Olympia, WA (4-22-15) — A 39-year old Tenino husband named Joseph Charles Tommasi (DOB: 4-5-76) has been charged with beating and raping his wife (Thurston Superior Court Case #:15-1-00540-9) under RCW 9A.44.050(1)(a) & 9A.36.021(1)(g). As a legal technicality, it remains to be seen whether a husband can be convicted of ‘raping’ (in law) a spouse though the crime of sexual assault itself is certainly tenable.

Mr. Tommasi was arrested Saturday after allegedly beating and raping his wife. The man (now facing charges of 2nd degree rape and 2nd degree assault) appeared Monday before Thurston County’s Superior Court Judge Anne Hirsch (previously the director of the county’s public defender group). Hirsch set bail at $5,000 which Tommasi met and was released on along with conditions such as no contact with the victim, surrender any/all firearms, keep his attorney advised as to his whereabouts, obey all laws, etc. Tommasi plead indigence (claimed he could not afford an attorney) and the court granted him court appointed counsel. [Mr. Tommasi owns a residence, 698 Sussex Ave W, Tenino, WA, valued at $186,367 in 2014.]

Police began investigating Tommasi after his wife called 911 and reported he had punched her in the head. She reported her husband was coming back and hung up according to court documents.

When officers arrived at the Tenino home, the woman stated her husband had accused her of cheating on him. She said he pinned her to the ground and forced his hand down her pants. He then put a pillow over her head and hit her according to the victim’s statement. She said she believed her husband put the pillow over her head so that he wouldn’t leave a mark when hitting her, and to prevent her from breathing. At Monday’s court, Hirsch prohibited the man from any contact with his wife. He is scheduled to be arraigned 5-5-15.

The following article isn’t really connected to Mr. Tommasi in any way other than the subject of it bears the same name. (The Joseph Charles Tommasi of the NSLF referenced below left a widow carrying his child at the time of his death. The name similarity and DOB raise the interesting question of whether the Tommasi now charged with the offenses listed above is the son of the man described in the following repost?) It is posted here to compare the common methodology held by certain miscreants and violent street radicals…both right, left, and @narcho-extremists:

(Editor’s Note: This publication does not support the ideas in the following screed and is not associated with those who do.)

A ‘tribute’ to Joseph Charles Tommasi (1951 – 1975)
by Tom Metzger from www.angelfire.com (a white supremacy web site)

I knew Joe Tommassi personally back in the early seventies. I met him and some of his NSLF soldiers at the New Christian Crusade Church convention headed by James K. Warner. I was still wet behind the ears and pretty naive at the time. Actually the first physical meet was when the hotel elevator door slid open into the meeting hall and there he was. Dressed in Levis, a sweat shirt and army fatigue jacket plus combat boots. In fact all his men were dressed like 60’s left wing radicals. There was one very beautiful girl in the group also and she dressed the same. I talked to Joe for a few minutes but it was obvious he was way out front of what I was into. But he was very gracious and polite as we spoke.

And then they were gone like people on a mission. Later when Joe rolled a surplus smoke grenade down the isle of the Hollywood theater that was premiering the big budget Film “Holocaust” I laughed and laughed. On the smoke bomb he had attached a note. “HELLO THIS IS A FREINDLY GIFT FROM YOUR LOCAL NAZI PARTY”. The theater was packed with hundreds of big shots, politicians, Hollywood Jews etc. They poured into the streets and were not allowed back in the theater for 2 hours. Next day the Los Angeles Times headlines screamed “Nazi’s bomb premier of the film “Holocaust”.

Up until a short time, before Joe was a spit and polish uniform wearing National Socialist who went by the book? Joe told me he had been a National Socialist since his early teens. Joe inherited a house in El Monte, Ca. Which he turned into a headquarters for the old Rockwell party now being led by Mat Kohl. Joe recruited a lot of people in the L.A. area and performed many marches. Joe was a natural leader of men and did not believe in going completely by the book.

He allowed some beer drinking in the headquarters and an occasional female companion into his room. This was one of the things that led to his downfall. Mat Kohl was unmarried bachelor type, like many National socialist were at the time–what could be considered tight asses. Not all by any means, but Kohl wanted to run the headquarters like a monastery which didn’t fit well with Joe. He was a working class guy who knew how to handle working class people. He was evolving through a Brown shirt stage into a Freebooter which was the forerunner of the street action NS.

Commander Kohl called for a national convention in the Midwest. So Joe and a few others attended. A trap was sprung at this meeting. A couple of officers like Joe owned the building that served as headquarters for the party in El Monte and, I believe, Chicago. They were talked into signing their headquarters over to the national party, i.e. Mat Kohl. Not long after, the National headquarters using the excuse that Joe was allowing parties beer and women into his El Monte headquarters, Kohl kicked Joe out of his own Headquarters.

From there, Joe seeing the folly of right wing membership organizations, created the NATIONAL SOCIALIST LIBERATION FRONT–an Order style loose cell type group wearing street clothes, surplus military jackets much like the left wing. They grew hair long and many had beards. They could move through the streets of L.A. without notice. No armbands, badges or any other identifying trinkets. They trained in the mountains and the deserts. They attacked Marxist book stores and meetings, rumors are they bombed a couple of porn shops. They published a very slick magazine with big pictures with captions such as “POWER COMES FROM OUT OF A BARREL OF A GUN” and many more revolutionary mottoes and articles.

But, as all this was going on, Joe festered at the idea that his home and headquarters had been swindled from him. Every few days he drove past his old home. It was now run on the total Hollywood version with full spit and polish uniforms…even with armed sentries in front of the building. One day Joe went past and a young security guard yelled at him in a disrespectful way. Joe slammed on the breaks and exited his car heading towards this young guard. The young guard (only 16) pulled his gun and shot Joe in the chest. Joe died at the scene in front of his own house.

I was running a book sales booth at the Pomona gun show when Joe’s wife approached me. She was pregnant with Joe’s child. After giving her a big hug, she told me she was going back to Joe’s parents home to live and have the baby. Joe was from an Italian background and his parents had operated an Italian restaurant in Kansas. Somewhere in my archives I have a picture of the sign for the family restaurant. One of his closest comrades was named Rust. 25 years or so ago I tracked him down. He told me he had a trunk full of records and pictures. I thought this should be made into a book about Joe but after agreeing at first, Rust kept giving me the run around after that and I never was able to get those papers. Joe’s boy would be in his thirties by now but I never heard from them after they went back to Kansas.

It is my opinion that if Joe’s NSLF ideas of organization would have spread across the nation we would be in a much better situation than we are now in. Unfortunately, Joe Tommassi, like Robert Mathews, did not have enough time to get it really rolling big time.

From David Pringle:

Joseph Tommasi was the founder and leader of the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF). The NSLF was focused on armed struggle. He was the Western District leader of the National Socialist White People’s Party and broke with Matt Koehl and the NSWPP in Fall of 1973. James Mason wrote quite a bit about him in the newsletter turned book Siege. Tommasi was killed during a brawl at the Los Angeles NSWPP headquarters on August 15, 1975. I have met a few former NSLF members and all of them have a reverent tone when speaking of Tommasi. In my opinion he is one of the most quotable American Nazis. The quote in my signature was featured on a flyer the NSLF used to distribute.

While I am in no way an expert on Tommasi, I admire his militancy, willingness to fight to the death and his ability to organize and inspire White men and women. I also love his straight forward no BS style of writing; here is a sample:

STRATEGY FOR REVOLUTION

On March 2nd, 1974, forty-three National Socialist Revolutionaries met in a hall in El Monte, California. At the meeting the National Socialists declared their lack of faith in the losing strategy of the mass movement idea. The National Socialists abandoned the mass strategy and adopted the revolutionary concept of the guerilla underground.

— No longer would we think in terms of obtaining political power through the electorate; but instead, of hurting the Enemy through force and violence. We would build the armed struggle.

— We would no longer adhere to a mass strategy but would instead cultivate those already committed to the National Socialists World View. We have limited ourselves to only the best among the Movement.

— We have abandoned petty bourgeois, bureaucratic hang-ups and have developed the idea that the end justifies the means. What works is good!

— We recognize that women have played a vanguard role in most revolutionary efforts and involve them in every aspect of the NSLF.

— We recognize the fact that the masses of Whites will never rally around radical politics. White people no longer have the ability to even recognize the enemy, so how could Movement adherents think the masses could ever involve themselves in revolution? The White masses don’t recognize their enemies, they don’t even care, and they don’t have the guts to shed their bourgeois hang-ups.

— We view armed struggle as the only effective means of forcing political change.

The White man has lost! We are an occupied people in our own land who must now develop a totally different outlook on revolution.

We must build the underground. We are making it an effective, hard-hitting National Socialist Revolutionary Army.

Obviously he put the extreme in Extreme Right. Here are a few more quotes from his writings:

“Leadership in the struggle has to do with making things happen. Leadership is the people who are doing it, cutting through diversionary debate, smashing forms and familiarities that hold us back, and through developing and acting on a clear line of how we move to win, redefining the context, content, and meaning of the National Socialist Movement and the Revolution. That’s what we call SEIZING THE TIME!”

“We DO NOT wish for ‘Law and Order,’ for law and order means the continued existence of this rotten rip-off Capitalist Jew System. We wish for anarchy and chaos which will enable us to ATTACK the system while her Big Brother Pigs trying to keep the pieces from falling apart. We wish for a situation so confused and mixed-up that we can go after those bastards responsible for the anti-White policies and attacks against our people which now exist. Such chaos would allow us to so intensify our assaults that we could very well plunge the entire system to its death. For us to support those (the police) who maintain the ‘rules the wise men make for the fools’ is absurd and suicidal.”

Joe Tommasi was a man ahead of his time and deserves to be remembered.

[The methods urged above and arguments for them are virtually indistinguishable from those used by the more violent elements of NW @narchists.]

From “Muller” at Stormfront:

On March 2nd, 1974, forty three National Socialist Revolutionaries met in a hall in El Monte, California. At the meeting, the National Socialists declared their lack of faith in the losing strategy of the mass movement idea. The National Socialists abandoned the mass strategy and adopted the revolutionary concept of the guerilla underground.

The NSLF was started by Joseph Tomassi after he left the NSWPP, due to what I have heard was jealousy over his effectiveness at organizing. The NSLF engaged in a number of low key actions including tear gassing a memorial rally for Jewish spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and bombing a number of Communist Party targets. Other actions by the NSLF have not been confirmed, the NSLF was still in it’s infancy and like many guerilla groups designed to strike at soft targets in the beginning and expand in operations.

In August of 1975 Tomassi was killed at the NSWPP party building after another guard had “flipped off” Tomassi as he was driving by. Tomassi exited his vehicle attacked the guard who had insulted him, while another guard drew his pistol and shot Tomassi in the head. From there the leadership passed to Karl Hand, who was imprisoned and the NSLF fell apart. Muller

“A GIFT FROM YOUR LOCAL NATIONAL SOCIALIST LIBERATION FRONT”

Above: Gas masked policeman questions rally staff (Michael Glass – center; Robert Carl Cohen – far right) [Image deleted]

That evening approximately 3,000 people filled the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Roscoe Lee Browne had just begun the performance when a riot control projectile of a type normally available only to police departments exploded in front of the air intake above the proscenium – quickly filling the hall with an aerosol powder irritant. Choking, vomiting & fainting, the crowd fled outside – into a severe thunder storm. As if forewarned, within minutes Santa Monica police & firemen wearing gas masks & equipped with portable ventilator fans appeared – telling the dazed & sickened crowd huddling for shelter in the outer lobby: “The show’s over – go home.” Despite being urged to leave, over 2,000 waited more than an hour until the gas had cleared, then reentered the hall. All 26 performers, including Henry Fonda who, wearing a pacemaker, after being assisted out of the auditorium by Michael Glass, remained and went on with the show. An anonymous caller claimed the “Provisional Wing of the National Socialist Liberation Front” was responsible.

BUILDING THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY – Joseph Tommasi

POLITICAL POWER STEMS FROM THE BARREL OF A GUN

Winning the hearts and minds of the people takes intense organizing activity and a willingness on the part of the people to get involved and be organized. Both at this time do not exist. Since a mass movement cannot be “pulled off” in America because of the anti-mass movement nature of the American people (which stems from their ever-growing apathy), the only recourse for National Socialist Revolutionaries is to go underground and build their own armed struggle to wage war against the state.

National Socialist activities have never produced one significant political result in the U.S.A. Any mob resistance our people have ever been engaged in has always been a spontaneous eruption (like Boston) with the participation and agitation of no political party or National Socialist activist. They did it themselves and without our help. Organizationally, the Movement has failed to exploit the opportunities available to create “mass” mob violence against the enemy, even when such opportunities have lingered on. Publicity stunts have always supplanted effective political action. There has been no arming the students, no burning of school busses except by mobs totally disconnected with National Socialism, no organization of mass violent demonstrations, and no effort to communicate with the people and provide the necessary National Socialist Political Leadership to gain direct National Socialist successes.

In Boston, contrary to claims of the old Party, the people rejected the Party and if anything desired help from the Ku Klux Klan, an embarrassment for the Party. This situation occurred because of a complete lack of proper leadership and leadership activity on the part of the Party. The Party with their stagnant Prussian tactics were incapable of identifying with the revolutionary youth. Special propaganda and mass organizing did not occur. Just a few stunts for the newspapers and no solutions for the problems of the people.

As National Socialist Revolutionaries we must always keep in mind that nothing we do against the System can ever be conceived as “adventuristic”. Militant struggle is the key to heightening contradictions. It not only strikes concrete blows against the State but also builds revolutionary consciousness among those involved in the struggle, which is what must happen before we can attempt to build our outside power bases from which to operate while building a popular base of support. Building a popular base of support will become more and more of a necessity and an easier goal to achieve as conditions in the country become worse and worse.

Our greatest weakness is our belief in our weakness. We have to communicate to all National Socialist Revolutionaries our strength and to show them our strength we have to show them the strength of fighting. We must build confidence within the entire Movement before we can hope to help people and lead those people in revolution. That confidence must be based on the idea that as National Socialist Revolutionaries we cannot be stopped by anyone: the System; the Reds; or the Reaction! This confidence must project the image and reality that only confrontation politics, force and violence, can change the anti-White actions of our enemies. Only by fighting, by any means necessary, will we be able to effect political change. We cannot effect political change by projecting a phony, bureaucratic, Prussian image and constantly spouting unrealistic daydreams, such as imagining the masses would ever wish to emulate Stormtroopers. It just won’t happen.

All revolutions, the actual assumption of power, are instigated by the effort of a tiny few. Those who could possibly participate in such a revolution among the White people in America are not like those who participated in past European struggles. Americans tend to go against the “grain” on practically anything. We are not Europeans and won’t respond as Europeans. If a revolution occurs in America it will most likely be a violent one sparked by one lone incident and not by a prepared dialogue of political euphemisms. Until that one lone incident occurs, White people will never flock to the voting booths to place their physical support to the direction of helmeted Stormtroopers. They will instead continue to play the present Republican and Democrat party politics no matter how bad things get simply because of their complete apathy towards getting involved with their neighbors’ problems. They don’t recognize those problems as their own. The old Party could not offer any proof of their ability to provide solutions to the problems facing the country, especially when the Party had only one or two real leaders. With such a situation, how could the Party make claims of having the answer? Their past performances give no guiding light at this time.

“The future belongs to the few of us willing to get our hands dirty.” –Joseph Tommasi, Founder, National Socialist Liberation Front

NSLF (The National Socialist Liberation Front) believes that it is necessary to begin development of an armed struggle immediately. We now understand the futility of maintaining the fight for social change within the framework of civil debate. Instead of trying to educate and organize people who don’t see it our way, we write them off as enemies and neutralizers of the National Socialist Revolution. This has marked the ascendancy of the purely militant point of view in NSLF thinking. We now confine our outreach to the small group of Movement people we consider potentially militant National Socialist Revolutionaries. The NSLF feels that since these National Socialist already know that the System “sucks” all they need is a revolutionary example in order to move into armed struggle themselves. The NSLF will lead these National Socialist through a series of rigidly defined steps, from the lowest levels of armed struggle to the highest levels. The levels are determined by the violence of the weapons used. Rocks and “trashing” are on one level, molotov cocktails are higher and bombs are higher still. The highest level is, of course, guns. This tactic of levels includes no political guidelines or flexibility and almost completely disregards mass participation. Levels are defined solely in terms of the weapons used. A mass action involving hundreds using only rocks is defined as a lower level of struggle than a bombing carried out by a few.

Leadership in the struggle has to do with making things happen. Leadership is the people who are doing it, cutting through diversionary debate, smashing forms and familiarities that hold us back, and through developing and acting on a clear line of how we move to win, redefining the context, content, and meaning of the National Socialist Movement and the Revolution. That’s what we call SEIZING THE TIME! NSLF is building an underground army. We must spread our efforts to trouble spots in the country, exploiting racially troubled areas and establishing bases of support. At these times we will continue to fan the fires as long as we can, using this chaos to launch armed attacks against the enemy.

Since our militance is obviously going to lead to a military confrontation (probably with the U.S. Army that is growing ever Blacker), maybe not for the next few years, then the fact that most of the Movement has no consistency of armaments makes us fools. So we must build internally during the new few months. Therefore we should state publicly that we believe in, support, and are preparing for armed struggle; For that is what we must do to effect political change.

In times of revolution, just wars and wars of liberation, we must love the angels of destruction and disorder as opposed to the devils of conservatism and law and order. To hell with all those who block the Revolution with rhetoric – revolutionary rhetoric or counter � revolutionary rhetoric! We will not make our most eloquent statements in courtrooms and at press conferences, but in the streets of Jew-Capitalist America! The choice of weapons belongs to him who moves; and NSLF moves into the streets and we have made our choice of weapons and tactics. The weapon of criticism will never equal the criticism of weapons. NSLF prefers a paralyzed enemy to a well-criticized one. Those who can’t stand the sight of blood, especially their own, should stay home and pray for those who come outside the master’s rules to “move”, to DO IT, and pray for victory and not an end to the slaughter. Pray for us to succeed for if we do succeed you will be safe. If we don’t, then kiss the baby good-bye. Muller

STRATEGY FOR REVOLUTION – Joseph Tommasi

On March 2nd, 1974, forty-three National Socialist Revolutionaries met in a hall in El Monte, California. At the meeting the National Socialist declared their lack of faith in the losing strategy of the mass movement idea. The National Socialist abandoned the mass strategy and adopted the revolutionary concept of the guerrilla underground. No longer would we think in terms of obtaining political power through the electorate; But instead, of hurting the Enemy through force and violence.

We would build the armed struggle. We would no longer adhere to a mass strategy but would instead cultivate those already committed to the National Socialist World-View. We have limited ourselves to only the best among Movement people. We have abandoned petty bourgeois, bureaucratic hang-ups and have developed the idea that the end justifies the means. What works is good!

We recognize that women have played a vanguard role in most revolutionary efforts and involve them in every aspect of NSLF. We recognize the fact that the masses of Whites will never rally around radical politics. White people no longer have the ability to even recognize the enemy, so how could Movement adherents think the masses could ever involve themselves in revolution? The White masses don’t recognize their enemies, they don’t even care, and they don’t have the guts to shed their bourgeois hang-ups.

We view armed struggle as the only effective means of forcing political change. The White Man has lost! We are an occupied people in our own land who must now develop a totally different outlook on revolution. We must build the underground. We are making it an effective, hard-hitting National Socialist Revolutionary Army. We have already begun to launch armed assaults against the Enemy. More assaults will continue, whether the Enemy be the Right Wing Reactionaries, the System, or the Communists. National Socialist Ideological and Political training, additional training in guerrilla warfare, explosives and demolition, military assault weapons and gas warfare, along with electronic communications and electronic surveillance techniques are taking place. Classes in first aid, police evasion, techniques of being a POW and escape are also taking place.

The NSLF is divided into combat units. A combat unit consists of three liberation fighters and a unit leader. No one combat unit knows who constitutes another combat unit. An NSLF combat unit member is trained as an efficient guerrilla fighter dedicated to destroying the Enemy, no matter who that enemy may be. On the surface he has no uniform. He could be the bearded long-hair sitting next to you on the bus, or the clean-cut store clerk. He could be anyone anywhere.

The NSLF has the best elements gathered together from the past twenty years of National Socialist activity in the United States. It has gathered experienced communications experts, military firearms experts, along with the finest liberation fighters available. Each member understands the new concept, the new strategy and tactics needed in order to effect political change. No longer willing to play the games of Movement bureaucracies or associating with bald-headed idiots who have no concept of realities, the NSLF will undoubtedly emerge the vanguard fighters in the National Socialist Revolution!

From “HailKlassenBKS” at Stormfront:

If you can get ahold of Siege, that will tell you a lot about him. I don’t have the first addition, but I know the second edition which I have (limited to 500, so kinda hard to say if it is even available anymore) has a ton of information on Tommasi. Theres everything from articles influenced by him written by Mason, to various newspaper photocopies on Tommasi. He essentially went from a Rockwell-style Nazi in a uniform to a long haired revolutionary with a more ‘leftist’ slant to things, at least as far as his rethoric went. All in all a good fellow, who probably could have made a real difference, if he hadn’t had his life cut short so soon. What is probably the most interesting thing about his death is that it wasn’t by a “red” or an “antiracist” or a jew, but rather by another member of the movement. I guess it just goes to show that we are our own worst enemies…if we aren’t killing each other or testifying against each other, we’re spreading rumours or what have you. Things haven’t changed much.

Joseph Charles Tommasi (1951-August 15, 1975) was an American National Socialist who founded the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) in 1974. Breaking with the conservative image of American Nazism and its “mass strategy,” he advocated an armed guerrilla struggle against the “System.”

Tommasi was a young leader in the National Socialist White People’s Party in southern California. The Party splintered, following George Lincoln Rockwell’s death, and Tommasi, one of most radical of the leadership, founded the National Socialist Liberation Front (on March 2, 1974) and began publication of a periodical called ‘Siege.’ He was assassinated in 1975.

INFLUENCE

Tommasi became an inspiration of James Mason’s, who later (in 1980) revived the NSLF and ‘SIEGE.’

REFERENCES

‘Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right’ by Jeffrey Kaplan (Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc, 2000, ISBN 0742503402)

‘Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason’ by James Mason; introduced by Ryan Schuster (ISBN 0972440801)

‘Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity’ by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2001, ISBN 0814731554)

EXTERNAL LINKS

‘The Post-Rockwell Period 1967-1978’ (http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/usanazis/chapter3.html) chapter three of ‘American Nazism In The Context Of The American Extreme Right: 1960 – 1978’ (http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/usanazis/index.html) by Jim Saleam

‘Who was Joseph Tommasi?'(http://www.stormfront.org/archive/t-108733), posted in the Stormfront lounge. Includes a number of Tommasi’s proclamations.

‘A Brief Histtory of Post-Rockwell National Socialism'(http://hacovington.blogspot.com/2002_05_01_hacovington_archive.html) by John Steele

‘The Post-War Paths of Occult National Socialism’ (http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?wasp=bav097bqrn5wtmccekdw&referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,5;journal,14,21;linkingpublicationresults,1:300354,1): from Rockwell and Madole to Manson by J. Kaplan

From the website of the English magazine ‘The Scorpion’ (http://thescorp.multics.org/)

Excerpt from the article ‘Siege Mentality’ by Dominic Hampshire:

The Party [The National Socialist White Peoples’ Party in the early 70’s] subsequently splintered and Joseph Tommasi, one of the more successful and certainly more radical of the leadership, formed his own group, the National Socialist Liberation Front. As a vehicle for the NSLF, he began publication of a periodical he called Siege, high on invective, not so high in intellectual content. Tommasi, a self-proclaimed political terrorist, was assassinated in 1975. The following year Mason left the NSWPP’ out of disgust for that group’s follies and lack of any tangible progress. In 1980 he revived the by then defunct NSLF together with Siege as a monthly newsletter to “develop the philosophy” of revolution.

[James Mason authored the book ‘Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason’ (1992)]

From the website of the English occultic-anarchist society “Synthesis,” in their ‘Journal Du Cercle De La Rose Noire’ (http://www.rosenoire.org/):

Excerpt from the article ‘Paranoia in the Pews – A Further Statement on the International Third Position’ (Issued by the National Revolutionary Faction’ by Dominic Hampshire):

We are accused of stealing other people’s ideas because we have used the late Joseph Tommasi’s popular NSLF slogan: “the future belongs to those willing to get their hands dirty.” But this is not theft – about which the ITP could probably teach us a great deal – it is a fitting tribute to a man who in revolutionary terms broke the conservative mould and took the agenda forward. After all, we do not regard the ITP as ideological and theological copycats simply because they use the expression “distributism” and employ the term “Catholic.”

From the website of the “Australian Nationalist” – Ideological, Historical, and Legal Archive (http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/):

Two excerpts from the article ‘American Nazism In The Context Of The American Extreme Right: 1960 – 1978’ (Jim Saleam; 1985; Chapter Three: The Post Rockwell Period 1967 – 1978; Section One: The National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP)]:

************

In 1967, the issue was clear for the American Nazis. United as the NSWPP, they had to overcome the effects of the murder of Rockwell and professionalize the organization under the leadership of Matt Koehl, Rockwell’s designated successor. The immediate result of Rockwell’s murder was a confused period of schism, mutiny and general disorganization in American Nazism. In Los Angeles, James K. Warner re-emerged to trumpet the “rebirth” of the American Nazi Party. (1) Certain “stormtroopers,” dissatisfied with their second-rung status in the new NSWPP, set up rival Nazi parties in Dallas and California. However, Koehl managed to surmount the crisis; it was in the words of a later Nazi publication “his finest hour”. (2)

1 ‘The Free American,’ No. 1, November, 1967.

2 Joe Tommasi, ‘The Crisis in American National Socialism,’ NSLF leaflet, 1975.

************

Of course, the NSWPP had already contended with two potentially dangerous splits: Frank Collin’s foundation of the National Socialist Party of America in Chicago in 1970, and Dr. Pierce’s defection, also in that year. The schismatic days of 1967-68 could also be mentioned. However, the desertion of Joe Tommasi, Western District Leader, in October 1973 made it clear that there was a leadership crisis in the NSWPP. Tommasi resigned just as the oil crisis was getting underway and raised the question of Koehl’s infirmities of leadership. Further, according to a Nazi source there was supposed personal rivalry between Koehl and Tommasi of an obscure nature, which festered throughout 1973. The Nazi Commander, anxious to “discipline” his subordinate, further exacerbated the division.

In October 1973, the greater part of the Los Angeles unit of the NSWPP, along with sections of other units, seceded under Tommasi’s leadership to establish the National Socialist Liberation Front. While other schismatics had been largely isolated, many NSWPP members had sympathy for Tommasi. As the months rolled on, and the NSWPP failed to capitalize on the oil crisis, many Nazis abandoned Koehl for Tommasi. Even so, the NSLF began its life as a Nazi sect with some regret for it wished to patch up differences with the NSWPP. (71) Koehl would not yield. In its journal, ‘Siege,’ the NSLF expressed its dissatisfaction with the NSWPP, the “old party.” The NSWPP was dismissed as an unsuitable political vehicle since its leaders were “bureaucrats,” and not “mass propagandists”. Koehl was personally reproached for using the “leadership principle” to run the party himself. It was argued that the NSWPP held to the illusion that violence was not necessary to achieve Nazi goals. The NSLF also charged, that the NSWPP was foolish to wait for the masses to rush to the party for salvation. It claimed that the NSWPP was dogmatic rather than pragmatic in its tactics and ideology, and that the middle-class leaders did not understand the psychology of the ordinary man. Nor was the party administration efficient.

There was something to the NSLF’s charges. From October 1973, the NSWPP was in a state of siege, surrounded by new schismatics. Koehl’s method of dealing with schismatics was ineffective. In 1967 he ignored their arguments, denounced them as “psychopaths” and built the party. They usually faded from the scene. By 1974, this stratagem was moth-eaten for the heretics had become too numerous, and, if Koehl opted to build the party he risked the creation of new regional centers of opposition. The initiative was slipping from Koehl’s hands and his immediate answer to the crisis – centralization – would also prove disastrous.

Koehl was no Rockwell. In Koehl’s taped address The White Man’s Viewpoint, the style of oratory and debate was deliberate but uninspiring. Rockwell had expressed fervor, militancy and intelligence. Koehl appeared humorless and certainly doctrinaire.(73) He had turned Rockwell’s creed into a near-religious revelation, and consequently he addressed Americans in an aloof manner. In his 1977 pamphlet, Some Laws Of Revolutionary Development, Koehl admitted that many Nazis directly compared the U.S. and German Nazis and asked why the American party was not at a stage of development comparable with German Nazis in the 1920’s. (74) Koehl however, insisted on his orthodox position that the party was still in Phase Two and must retain its sobriety – even though this was clearly not what many American Nazis wanted to hear. As Tommasi had contended, Koehl often restricted activities to conform with his vision of Phase Two. His objective leadership style and the destructive effects of his ideological revisions of Rockwell would be illustrated in the history of the NSWPP after 1973.

The Cleveland Congress of the NSWPP, held in 1973, and coinciding with the Tommasi crisis, marked the zenith of the party. Yet in “the largest stormtroop demonstration in the party’s history,” a mere 120 troopers marched through downtown Cleveland. (76) Although the Tommasi schism was an ulcer, the NSWPP continued on its course The Cleveland Congress laid down that the major issues of 1973 and 1974 were Watergate and Israel. In these years, White Power reported extensive Nazi activity on the oil crisis. Nazis picketed Hubert Humphrey at a Zionist function in San Francisco, with a “Dump Israel” theme, while new leaflets were issued calling for support for the Palestinian cause against “the bandit state of Israel.” In an article entitled “The Honeymoon is Over,” Koehl wrote that “the real picture of the Enemy behind all our problems was now visible in America.” (77) Of course, this enemy was the Jewish community. Koehl’s attacks on America’s Jews took place at a time of a substantial shift in public and political support for Israel. Senator Fulbright denounced the Jewish lobby in Washington and General Brown, former chief of the U.S. Army, attacked Jewish-owned newspapers for their irresponsible attitudes towards the Middle East conflict. Jewish publications denounced these men for “anti-Semitism.” (78) The Nazis were therefore not operating in a vacuum, yet they clearly failed to make much headway. In pursuing the question of the oil crisis, the NSWPP differed from its rival Nazi party, the National Socialist Party of America, which continued to stress racial issues. The NSWPP opted for “agitation,” as distinct from making mere propaganda. However, whatever outbreak of anti-Semitism took place in the years 1973-75, it was directed more by organizations like Liberty Lobby than by the NSWPP.  (Further, the oil crisis agitation also left the NSWPP little time to agitate around Watergate, though the Nazis drew the inevitable parallel between the “corruption” of Weimar Germany and contemporary America.)

Throughout 1974 and 1975, the NS Bulletin encouraged its readers to be exceptionally active on behalf of the cause. The NS Bulletin encouraged newspaper sales, and the distribution of anti-busing leaflets to build the movement.  An appeal, launched in 1974, which aimed to raise $40,000 was fully subscribed by April 1975.

But split after split took place in the NSWPP. In early 1974, Casey Kalemba, leader of the Cleveland unit, seceded from the party to establish the United White People’s Party. The new organization ceased to use the swastika, changed into blue uniforms and dubbed itself a “White Nationalist” party. (81) Kalemba became the “Commander” of the new party, which remained restricted to Ohio. Kalemba had been a trusted Koehl aide and had engendered substantial publicity for the party through opposition to busing. The reason for his desertion cannot be traced. The NSWPP which had hoped to make Cleveland its “Nuremberg,” that is, the site for the annual party congress, was forced to relocate its 1974 Congress to St. Louis. In any event the 1974 Congress never took place, because of further internal division.

The 1974 split with the St. Louis unit cost the NSWPP dear. Dennis Nix, leader of the unit, had been commissioned to organize the Congress when Koehl, as trustee for NSWPP property, requested that Nix transfer the ownership of the local headquarters to him. This Nix refused to do. (82) Shortly afterwards, the St. Louis unit of the NSWPP, joined the National Alliance.

Koehl’s inability to trust local organizers is striking. Every time the NSWPP won publicity in a city, Koehl’s efforts to centralize power appear to have caused a split. This trend, already evident in 1974, continued in 1975. Early in 1975, the Detroit unit abandoned the NSWPP for reasons that remain obscure. Then a South Carolina section, under the direction of Frank Brasswell, defected to Tommasi’s NSLF. Brasswell apparently preferred the NSLF’s commitment to violent action.

70 James N. Mason, letter to author, August 31, 1979.

71 “Joseph Tommasi: his last interview,” Los Angeles Free Press, August 22-28, 1975.

72 ‘Siege,’ No. 1, Third Quarter, 1974, passim.

73 Matt Koehl, ‘The White Man’s Viewpoint,’ NSWPP tape recording, 1974.

74 Matt Koehl, ‘Some Laws of Revolutionary Development,’ Arlington, 1977, pp. 3-4.

75 Matt Koehl, ‘Some Laws,’ passim.

76. NSWPP members’ leaflet.

77 ‘White Power,’ No. 53, July 1974, p. 5.

78 NSWPP members’ leaflet, 1974. The leaflet reproduced Jewish Press, October 11-17, 1974. The leaflet reproduced other cuttings reporting Jewish Defense League leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, predicting a rise in U.S. anti-Semitism.

79 Liberty Lobby published the weekly, Spotlight, in 100,000 copies during this period. Spotlight was vehemently anti-Israel and was armed with a multi-million dollar budget.

80 NS Bulletin, No. 168, 1 December, 1974; ‘NS Bulletin,’ May, 1974, wrote: “this involves hard and sometimes persistent work…”; NS Bulletin, No. 176, April, 1975.referred to a picket of a “conservative anti-busing rally.”

81 ‘What is the United White Peoples Party?,’ UNWP leaflet, Cleveland, 1975.

82 ‘Siege,’ No. 2, 1975. Though Siege was the journal of the NSLF, it abounded in gossip about the NSWPP.

83 NS Bulletin had mentioned Brasswell several times. His violent actions were praised by ‘National Socialist Review,’ January, 1975, ‘NSLF Newsletter.’

Excerpt from the article ‘Leaderless Resistance’ by Jeffrey Kaplan (1997):

Following the assassination of Rockwell in 1967, the party began to fragment. Matt Koehl succeeded the Commander, soon renamed the American Nazi Party the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), and initiated the endless round of purges that would soon cost the Party it’s bare handful of capable adherents. Two of the victims of these purges and angry resignations, William Pierce and Joseph Tommasi, figure prominently in the development of the leaderless resistance concept.

Of Pierce much more will be said later. Joseph Tommasi concerns us first. Tommasi ironically was a Koehl loyalist almost to the day he was unceremoniously purged from the NSWPP and subsequently assassinated by an NSWPP member in 1975. [5] Tommasi was one of the young West Coast party members whose radicalism thrilled a few and appalled the majority of American National Socialists. Addressing the Second Party Congress in 1970, his ringing call for revolutionary action NOW brought him to the attention of William Pierce–then in the throes of his own bitter dispute with Matt Koehl. [6] Tommasi, like Pierce, was acutely aware of the bold actions undertaken by the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army to name but two of the left wing combatant organizations of the day. They were determined to create a campus-based revolutionary movement of the right on the same model. Thus was born the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF).

In 1973 or 1974, Tommasi published his now famous poster, “THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE FEW OF US WILLING TO GET OUR HANDS DIRTY. POLITICAL TERROR: It’s the only thing they understand,” and his seminal pamphlet, ‘Building the Revolutionary Party’ to announce the formation of the NSLF. The NSLF’s revolutionary ideology was based on the rejection of the conservative theory of mass action which Tommasi correctly believed was paralyzing the NS movement. For Tommasi, the mass action doctrine meant in reality that no serious anti-state actions were possible given the patent impossibility of creating a mass based National Socialist party in the U.S.

Tommasi gathered some 43 adherents to the foundational meeting of the NSLF in El Monte, California, on 2 March 1974. But this number is somewhat deceiving. Few of these young National Socialists were sufficiently suicidal to act on Tommasi’s rhetoric. [7] In the end, only 4 NSLF “members” undertook revolutionary action, Tommasi, Karl Hand, David Rust and James Mason (Mason had not officially joined the group, only receiving his membership card after Tommasi’s assassination). As James Mason recalls:

Yes, the N.S.L.F. of Tommasi had four persons who carried out the illegal activities. The remainder, the majority, weren’t that much different from the N.S.W.P.P. members except they were a lot more forward thinking. [8]

The NSLF soldiered on at least in name for another decade. In that time however, Tommasi was murdered, Hand and Rust were incarcerated for acts of racially motivated violence and firearms charges, and James Mason found a new avatar in Charles Manson. But the NSLF’s contribution to the leaderless resistance concept is incalculable. [9] The NSLF was the first to act on the theory that, regardless of the dearth of public support, a blow could be struck against the hated state, provided that the determined revolutionary was prepared to act resolutely and alone. Tommasi was among the first to fully grasp the truth of the strategic situation–in the milieu of the radical right, no one is to be trusted, anyone could be (and probably is) an informer for the government or for one of the many watchdog organizations monitoring radical right wing activity, and short of divine intervention, public support would not be forthcoming no matter what tactical approach the movement was to adopt. Yet in this state of weakness, there is ultimate strength. With nothing left to lose, a man is totally free to act as he will. For while the state had proven over and over again that it could effortlessly penetrate any right wing organization, it had yet to develop the capability to thwart the will of one man acting alone!

This revelation would do the NSLF little good. The group actually died with Tommasi. [10] The actions of Hand and Rust were in reality pathetic outbursts of pointless violence which succeeded only in bringing them into the care of the state’s prison system. But the example, once proffered, could not be erased. Although it had yet to be given a name, leaderless resistance was born.

At the same time, it is important to remember that the conservative majority of the far right did not approve of the unauthorized actions of leaderless resistors. Their well grounded fear was of precisely the sort of pointless and undisciplined actions which landed the tiny NSLF combatant cadre in prison. Rather, between mass action’s impotent dreams and leaderless resistance’s antinomian reality, there was a third path which would become a model for the more extreme fringes of the present day militia movement. Borrowed from Leninist theory, the cell structure under a centralized command was the mark of the 1960s era Minutemen under the leadership of Robert Bolivar DePugh. R.N. Taylor recalls of these days:

The Minutemen never advocated leaderless resistance “per se.” In fact where such did occur, where an individual or small group, did in fact take some action on their own, it was generally a cause for concern and created trouble for the National organization. We did our very best to maintain a certain discipline among the members.

Originally the structure of organization was in “bands” [that] pretty well conformed to the classic guerrilla band of from 6 to 12 people. Later for security reasons, we began to reorganize along the lines of “cells” of three people. When all the members, in a geographical proximity to one another had been made a part of a cell, then we instituted a dispersed cell system for members who lived at too great a distance from other members. Where three people from 500 or more miles apart would be members of a dispersed team. This was on the understanding that, if directed to do so, they would all meet at a given time and place. When they had fulfilled whatever function they were called upon to accomplish, they all would then return to their respective locations. Only one of the three would even know the identity of the other two members, and that party would be the only one directly in touch with the National Organization. This is like an underground or resistance war type of structure. In addition to these modes of organization, the national organization had what they termed the “Defense Survival Force.” The DSF was a group of inner core members who had expertise and training in such skills as surreptitious entry, lock-picking, electronic eavesdropping and proficiency in weapons, tactics and all else that might apply to specialized para-military operations. The DSF to my knowledge never consisted of more than 50 members. This small sector were of course under control of the National Organization. There was nothing spontaneous or thrill of the moment about this inner corps’ activities. So, from the very beginning the Minuteman Organization was always attempting to maintain leadership and some sense of discipline and restraint among it’s members. [11]

The decade which followed Tommasi’s death and the fall of the NSLF were, from the perspective of the far right, both eventful and deeply disheartening. Most notable, a true revolutionary movement, the “Silent Brotherhood,” more popularly known as “the Order,” under the leadership of Robert Mathews arose and after a brief but incandescent revolutionary career, was smashed by the state. It was not until the Order was nearing its inglorious end that many in the radical right were able to accept that the group could be anything other than a diabolically clever federal entrapment scheme. [12]

5 Interview with James Mason, 28 November 1996.

6 Ibid.

7 On the meeting, and for reprints of Tommasi’s writings, see James Mason, ‘Siege’ (Denver, CO: Storm Books, 1992). On the formation of the NSLF, letter from James Mason, 16 December 1996.

8 Letter from James Mason, 16 December 1996. Mason was responding to the suggestion that this core/peripheral membership was at the root of differing claims by Tommasi of the level that NSLF support was either more than 40 or only 4.

9 One such contribution is provided by the special double issue of the NSLF’s newsletter which offered a–how to’ manual for those seeking to organize their own NS combatant organizations. See Karl Hand, ‘Special Double Issue: How to Organize a Local Unit,’ ‘National Socialist Observer’ (February & March 1985).

10 James Mason, ‘Siege,’ p. 104. Interview with James Mason, 28 November 1996.

11 Interview with R. N. Taylor, 11 June 1997. Even today, however, Taylor does not completely discount the utility of the leaderless resistance concept, given the unlikely possibility that the right person may emerge to carry on the fight: As for it’s (leaderless resistance’s) effect on “demonstrating resistance-however doomed it might appear.” This might be the case, and perhaps the only case in which something effective would be accomplished. It brings to mind the Catalan Nationalist, Francisco Sabata, who conducted a one-man guerrilla war against Franco’s government, for decades. He became something of a mythic Robin Hood figure in Spain. I’m sure his activities and the publicity generated by them, helped to serve as a sort of torch or beacon. What made Sabata the legend he was? I’m sure it was based on his daring, his determination and flair. He wasn’t a madman, he wasn’t a pervert–he was an idealistic patriot and nationalist of the highest order. So, if someone like that were to conduct some one man war, it might well capture the popular imagination. But nothing less than that.

12 On the Order, see Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, ‘The Silent Brotherhood’ (New York: Signet, 1990). On the movement’s suspicion of the Order as a federal government sting operation see Rick Cooper, ‘Warning,’ NSV Report (Jul/Sep 1984), p. 6. Too late, Cooper would realize his mistake and publish a eulogy to the Order. See NSV Report (Apr/Jun 1985), pp. 1-5.

Two excerpts from weblog entry ‘More Boring Spiritual Stuff’ by Winston Smith (1996):

I was very fortunate in that I was able first to become involved in a structured organization rather than the present—jeez, what can I call it? Let’s be charitable and say the Movement is now in a kind of “stream of consciousness” mode. At any rate, when I first came in I was assigned a bunk, a uniform, a weapon from the El Monte HQ armory, and a list of daily responsibilities ranging from literature distribution quotas to when it was my day to wash dishes and clean the toilets. My first commanding officer in the NSWPP, the late Captain Joseph Tommasi, was an instinctive leader. He kept us busy and while aware of the fact that he was handling young men in a state of high morale and adventurous spirit, he tolerated no BS. He put it to me like this on one occasion: “The Party doesn’t accommodate you, trooper. YOU accommodate the PARTY.”

************

The best people we have ever had were those who SERVED our cause, not used it, served it with their whole hearts and minds and wills, served it unselfishly, with no thought of reward or gain in their mind. Commander Rockwell, Joe Tommasi, Bob Miles, Bob Mathews, and a whole slew of others still alive whom I will not embarrass by naming–because they WOULD be embarrassed to be praised for doing what is to them their simple, quiet duty. They have that grace. And by the by—men and women like that are far, far more common in our ranks than the wretched boy and our other detractors would have you believe. Not common enough–but there is always enough of the good to keep us alive and fighting in the face of all the bad.

Excerpt from the article ‘A Brief History Of Post-Rockwell National Socialism’ by John Steele:

“On March 2nd, 1974, forty three National Socialist Revolutionaries met in a hall in El Monte, California. At the meeting, the National Socialists declared their lack of faith in the losing strategy of the mass movement idea. The National Socialists abandoned the mass strategy and adopted the revolutionary concept of the guerilla underground.” So began the manefesto of the National Socialist Liberation Front, without a doubt the most militant of all post Rockwell National Socialist organizations. To this day, many (if not most) of the underground ‘strikes’ committed by this small but brave band of Comrades remain unknown or are only vaguely suspected. Strong evidence does suggest that activists involved in the N.S.L.F. were responsible for tear gassing a memorial rally for Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg (Jewish spies executed for selling U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union) as well as the torching of at least one communist bookstore. Sadly, the courageous life of Joseph Tommasi came to an end on August 15, 1975 at just 24 years of age. Fingers were pointed on both sides, but the story essentially is that Tommasi and another comrade were driving past the then N.S.W.P.P. building when one of the on duty guards flipped a middle finger at him. Tomassi then stopped the car and confronted the on duty trooper. After a brief scuffle, another guard on duty drew a gun and fired one shot into Tomassi’s head, killing him then and there on the porch of the N.S.W.P.P.’s headquarters. (It is unclear whether or not Tommasi was himself armed at the time.)

From the website of the “National Socialist Movement” (http://www.nsm88.com/):

Two excerpts from the article ‘100 Years of Madness’:

The 1970s were a decade of political corruption. Nixon and Watergate is the primary example, but this was worldwide reality, and people started to view all politicians as lying swindlers–none too soon, we might add. Things in the economic sector were no better: by 1977 the top 10% of the populace had an income thirty times that of the bottom 10%; the top 1% owned 33% of the wealth; and the richest 5% possessed 83% of personally owned corporate stock. Unemployment rose, and people were disgusted, which caused many to become demoralized and apathetic, feeling like nothing could be done, and limiting their political participation to voting for the lesser evil. None of this should surprise anyone, since honest and honorable leadership has a positive effect on the majority of the populace, while poor leadership is guaranteed to produce the opposite result. Of course not everyone sat on their hands. In National Socialist circles a man named Joe Tommasi realized that you can’t beat the system at its own game. He began to discuss the armed struggle, and the need to conduct political operations in the same manner as the IRA/Sinn Fein (both legal and convert). Tommasi put his money where his mouth was, and lived for about a year after choosing this path. During that time he had more than one or two of our enemies scared out of their skins, which just goes to show what a few dedicated individuals can accomplish (making one wonder what a few hundred serious-minded men and women might be able to achieve). Tommasi also terrified another group: self-proclaimed white leaders. It’s a fact that Hitler came to power legally. Unfortunately, this is often used as “proof” that the same thing can be done here. Vote, write your congressman, buy books, send cash, etc. People who play this nowhere game see a man like Tommasi as a dangerous boat-rocker. They’ve had 25 years since Tommasi’s death to show us that their way works—and they haven’t managed to take a single step forward. It would be false to claim that Joe Tommasi has had the same amount of influence as Lincoln Rockwell, but it would be absolutely correct to say that National Socialism won’t be going anywhere in this country until he does.

************

On a positive note the ’80s saw a significant rise in racial awareness. The seeds planted by men like Rockwell and Tommasi had started growing. This was best seen in the widespread skinhead movement.

[Editor’s Note: This publication does not support the rhetoric in the above screed nor is it associated with those who do. This has been reposted to alert the public to the similarities in argumentative pretexts shared among violently radical street elements.] 

Professionals typically demand and receive 50% of their normal salary for being ‘on call’. But the underclass is seldom afforded benefits at all, let alone fairness in the workplace.

How the New Flexible Economy Makes Workers’ Lives Hell

by Robert Reich

These days it’s not unusual for someone on the way to work to receive a text message from her employer saying she’s not needed right then.

Although she’s already found someone to pick up her kid from school and arranged for childcare, the work is no longer available and she won’t be paid for it.

Just-in-time scheduling like this is the latest new thing, designed to make retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, and other customer-driven businesses more nimble and keep costs to a minimum.

Software can now predict up-to-the-minute staffing needs on the basis of  information such as traffic patterns, weather, and sales merely hours or possibly minutes before.

This way, employers don’t need to pay anyone to be at work unless they’re really needed. Companies can avoid paying wages to workers who’d otherwise just sit around.

Employers assign workers tentative shifts, and then notify them a half-hour or ten minutes before the shift is scheduled to begin whether they’re actually needed. Some even require workers to check in by phone, email, or text shortly before the shift starts.

Just-in-time scheduling is another part of America’s new “flexible” economy – along with the move to independent contractors and the growing reliance on “share economy” businesses, like Uber, that purport to do nothing more than connect customers with people willing to serve them.

New software is behind all of this – digital platforms enabling businesses to match their costs exactly with their needs.

The business media considers such flexibility an unalloyed virtue. Wall Street rewards it with higher share prices. America’s “flexible labor market” is the envy of business leaders and policy makers the world over.

There’s only one problem. The new flexibility doesn’t allow working people to live their lives.

Businesses used to consider employees fixed costs  – like the costs of factories, offices, and equipment. Payrolls might grow or shrink over time as businesses expanded or contracted, but from year to year they were fairly constant.

That meant steady jobs. And with steady jobs came steady paychecks along with regular and predictable work schedules.

But employees are now becoming variable costs of doing business – depending on ups and downs in demand that may change hour by hour, possibly minute by minute.

Yet working people have to pay the rent or make mortgage payments, and have keep up with utility, food, and fuel bills. These bills don’t vary much from month to month. They’re the fixed costs of living.

American workers can’t simultaneously be variable costs for business yet live in their own fixed-cost worlds.

They’re also husbands and wives and partners, most are parents, and they often have to take care of elderly relatives. All this requires coordinating schedules in advance – who’s going to cover for whom, and when.

But such planning is impossible when you don’t know when you’ll be needed at work.

Whatever it’s called – just-in-time scheduling, on-call staffing, on-demand work, independent contracting, or the “share economy” – the result is the same: No predictability, no economic security.

This makes businesses more efficient, but it’s a nightmare for working families.

Last week, the National Employment Law Project reported that 42 percent of U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour.

But even $20 an hour isn’t enough if the work is unpredictable and insecure.

Not only is a higher minimum wage critical. So are more regular and predictable hours.

Some states require employers to pay any staff who report to work for a scheduled shift but who are then sent home, at least 4 hours pay at the minimum wage.

But these laws haven’t kept up with software that enables employers to do just-in-time scheduling – and inform workers minutes before their shift that they’re not needed.

In what may become a test case, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last weekwarned 13 big retailers – including Target and The Gap – that their just-in-time scheduling may violate New York law, which requires payments to workers who arrive for a shift and then are sent home.

We need a federal law requiring employers to pay for scheduled work.

Alternatively, if American workers can’t get more regular and predictable hours, they at least need stronger safety nets.

These would include high-quality pre-school and after-school programs; unemployment insurance for people who can only get part-time work; and a minimum guaranteed basic income.

All the blather about “family-friendly workplaces” is meaningless if workers have no control over when they’re working.

Shelton, WA (4-20-15) — Olympic Panel Products has sent a letter to all of its employees about several incidents of attempted or actual sabotage of its facilities in downtown Shelton after its reported sale to Swanson (OPP to be Cannibalized), a plywood manufacturer in Springfield, OR whose facilities were lost to fire last year. Copies of the letter threatening closure if the sabotage can’t/won’t be stopped were forwarded to Bill Corbin, chairman of the  board of New Wood Resources LLC, and its CEO, Kurt Liebich.

The letter to employees and stake holders relates several instances of malevolence including 2 separate occasions of steel bolts being pressed into the plywood panels. A 3rd bolt was discovered before it could be pressed into a panel. The company pointedly described how such a hazard could destroy expensive routing or saw blade tools as well as the injuries/death to workers that could be suffered from the flying shrapnel. OPP didn’t mention the obvious reduction of confidence in its products that already could give potential customers pause.

A flooding of the pit beneath one of the presses damaged equipment and caused loss of production. A mounting bracket was pressed between two platens (the large precision steel surfaces required to produce smooth level sheets of plywood) incurring a $25,000 loss to OPP for repairs. Another Press platen was found bent at the beginning of the day shift after it had not been used during the previous graveyard shift.

Someone removed propane tanks from a forklift on site, deliberately spilling the contents inside the repair shop. The danger to the health and safety of workers as well as the existence of the plant was self evident. OPP management was made aware of two large propane tanks having their valves opened to bleed the explosive  fuel into the maintenance shop, as were the local police, the ATF, the fire department and likely the FBI on at least two occasions during the week of 4-6-15.

OPP stated it sought to ‘mitigate’ the anticipated “riffs” by continuing its operation for the next 12-18 months, but that game plan is now very much in doubt. The question of what insurance underwriter would want to be left holding the bag in the face of such a pronounced ‘moral hazard’ begs to be answered. OPP may want to continue operating until its lease has expired, but is it willing to continue to sit at the poker table risking all of its chips to a malevolent nameless nemisis when it could cash them in immediately.

OPP has already terminated 25 workers. Any employees found to be using cell phones or a camera inside the plant are told they’ll be terminated immediately. Its threat to summarily close down the facilities cannot be taken lightly and the letter may simply have served as a pretext for doing so. The company’s suggested remedial action it intends to take include the following:

Regular shift meetings with employees will be held to discuss safety concerns and to review ‘incidents’.

The police have been notified and OPP is cooperating with authorities in their investigation of the sabotage.

Video surveillance cameras will be installed.

Increased onsite ‘security’ patrols will be dispatched.

Propane tanks will be removed from the inside of buildings and the shop.

An anonymous ‘hot-line’ will be set up for employees to report any illegal/suspicious activities. OPP is requesting employees use the hot-line to do so, and promises any discovered to have avoided reporting the same will be terminated and prosecuted, if possible.

OPP openly announced in its letter to ‘constituents’ that should the above measures fail, if the plant can’t “be operated safely”, it will cease operations altogether. Employees will be pounding the bricks sooner than later. Meetings with local uniformed police and the president of OPP have already been held. The company states it hopes these steps will lead to  the arrest of the saboteurs or in some way STOP the sabotage.

The letter, signed by OPP president John Pierce (360-432-5003) invites workers to call or visit his office with an open door policy to discuss/report concerns. (Apparently, the door won’t be ‘opened’ until Wednesday as the receptionist claimed he wasn’t in his office Monday afternoon and wouldn’t be until then.)

A call to the local Woodworkers Union (360-426-5541) found nobody there to answer questions regarding their members’ safety or job prospects.

The ultimate question is now: Will OPP remain sitting at the poker table worrying about a joker in the deck, or will it takes its winnings and quit while it’s ahead? Who is OPP’s underwriter? Have they been notified of the spate of incidents for which the insurer might have to write a check? Workers there are advised not to look back–something might be gaining on them.

And then there’s the little matter of a mountain of wood ash on location leaching its dioxin into Shelton’s harbor and Oakland Bay…the most dioxin saturated waters/sediment in the Puget Sound…but nobody’s talking about that and OPP hopes the EPA won’t notice. It certainly would create a problem for any future tenant thinking of leasing the site after OPP clears out.

 

3 Iraq military contractor co-defendants  get only 30-year prison terms

by Andrea Germanos

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on Monday sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison for his role in a 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians, which left 14 dead and wounded 17 others.

The Associated Press reports that the three other Blackwater employees—Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard—were sentenced to 30 years and one day each on charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.

Earlier:

Four former Blackwater guards face sentencing Monday for their role in the deaths of 14 Iraqi civilians during a 2007 massacre called “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday.”

The men, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough, and Nicholas Slatten, were convicted in October 2014 after years of legal battles. “Slatten faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for first-degree murder before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth,” the Washington Post reports; the other three men face the possibility of dozens of years behind bars.

While defense lawyers have argued that the men were acting in self-defense, federal prosecutors wrote that the men’s “crimes here were so horrendous—the massacre and maiming of innocents so heinous—that they outweigh any factors that the defendants may argue form a basis for leniency.”

In an interview with Democracy Now! last year, Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, described the deadly traffic square shooting that left 17 people killed:

[Blackwater guards] were responding—they were a unit called Raven 23. They were the elite Praetorian Guard of the U.S. occupation. They were guarding Paul Bremer, who was the original sort of proconsul in Iraq, the “viceroy,” as he liked to call himself. They were responding to an incident that had occurred on the opposite end of Baghdad from where their base was located. They roll out. They end up hitting a crowded intersection at Nisour Square. What often would happen in Iraq is that mercenary contractors would start throwing frozen water bottles at cars, trying to force them off the street, and then eventually escalate up to shooting at vehicles. These guys basically tried to take over this traffic circle, the Blackwater guys, so that they could speed around and continue on to their destination.

A small white car with a young Iraqi medical student and his mother didn’t stop fast enough for the Blackwater convoy, and they decided to escalate it all the way up to assassinating those individuals. And I say “assassinating,” because they shot to kill these people, and then they blew their car up. And then, that started this massive shooting spree that went on for—it was sustained for minutes. And at the end of it, 17 Iraqis were killed, including a nine-year-old boy named Ali Kinani, whose story we’ve told on the show before, and some 20 others were wounded in the attacks. And it was—you know, it became known as Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday.”

And Blackwater… in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, said that they had been fired upon. They had their allies in the media. A senior producer at CNN was quick to get on TV and say, “Oh, no, no, this wasn’t a massacre. You know, this was a firefight, and Blackwater was shot at.” Clearly, this jury saw what the Iraqi eyewitnesses have always contended, and that is that this was an unprovoked massacre of Iraqi civilians, none of whom were posing a threat, except not stopping fast enough for the mercenaries helping to occupy their country.

The incident became a flashpoint of outrage over the atrocities that U.S. forces—particularly mercenaries—inflict on occupied civilian populations in Iraq.

The Post reports Monday: “Defendants said that the case is the first in which the U.S. government prosecuted its own security contractors for the firearms violation, which involve weapons given them by the government to do their jobs in a war zone.”

Scahill wrote following the guilty convictions that they marked yet another instance in which high-ranking individuals failed to be the targets for accountability. 

“Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. [Blackwater founder Erik] Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries.

“None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors,” Scahill wrote.

[Shelton, WA has a similar addiction to eating its children and will suck up to anyone who will provide the dining table, as noted in coverage here of local officials doing exactly that during a public meeting where State prison officials contemplated opening yet another hell hole in the community.]

“It is no easy matter to go to Heaven by way of New Orleans.” -Reverend J. Chandler Gregg-

The Gathering Storm

by Kathy Kelly

(Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence info@vcnv.org), is in federal prison for participation in an anti-drone protest. She can receive mail at: KATHY KELLY 04971-045; FMC LEXINGTON; FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER; SATELLITE CAMP; P.O. BOX 14525; LEXINGTON, KY 40512.)

Lexington, KY — Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. “I love storms,” said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, KY’s federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: “It’s over now, It’s over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now.”

I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many times? “That was lightning,” Gypsi said, giggling. The guards shine flashlight in our rooms three times a night, to count us, and I generally wake up each time; that night the storm was also a culprit.

As the day continued we saw large pools of water had collected at each entrance to Atwood Hall. Prisoners from drought-ridden areas wish they could collect the rainwater and send it home. Fanciful notions, but of the kind, at least, that can help us remember priorities. I suppose it’s wise, though, to focus on what can be fixed. The elevator here, for instance.

The Department of Justice Budget for Fiscal Year 2015 provides 27.4 billion in discretionary funding. In state prisons alone, it’s estimated that taxpayers spend an average of $31,286.00 per inmate per year. (The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers, p. 9). But, for most of the 2.5 months that I’ve lived here in Atwood Hall, the elevator from the basement to the 3rd floor, which should serve close to 300 women, has been out of order. According to “inmate dot com,” our in-house rumor mill, a decision was made, last month, not to fix it. In the past several weeks, two women arrived in wheelchairs and another new prisoner is blind.

I like moving from the basement to the third floor on the staircase. It’s easy exercise. But traveling up and down the stairs can be life-threatening for many prisoners here.

Ms. P. seems to be in her seventies. Wiry white hair, fixed in a braid that reaches down her neck, surrounds her golden brown face. I like to imagine a framed oil painting of her gracing the first floor entrance.

A few nights ago, I watched her toil to haul herself, hanging on to the handrail, from the basement to the first floor. She needed to rest on the landing, winded, her heart pounding, barely able to speak. But Ms. P. made the best of it. “Ms. P.,” said another prisoner comfortingly, “maybe they’ll get this elevator fixed this week.” “I’d contribute my entire month’s salary if it would help repair the elevator!” Ms. P. said with a chuckle. She very likely earns $6.72 cents per month, at 12 cents an hour. Three of us readily agreed to match her donation, which would amount to about $28.00.

We need Ms. P.’s lightheartedness. But I’ve seen flashes of fury, followed by sad resignation, like lightning giving way to rain, in the faces of guards and prison administrators witnessing these scenes occurring on their watch, but as powerless to stop them as to call off those storms the other night.

A ray of brilliant sun fell for me last weekend with a visit from an old friend, parent to a lovely child I was especially delighted to see. Once again, I am luckier than so many whose loved ones lack the means for regular and intensive travel. Through our conversation in the prison visiting room, I learned the story of Thompson FCI, a freshly-constructed but never-occupied federal prison near Clinton, Iowa. My friend’s folks, who live near the town, have speculated for years, as have all the town’s residents, about when or whether the empty prison would ever open. Right now, my friend said, there’s only one full time employee in the prison, the warden, and his job is to mow the lawn.

Apparently, local people have been pining for the Bureau of Prisons to act. “The BOP’s positive impact on rural communities is significant,” says a 2015 paper issued by the Department of Justice. “By bringing in new federal jobs, stimulation of local businesses and housing, contracting with hospitals and other local vendors, and coordinating with local law enforcement, the BOP improves the economy of the town and the entire region where these rural facilities are located.”

Yet government’s promises to aid small towns with “prison money” often ring false. In an article entitled “The American Prison, Open for Business?” (Peace Review, vol. 20, issue 3), Stephen Gallagher notes that although prisons may bring with them high-paying jobs, “most employees of the prison industry do not live in the host communities.” “In a joint WSU/MSU study, it was found that 68 percent of the corrective jobs were held by people who did not even live in the county that housed the prison where they worked. In another study in California, it was found that less than 20 percent of the jobs went to residents of the host community.” And most people living in poor rural communities aren’t eligible for the better-paying jobs in the prison system.

Communities desperate to host a new prison should also consider the wages that will be paid to the prisoners. What company would choose to hire local non-inmate workers when the BOP can forcibly hire inmates to work for 12 cents an hour, right in their homes, with no need to consider employee benefits, pay raises, vacation pay or insurance. Prison labor creates a labor pool that is always available and can be maintained in a manner similar to the cost of maintaining slaves. If neighboring people lose their jobs, if they have to steal to try to get by, they can always wind up living in the prison.

I’m hard-pressed to see how this can possibly benefit an area’s economy, that is if its “economy” is understood to include all the area’s people, and not just the wealthiest who can influence prison placement.

When prisons are constructed in rural, southern areas, the political elites can count the entire prison population as part of their census, bringing federal funds into their jurisdictions, but without much pressure to share funds with their new ‘constituents,’ since the prisoners by and large can’t vote. Blighted urban areas lose funds desperately needed for education, housing, health care and infrastructure, while rural people compete to be hired as jailers.

One morning last week, a neighbor across the hall told us she feared she would choke on her own sobs as she cried herself to sleep. I wondered how many times the flashlights would re-awaken her during the night. She had been counting on a sentence reduction and her lawyer had told her, just the previous day, that her case is complicated and she most likely wouldn’t qualify. “I can’t do 3 1/2 more years here,” she said, completely distraught. “I just can’t!” “Yes, you can,” insisted one of the friends gathering to console her. I watched appreciatively, two people caught in the storm and guiding each other through it.

We hear about the droughts, and the temperature records, and we recognize that more storms are coming. The recent, and for many never-ended, financial crisis was a storm, and I notice that politicians and pundits are in full swing demanding a new regional war overseas with the arguments we’d hoped the nation had learned to reject twelve years ago. We can expect these threats, with ecological scarcity underlying them all, to build into each other: the perfect storm. We remember that storms can build quickly. “I can’t do 3 more years” might well be a statement truer, and truer for many, many more people, than my suffering fellow inmate ever imagined. We could be working together preparing shelter.

Many people of Clinton, Iowa will clamor for the prison to open, but not for more direct government help, communal help to foster employment and development in the the area. For many, a “free market” will mean the choice to lose our homes or find a home behind bars, or else to make a living keeping other people there; but without the choice, in an increasingly undemocratic nation, to pool our resources as a community and help each other to stay free; compassionately, or even sanely, to shelter each other from this storm. The jobs will come when strangers file in, in chains – that’s freedom. I look around me at “freedom,” and at how Ms. P. is getting a step up in the world.

We could awake into the world, build affinities between the suffering people locked in Atwood Hall and its managers, between the struggling rural community of Clinton and the urban desperate they wait to see bused in. Just about everyone longs to raise their children in a world where drought, storms, and brutal want won’t loom as insoluble, inevitable catastrophes. Working together we could reclaim misspent resources and correct misguided policies. Our fear and isolation from each other, aiming to get a step up above our neighbors, our reluctance to live in a shared world, may be worse than the other storms we face.

The other storms will come, and we will have to see how we weather them, but what if our terrible fear of each other could pass us by? What if, for those of us doing the easiest time, “I can’t do 3 more years” became “I won’t make you do 3 more years” – became our part in a chorused “we won’t do 3 more years!” ringing through our society. How miraculous it would be to hold our children and grand-children and sing, “I think that we can make it. The storm is over now.”

Colors Of The Wind (Theme from Pocahontas)

Theme from Toy Story (You’ve Got a Friend in Me)

Take the A Train

Satin Doll

Under The Sea (from The Little Mermaid)

“Harlem Nocturne” is a jazz standard written by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers in 1939. The song was adopted by bandleader Randy Brooks the next year as his theme song. Originally written as a tribute to saxophonist Johnny Hodges, Earle Hagen said that he was inspired by Duke Ellington’s band, and he wrote the piece for Ray Noble Orchestra member Jack Dumont.

The haunting version by The Viscounts has the distinction of being a tune released twice by the same band and rising high on the Billboard charts each time: first in 1959, when it peaked at #53, and again in 1966, peaking at #39 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It has been reported that there are about 500 covers of this classic. It’s also notorious as a slow strip/grind bluesy piece.

Harlem Nocturne/The Viscounts (long version – 1960)

The Viscounts / Harlem Nocturne

Harlem Nocturne – Willis Jackson (slow sax)

Harlem Nocturne — Illinois Jacquet

Play Along (Harlem Nocturne)

Harlem Nocturne – Saxophone Backing Tracks by saxophonebackingtracks

Judge sets $5,000 bail for state community corrections officer Michael C. Boone accused of possessing child pornography

Ever wonder just how secure all those files you’ve been storing in the ‘cloud’ are?–now you know! Privacy has long been dead. The thought police can and WILL arrest you for what you are thinking…or thought to be thinking. Simple possession of incriminating indices of bad thoughts…even fictitious ones…is enough. (e.g. kiddie porn, in law, need not actually be a photograph of anyone/anything, but can merely be composed of the scribbling or rendering of one’s fetid imagination.) The poetry of this particular example of big brother’s justice is the thought police have, in this instance, devoured one of their own…aided and abetted by none other than the creator of the Operating System most of us use on our computers: Microsoft!

by Amelia Dickson

Olympia, WA (4-8-15) — A Thurston County judge set bail at $5,000 for Michael C. Boone, an Olympia man accused of possessing child pornography.

The 37-year-old man, who works as a community corrections officer for the State Department of Corrections, appeared before Judge James Dixon on Wednesday afternoon. The judge found probable cause for three counts of second-degree possession of depictions of a minor engaged in a sexually explicit act.

According to the Corrections Department, Boone was hired in 2003 and works with adult offenders. He was placed on administrative leave, pending an investigation.

Boone also works as a reserve officer for the Tenino Police Department. Mayor Bret Brodersen said Boone has been placed on administrative leave there as well and that he won’t have access to Police Department facilities.

The State Patrol arrested Boone on Tuesday following an investigation that began in December. Microsoft notified law enforcement when employees discovered that Boone uploaded child pornography to his cloud account, according to court documents.

Detectives later confirmed that three of the images were child pornography that is well-known to law enforcement. The images were uploaded from an IP address belonging to Boone’s wife.

Sgt. James Mjor said in a press release that at present there is no indication that any child pornography was stored on Boone’s work computer but out of an abundance of caution, detectives seized the computer for a forensic examination.

Mjor said the investigation began when security officers at Microsoft noticed the electronic signature of well-known and frequently-traded images of child pornography on Boone’s Microsoft SkyDrive account. They contacted the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which in turn referred the matter to law enforcement.

They served a search warrant at Boone’s home and found his laptop. The computer contained the same three explicit images that had been uploaded to Boone’s cloud account, according to court documents.

Deputy prosecuting attorney Jim Powers said that Boone has no criminal history, but because of the seriousness of the alleged crime, bail was still warranted. He also requested that Boone have no in-person contact with minors and that he have no access to the Internet.

Office of Assigned Counsel Attorney Sara Hixson, who represented Boone at the hearing, argued that those conditions were too harsh. She said that there was no indication that Boone had ever harmed his children, nor was there an indication that he would fail to appear in court.

“He has significant ties to the community,” Hixson said. “He has been here for more than 10 years.”

Dixon accepted Powers’ recommendations, clarifying that Boone could contact his children via phone calls and letters.

He also found Boone ineligible for a court-appointed attorney. Hixson said Boone plans to hire a private attorney before his next court appearance, an April 21 arraignment.

The investigation began with a tip from Microsoft.

Security officers at the Redmond company noticed the electronic signature of well-known and frequently-traded images of child pornography on Boone’s Microsoft SkyDrive account, according to the Washington State Patrol.

SkyDrive is like cloud storage for a person’s photos, documents and other files, which one can access from multiple devices.

They turned the information over to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who forwarded it to the state patrol task force, Mjor said.

The task force said this afternoon it had no indication any child porn was stored on Boone’s work computer, but seized it for a forensic examination, and also seized his Tenino Police Department-issued smart phone.

The tip came in last week and initially was just an IP address, Mjor said.

Detectives went to speak with Boone, to see if he had any information he could help them out with, he said. While they were talking with him, other detectives were serving the search warrant at his home for his computer, he said.

MILAN – The Associated Press reports a man on trial for fraudulent bankruptcy opened fire in Milan’s courthouse Thursday, killing his lawyer, a co-defendant and a judge before being captured nearly 16 miles away as he fled on a motorbike, officials said.

As the shots rang out in the fortress-like tribunal, court employees barricaded themselves inside their offices and took cover under their desks while police hunted for the gunman who moved unimpeded from one floor to the next.

“There was a lot of panic at the beginning when people came running toward us saying there was a person with a pistol who had been shooting,” said lawyer Mirko Ricetti, who said he locked himself in a first-floor court room after hearing a shot.

After texting loved ones that they were OK, employees and lawyers were eventually allowed to trickle out of the tribunal, women first, followed by the men who had their court ID cards checked.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said the suspect was caught by carabinieri police in Vimercate, near Monza, indicating he had traveled some 15 miles from the scene before being captured. An ambulance with escort was seen leaving the Vimercate police station, but it wasn’t immediately clear if the gunman was inside.

Prosecutor Edmondo Bruti Liberati said the gunman first fired on his lawyer and co-defendant, killing both and seriously injuring a second co-defendant.

Afterwards, he “walked through the building, going down a floor, and killed the judge,” Bruti Liberati told The Associated Press.

He said it wasn’t clear whether there was any relationship between the gunman and the judge.

He identified the slain judge as Fernando Ciampi, who worked in the civil section of bankruptcy court. The ANSA news agency identified the gunman as Claudio Giardiello.

Bruti Liberati said the gunman was on trial with two others for fraudulent bankruptcy.

Giardiello’s former attorney, Valerio Maraniello, told RAI state TV the case concerned a failed real estate business and that Giardiello was “very unusual” and “over the top” in his legal dealings.

The shooting immediately raised questions about how the man gained entrance to the Fascist-era courthouse with a weapon, given that visitors must pass through metal detectors.

The courthouse has metal detectors at the four main entrances, but lawyers and courthouse employees with official IDs are regularly waved through without the additional security screen and accredited employees can drive into the internal garage.

Attornies Mirko and Davide Pupo noted that the metal detector from the lawyers’ entrance had been removed several months ago.

Employees who emerged after the shooting suggested that the gunman could easily have gained entrance without passing through the metal detector by entering with his lawyer, though other attorneys said their clients routinely are told to go in via the public entrance.

The deputy interior minister, Filippo Bubbico, said an investigation would determine who was to blame for any security lapse, given also that the gunman wasn’t stopped as he moved from one floor to the next to continue the spree, and then was able to flee unimpeded.

“There’s no doubt that this episode signals a non-functioning of the protection mechanisms, which must be employed daily and which have worked for years at the Milan tribunal,” he told Sky TG24.

Security concerns are particularly high in Milan given the May 1 opening of the Expo world’s fair. In fact, the interior minister, Alfano, was in Milan on Thursday to preside over a public security coordination meeting for Expo when the shooting erupted.

Nearly Getting Away With Murder

by Scott Lemieux

He probably would have gotten away with it.

That’s the sobering reality of the video of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shooting Walter L. Scott as he ran away, not posing the slightest threat to the officer. The utter indifference to human life evident in the video, shot by Feidin Santana, is horrifying. As Scott’s father put it, “The way he was shooting that gun, it looked like he was trying to kill a deer.” After Scott was felled by at least one of eight shots, Slager occupied himself with handcuffing Scott and possibly trying to plant evidence rather than making any immediateattempt to save his life. The phrase “cold-blooded killing” could have been invented for this shooting.

After the video surfaced, the relevant local authorities, to their credit, acted promptly and justly. Slager was fired by the police department and charged with Scott’s murder by the district attorney. The killing was denounced by South Carolina’s Republican governor and its two Republican senators. In this case, clear video evidence pierced the thin blue line.

And yet, if it wasn’t for the pure chance of Slager’s actions being videotaped, he probably would have gotten off scot-free. Without videotaped evidence, stories of officers fearing for their lives before using deadly force can be difficult to dispute, and local police departments have little incentive to conduct extensive, critical investigations of the self-justifications of officers who kill. Even worse, they do have incentives to cover up even the most serious police misconduct.

“Americans are bombarded with evidence that police officers who use excessive or fatal force will go to great lengths to protect themselves and make sure they face no legal repercussions,” says Heather Ann Thompson, a professor of history at Temple University who specializes in issues of criminal justice. “From the state police bloody retaking of Attica in 1971, to the recent police officer killing of a citizen in South Carolina, cover-up is the first line of defense.”

This tendency to cover up represents a very serious systematic problem. A great deal of the criminal justice system depends on the honesty of law enforcement officials. Many criminal prosecutions depend on police testimony, and we often must rely on the investigations of local police when potential cases of misconduct arise. Pervasive dishonesty both lets individual bad actors escape punishment and undermines essential law enforcement activities. [Police not only routinely perjure themselves in their written reports/sworn testimony, but by being permitted to lie to ‘suspects’ are tacitly encouraged to do so!]

As Jeet Heer details at The New Republic, the social science literature shows that our trust in the police is often not warranted. “Testilying” (police giving knowingly false testimony in court) and “reportilying” (police producing reports that are knowingly false) are dismayingly common. The prosecutors theoretically charged with checking police behavior are all too likely to be in cahoots with them, rather than acting as a watchdog. Within the system, most people have nothing to gain and much to lose by aggressively pursuing police misbehavior.

The immediate response of the North Charleston police department to Scott’s killing is a case in point. Without the knowledge that the killing had been videotaped, the department gave an account of the killing that was brazenly false. This tall tale was straightforwardly reported by local media, and probably would have set the narrative and led to Slager’s exoneration had the videotape not surfaced.

This is particularly disturbing because the use of deadly force is hardly unusual. Although it’s only the second week of April, 11 people have been killed by police officers in South Carolina so far this year. Many or all of these applications of deadly force may have been justified, of course. [‘of course’?] But it is very difficult to trust the process that finds the overwhelming majority of these cases to be so. And it is very, very hard to believe that Scott’s case is an aberration.

One upshot of this case is to demonstrate the vital importance of the First Amendment right of citizens to film the behavior of police officers who are on duty. As The Washington Post‘s Radley Balko explains, despite the hostility of police officers [and @narchists!] to being filmed, recording their behavior while on duty is protected by the First Amendment in all 50 states. Citizens should be educated about this right and make use of it. At worst, one result of the killing of Walter Scott is that more officers will not expect that they can kill unarmed and unthreatening citizens with impunity.

Much has been made of the often rancorous debate surrounding capitalism, whether it truly exists in the U.S. and if it is the best we can do in terms of fairness, efficiency, and sustainability. One aspect is, however, irrefutably apolitical: A sustainable economy requires a sustainable environment and vice-versa–a tautology, really. If capitalism requires ever increasing levels of production and expansion (as economists claim) in a world of finite resources, the two are incompatible…not some distant day in the far off future, but now, today where untold numbers of people suffer and die from its toxic impact along with its severing their access to vital fundamental necessities (e.g. clean safe air & drinking water) for themselves, their children, their community.

At its core, our economic model acts as a virtual executioner of entire populations, both human and not, by providing incentives (profit) to promote their destruction as surely as the Nazis used the mechanism of government toward the same end. Ours, simply sells permits to corporations that allow them to, in essence, operate the gas chambers. Our national policy favoring such wanton slaughter and death by proxy begs we ask a disturbing question: What was the point of beating the Nazis only to become just like them?

Capitalism in America: Giving Crazy a Bad Name While Subverting Democracy

by John Atcheson

Ever since Milton Friedman’s series of essays on Capitalism and Freedom, conservatives have tried to link democracy and capitalism as essential handmaidens.  But as the evidence shows, it’s a reality-busting bundle that only a psychotic could love…Or believe.

The fact is, capitalism as practiced in America – far from being democracy’s handmaiden — is anathema to freedom, and ultimately, impoverishing to the vast majority of its citizens.

And it’s driving us crazy.

Let’s Take a Look at Crazy:

Sometime around 2050, large portions of many of America’s coastal cities will become uninhabitable due to periodic floods of epic proportions, unless we spend trillions of dollars on sea walls and pumping systems.  Think Katrina and Sandy occurring every year in the majority of our coastal cities.

The coastal flooding will be accompanied by droughts, huge forest fires, famine, massive migrations of climate refugees, and extinction of up to half the world’s species.  Oh, what the hell, throw in widespread pestilence, too.

But of course, the most ardent believers in capitalism say we can’t afford to take steps to prevent this – even though clean energy systems would create more jobs and economic growth than continuing to use fossil fuels.

So, what’s a psychotic to do?

Well, the true believers are in denial, with some even trying to pass laws prohibiting people from acknowledging the reality of climate change, which is the cause of all these catastrophes. Or, in the case of Florida – the State which will suffer the most – the governor is prohibiting state employees from using the words “climate change” or “global warming.”

Yeah, that’s sane.

Any objective look at this kind of behavior would have to label it as certifiable, mandatory lock-up, straight-jacket worthy insanity.

But it gets worse.

You’d think preserving the capacity to feed people would be pretty much an imperative.  But you’d be wrong.

As George Monbiot pointed out, the UN estimates we will need about 6 million hectares of new farmland each year to keep up with population growth – instead, we’re losing 12 million hectares to depletion.

Why? Because the consumptive monocultural approaches we use are “profitable,” according to capitalism.  So, basically, capitalism is setting us up for starvation and calling it profitable.

Meanwhile, we’re turning the oceans – the main source of protein for more than a billion people – into sterile acidic and nearly lifeless crypts.  Already, fisherman across the globe are pulling up nets fouled with jellyfish, which will dominate the seas in the not too distant future.

Another clear sign of psychosis.

Then of course, there’s the fact that Obama is proposing aggressive measures to cut carbon at the same time as he’s permitting exploration for more oil in the Arctic, even though we know we have to leave most of what we’ve already found in the ground or risk global catastrophes of biblical proportions.

Yeah, that makes sense.

We the people share a big part of the blame. While the Plutocrats take over the country, we keep electing people who hate government and want to turn it over to the private sector – aka the plutocrats — to run government.  Yet government is the only force capable of stopping the march of the fat cats and oligarchs.

At the state level, we’re seeing the fruits electing fruitcakes to run the state and the economy. In Kansas, they’re so hot to cut taxes that school systems can’t even finish the year.  And once promising Ohio has been consigned to the trash bin of economic history by this counterfactual clap trap, while Wisconsin – another bastion of conservative psychosis, lags far behind the nation in job growth and wages.

Crazy? It doesn’t get any crazier.  OK, now let’s move on.

How Capitalism Subverts Democracy

For starters, let’s acknowledge that in the United States, the interests of Big Money routinely trumps the will of the people. Here’s the proof:

• 91% want to strengthen rules on clean air and protection of drinking water; yet Congress – led by the Republican majority — is proposing to weaken them;
• 90% want to protect public lands and parks; yet the Republicans are proposing to put them on sale or otherwise privatize them;
• 74% of Americans favor ending subsidies to big oil; yet Congress has retained most of them;
• 90% of the citizens support legislation requiring background checks for gun purchase, but Congress can’t pass one.
• The majority of citizens favored allowing tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to expire, but the best Congress could do is compromise on $400,000;
• 70% of Americans consider climate change to be a high priority issue, yet Congress has taken no action;
• Some 80% of Americans favor shoring up Social Security even if it means higher taxes and a similar number support retaining Medicare as is, but we’ve twice offered cuts to both programs as part of a “grand bargain”;
• Or take this gem … more than 80% of Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street but the best we could get was weak-sister legislation that is being completely eviscerated as it is translated into regulations.

The list could go on and on.  Over the years Americans have favored an end to fracking, single payer health care, greater public investment in infrastructure, an increase in minimum wage, and an end to the perennial wars and removal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Congress and the President routinely ignore these wishes at the behest of monied interests.

So much for the will of the people.

Democrats received 20 million more votes for Senate than Republicans in 2014, yet Republicans hold the majority of seats.  Similarly, it only takes about 48% of the popular vote for Republicans to hold a majority in the House.

Why? Because a sophisticated cadre of the ultra-rich have been on a 30 plus year campaign to buy government.  Think tanks, corporate “free” speech, Democratic complicity, and a bought and paid for media has resulted in a gerrymandered map, a stacked Supreme Court and elections in which money trumps the wishes of the people, and routinely puts the will of a tiny rich minority over those of the majority.

By any measure, the US is an Oligarchy, not a democracy. This too, is a result of our doctrinaire belief in unconstrained capitalism, which inevitably results in grotesque income inequalities, and – ironically – economic collapse.  Pushed by an unholy alliance of true believers and rich special interests, we’ve tried unconstrained capitalism three times now, and each time it has obliterated the middle class, and wrecked the economy.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages – where belief trumps facts; where wishful thinking beats reality

The facts show that pure unadulterated capitalism not only limits freedom and destroys the planet, it is self-extinguishing.

But facts have little sway with the true believers. Like inmates in the asylum, the plutocrats keep pushing the very thing that will destroy them.  Unfortunately, they’re taking us with them.