anti-statists. One we’d do well to remember when confronted by any of the bosses—whether corporate bosses or political, the labor fakirs and the authoritarian thugs styling themselves the vanguard of the working class, the regulators and the deporters and the patronizing friends of labor
all:
Dump the Bosses Off Your Back
Are you cold, forelorn, and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back!—John Brill (1916)
Happy May Day, y’all.
Elsewhere Today:
- Scott McLemee, Crooked Timber 2008-04-30: All Out for May Day
- Gulf Stream Blues 2008-05-01: Labour Movements Cry
Mayday!
Further reading:
Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter? (posted 28 April 2008)
In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley wants patrol cops in the inner city to carry M4 assault rifles on the streets.
In Springfield, patrol cops in the inner city are going to switch to black, military-style uniforms
on the streets. According to cop mouthpiece Sergeant John Delaney, the purpose of the new uniforms is in order to make sure that the cops spread a sense of fear
.
Do you feel safer now?
Further reading:
Roe v. Wade Day #35 (posted 22 January 2008)
The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.
…
There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.
—Lucinda Cisler (1969): Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women
To-day is the 35th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, the jubilee day on which abortion laws were repealed in every state of the United States, and the United States judiciary recognized, finally, even if in a limited and limiting way, every woman’s fundamental human right to control her own body, and to exercise her rightful self-ownership, if she sees fit, to refuse the use of her reproductive organs to Man, Fetus, and State. There’s a lot not to like about the specifics of the reasoning in Roe, and it’s often frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’ve got to celebrate, or at least defend. But if nothing else, it is worth celebrating the pro-choice feminist movement that made Roe inevitable, and which won Roe for the capstone of a remarkable, explosive struggle, over the course of just under 4 years, from the decisive beginning of the pro-choice feminist movement in early 1969, to the Supreme Court decision in January 1973. (There was a small, barely effectual abortion law reform movement before 1969; but February and March 1969 marked the beginning of the abortion law repeal movement, and also the beginning of the pro-choice argument — that is, early 1969 is when the argument shifted from the old tack of getting people to feel sorry for the poor desperate girl, to the new demand by radicalized women for their right to the determine how their own bodies will or will not be used.) The repeal movement exploded basically out of nowhere, at a time when abortion was criminalized in every one of the 50 states. Led by a coalition of radical Women’s Liberationists and radicalized ordinary women, the new movement quickly shoved aside the male experts,
both reactionary and reformist, who had dominated the discourse for decades beforehand, threw out the request for piecemeal reforms
(of the rape-incest-health of the mother variety), demanded instead the complete repeal of all abortion laws, and then won, first with the New York state repeal in 1971, and then with the nation-wide repeal in January 1973. That’s something to remember, and to celebrate.
Men don’t get pregnant, men don’t bear children. Men just make laws.
—Redstockings demonstrator, at a New York legislative hearing on abortion laws, 13 February 1969
Like all anniversaries, this is a good day for remembering, and for honoring. One of the things I think it is most important to remember on this day, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the way in which the occasion is attached to a legal ruling handed down by nine men in black robes, is a matter of strategy. It is all too easy to make the latest political cockfight out as the be-all and end-all of pro-choice activism; to realize, correctly, that the legal position of abortion rights is really precarious and to leap, incorrectly, to the conclusion that if Roe falls, that will be the end of it. No it won’t. The pro-life
State had its guns trained on us before, and we beat it. If it turns its guns on us again, that will be terrible, but we will beat it again nevertheless. Perhaps by once again forcing the hand of state legislators or the courts. Or perhaps not. There are other ways to get it done. Here is how a group of women in Chicago took matters into their own hands, years before Roe, without the blessing of the male experts
and in defiance of the man-made Law, in order to make justice for their sisters a reality.
Radical women in Chicago poured their energy into Jane, an abortion referral service initiated by Heather Booth, who had been a one-woman grapevine for her college classmates. In 1971, after Booth’s departure, some of the women took matters into their own hands and secretly began to perform the abortions themselves. Safe, compassionate terminations for a modest fee became their high calling—a model, as they saw it, for women’s empowerment after the revolution.
Leaflets appeared in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the University of Chicago bearing a simple message:
Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane at 643-3844.The number rang at the home of one of the activists who volunteered to beJane.As word spread and the volume of calls increased, the service acquired its own phone line and an answering machine, a cumbersome reel-to-reel device that was one of the first on the market. Volunteers, known inside the service ascall-back Janes,visited the abortion seekers to elicit crucial medical details (most important waslmp,the number of weeks since the last menstrual period), then another level of volunteers scheduled an appointment with one of the abortionists on the group’s list.At first the service relied on
Mike in Cicero,who was fast, efficient, and willing to lower his price to five hundred dollars as the volume increased. Mike gradually let down his guard with Jody Parsons, his principal Jane contact, an artisan who sold her beaded jewelry and ceramics at street fairs and was a survivor of Hodgkin’s disease. The clandestine abortionist and the hippy artisan struck up a bond. When Mike confessed that he was not in fact a real doctor but merely a trained technician, she cajoled him into teaching her his skills. Jody’s rapid success in learning to maneuver the dilating clamps, curettes, and forceps demystified the forbidden procedures for another half dozen women in Jane.If he can do it, then we can do itbecame their motto.Madeline Schwenk, a banker’s daughter who had married at twenty,
six months pregnant with no clue whatsoever about how to get an abortion,moved from counseling to vacuum aspiration after Harvey Karman, the controversial director of a California clinic, came to Chicago to demonstrate his technique. Madeline was one of the few women in Jane who was active in NOW, and who stayed affiliated with the Chicago chapter during the year she wielded her cannula and curette for the service.I’d get up in the morning, make breakfast for my three kids, go off to do the abortions, then go home to make dinner,she reminisces.Pretty ourageous behavior when you think about it. But exciting.Jane’s abortion practitioners and their assistants were able to handle a total of thirty cases a day at affordable fees—under one hundred dollars. A doctor and a pharmacist among the women’s contacts kept them supplied with antibiotics.
Fear of police surveillance in radical circles had its match among clandestine abortionists who relied on a complicated rigamarole of blindfolds and middlemen. Jane straddled both worlds. Abortion seekers gathered every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at a
frontapartment, usually the home of a Jane member or friend, and were escorted by Jane drivers tothe Place,a rented apartment where the abortions were performed. The fronts and the Place changed on a regular basis. New volunteers, brought into the group by counselors and drivers, went through a probation period before they were told that women in Jane were doing the abortions. The news did not sit well with everyone. Turnover was high, from fear and from burnout, although the service usually maintained its regular complement of thirty members.Jane lost most of its middle-class clientele after the New York law [repealing the state’s abortion ban] went into effect. Increasingly it began to service South Side women, poor and black, who did not have the money to travel out of state, and whose health problems, from high blood pressure to obesity, were daunting. Pressure on the providers intensified. Audaciously they added second-trimester abortionsby induced miscarriage to their skills.
On May 3, 1972, near the conclusion of a busy work day in an eleventh-floor apartment on South Shore Drive overlooking Lake Michigan, Jane got busted. Seven women, including Madeline Schwenk, were arrested and bailed out the following day. The Chicago Daily News blared Women Seized in Cut-Rate Clinic in a front-page banner. The Tribune buried Lib Groups Linked to Abortions on an inside page. Six weeks later the service was back in buinsess. Wisely, the women facing criminal charges selected a defense attorney who was clued in to and optimistic about the national picture. She advised them to hang tight—some interesting developments were taking place in Washington that could help their case. (After the January 1973 Roe decision, all outstanding charges against the seven were dropped.)
The activists of Jane believe they performed more than ten thousand abortions. It’s a ballpark figure based on the number of procedures they remember doing in a given week. For security reasons they did not keep records.
—Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, pp. 123—125
The repeal of the abortion laws in the United States wasn’t a gift handed down out of benevolence by a gang of old men in robes. It was struggled for, and won, by women in our own times. It didn’t take ballot boxes; it didn’t take political parties; it didn’t take clever legal briefs. It took radical women who stood up for themselves, who challenged the authority of self-appointed male experts
and law-makers, who spoke truth to power, who took things into their own hands and helped their sisters, in defiance of the law, because they knew that they had a right to do it, and to hell with any law and any government that said otherwise. Radical feminists who built a movement for their own freedom over a matter of months and decisively changed the world in less than five years. It’s not just that we owe the Redstockings, Cindy Cisler, Heather Booth, Jody Parsons, Madeline Schwenk, and so many others our praise. They do deserve our cheers, but they also deserve our study and our emulation. They did amazing things, and we — feminists, leftists, anti-statists — owe it not only to them, but to ourselves, to honor them by trying to learn from their example.
