By Steve James
21 April 2017
The BBC’s April 11 flagship documentary Panorama, “The Spy in the IRA” by veteran journalist John Ware, highlighted the decades-long British state infiltration of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Ware centred on Alfredo Scappaticci, who became infamous 14 years ago, in 2003, when he was named as the alleged British agent “Stakeknife.”
Scappaticci, notorious as the alleged one time head of the IRA’s Internal Security, responsible for identifying and dealing with informers, denied everything.
In the intervening period, such material that has emerged into the public domain has tended to confirm the role of “Stakeknife” in the extended and murderous British military intelligence operation, which for many years hopelessly compromised the security of the IRA.
Three years after Scappaticci was named, in 2006, Denis Donaldson, the former head of the IRA’s international relations, was exposed as a long-term British agent.
Donaldson was assassinated later the same year. No one has ever been charged with the killing.
In 2008, Roy McShane, also formerly of IRA Internal Security, was taken into “protective custody” for fear his role as a British agent was about to be revealed.
Scappaticci, Donaldson, and McShane are only a few of the most prominent figures thus far identified, in what is now assumed to be a list of agents that runs into many hundreds.
The role of “Stakeknife” and Scappaticci’s name only became known because of the efforts of a former British military intelligence officer, Ian Hurst. Hurst was a member of the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU), one of whose tasks was running spies in both loyalist and republican paramilitary organisations. Hurst appears to be primarily motivated by anger over the fact that British agents’ lives were sacrificed to maintain “Stakeknife’s” cover within the IRA. This was chiefly the angle taken by Ware, although the broadcast shed light on how Scappaticci came to be recruited.
Former IRA volunteer, now historian and writer, Anthony McIntyre, told Ware that Scappaticci was an admired and feared republican figure in the Markets area of Belfast. Scappaticci was detained in 1971, when, during the early years of “the Troubles” the British government introduced mass internment without trial, and was only released four years later.
Sometime after this, according to Ware, Scappaticci, who was a building worker, appears to have become tangled up in a VAT fraud. He was arrested by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), was recruited as a police informer and avoided prosecution. At some later stage, responsibility for handling him was transferred to the FRU. He was given number 6126, and a codename, “Stakeknife.” By this time, he already appears to have been placed in the IRA’s Internal Security section, which he came to lead during the 1980s.
McIntyre described Internal Security as “like an electrical junction box through which every wire must flow.”
Scappaticci was able to inform his handlers on many operations the IRA was planning and on threats to other perceived or real British agents within the organisation. Some of these, like Vincent Robinson, were innocent. According to Ware, Robinson was killed by the IRA after he was tortured by the police into revealing the location of an arms dump.
Others, such as Frank Hegarty, were spies. Hegarty was a republican who dropped out of the movement, then rejoined as an FRU agent. Having passed on the whereabouts of a stash of Libyan-supplied arms, he was shot in the head in 1986. According to Ware, Scappaticci knew Hegarty was going to be killed and told his handlers as much.
Ware has also recently brought out another aspect of Scappaticci’s activities, although this was not covered by Panorama.
Writing in the Irish Times April 15, Ware noted that Scappaticci was also responsible for the IRA’s “Civil Administration” in nationalist areas. According to Ware, Civil Administration was responsible for the vile practice of shooting working class youth in the knees, elbows and ankles for petty misdemeanours such as car theft and drug dealing. One mother described Scappaticci as warning her, “The next time we hear he’s been at it, or of any complaints against him, I will personally blow the head off him.”
The man in question was shot dead a few years later.
In 2016, after years of delay, the British police opened Operation Kenova, a £35 million police investigation involving as many as 50 detectives from across the UK with a remit to establish whether there is evidence of crimes that may have been committed by “Stakeknife” or “by members of the British Army, the Security Services or other Government agencies.”
Head of Operation Kenova, Jon Boutcher was distinctly non-committal to Panorama, but Ware outlined the circumstances surrounding two of the cases with which Kenova is likely to be dealing.
One was the murder of Joe Fenton, a Belfast estate agent who was manipulated into serving as an agent for the Special Branch of the then Northern Ireland police, the RUC. According to Ware, Fenton set up safe houses for the IRA, which were then bugged by Special Branch and information gathered used to compromise their operations. As head of IRA Internal Security, Fenton came to Scappaticci’s attention, as did a succession of failed operations. Scappaticci is said to have warned his handlers that an investigation into Fenton was imminent. Nothing was done, so Fenton was interrogated and shot.
As many as 50 murders are alleged to have been carried out by Internal Security, 30 under Scappaticci. By contrast, another agent, Sandy Lynch, who was facing the same fate under Scappaticci’s supervision, was rescued at the last moment by the RUC.
The entire sordid affair is a testimony to the brutal and oppressive character of the British and Northern Ireland military, intelligence and police operations against the IRA during the decades-long “dirty war.” But Sinn Fein have also colluded with the British state in preventing exposure of the infiltration and subversion of their own ranks and leading bodies. This is consistent with the party’s key goal of securing a working agreement with British imperialism. Following the 1999 Good Friday Agreement, and 2006 St Andrews Agreement, Sinn Fein has functioned as a loyal government partner with the hard-right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland and currently promotes itself as a prospective coalition partner with either Fine Gael or Fianna Fail in the Irish Republic.
Sinn Fein are currently embroiled in protracted negotiations with the British government and the DUP over the terms on which it might be possible for the Northern Ireland Assembly to be revived after an indecisive election in March left the DUP with just one more seat than Sinn Fein. Items under dispute include the impact of Brexit, the status of the Northern Ireland border, the Irish language, and the continued leadership of the DUP by Arlene Foster.
Also under discussion are the so-called “legacy” cases of “the Troubles.” However, while historical cases are the subject of immense tension between the talks’ participants, none of them, including Sinn Fein, have any interest in a full exposure of what took place since all are compromised and implicated.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/21/scap-a21.html
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Boston's Revolutionary Doctor - Antoinette Konikow: A Trotskyist To The End
by John G. Wright
From The Militant, Vol. 10, No. 28, July 13 1946, p. 3.
Antoinette Konikow was a revolutionary socialist to the last day of her life. A striking incident the night before she died indicates her spirit.
One of her friends in the medical profession, a leading Boston psychiatrist, visited her. Antoinette has long been famous in the medical world. But the conversation quickly turned to questions far more important than shop talk. Antoinette raised the question of dialectical materialism. The doctor responded with an attack on the dialect method claiming that it has not been borne out by latest developments in science.
Antoinette did not spend much time on the defensive. Almost 60 years as a Marxist had taught her the extraordinary importance of the dialectic method, and all her experiences in the medical field as well as study in other sciences had only confirmed what she had learned from the great Marxist teachers. She opened up with a counter-attack that quickly won her the upper hand. And then to pursue her advantage she persuaded her foe in dialectics to continue the subject the following night.
Antoinette wanted to pass on to the younger generation the lessons and truths gleaned in a long lifetime of hard experience. Three years ago, she retired from active practice, intending to devote the remainder of her life entirely to recording the most important things she had learned.
She assembled the great mass of notes she had jotted down from time to time and began putting them in order. First on the agenda was her memoirs. After writing about her childhood and youth in Czarist Russia and Germany as a background, she took up her political recollections. These begin with her impressions of George Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism and teacher of Lenin.
Still Learning—At 76!
To facilitate her work she decided last winter to learn touch typing—at the age of 76! Her letters to the Political Committee changed all at once from the long-familiar, diffieult-to-de- cipher handwriting to neatly typed communications.
But she did not succeed in finishing her memoirs. The considerable body of material she leaves will have to be assorted and woven together by someone else.
Her main objective in this work was to leave the younger generation with a true impression of more than a half century of revolutionary socialism. She had seen what damage opportunism can do. With her own eyes she saw the Second International brought to ruin and betrayal. In the light of this experience she understood to the full the need for battling Stalinism tooth and nail, for the Stalinist regime not only spreads the same poison-of opportunism as the Second International, but wields totalitarian state power with utter ruthlesness. Consequently she devoted a great deal of her last days to analyzing the revolutionary period of the Communist International in order to show what the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky really set out to do. The task of her gener- action, she felt, was to hand on the program of revolutionary socialism as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had shaped it. Her study of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International resulted in an outline for class use and much additional unpublished material.
She wanted especially to write down her impressions of the Bolshevik generation that led the October 1917 revolution. Many of them she knew personally. They were the men cruelly slandered by Stalin as fascist “dogs gone mad.” She knew them to be victims of Stalin, framed- up in the Moscow trials organized by the Kremlin dictator.
In 1940 she visited Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia at Coyoacan. There the friendship with the great revolutionary couple, already many years old,: was still more firmly cemented. The assassination of Trotsky by a GPU agent was a terrible personal blow to Antoinette. Despite her age, Antoinette followed the press very closely. She intervened actively in political events, following the Militant and Fourth International and sending in her criticisms and opinions.
Recently she pointed out the necessity for the European Trotskyist movement to start up a paper in the Russian language. She mentioned the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking refugees now in various countries. The paper, she thought, should be popularly written, and even if her own Russian wasn’t “classical” she was willing to become a contributor.
Antoinette spent her last days in the kind of surroundings she loved most, a cottage on the shores of Morse Pond, a beautiful lake at Wellesley, Massachusetts. The green surroundings reminded her of the Black Forest country of Germany where she one lived. She particularly admired a great pine tree standing between the porch and the lake. Some time ago a bolt of lightning ripped through the branches of this tree. After every storm Antoinette came out to see hour it had weathered the ordeal. But it always stood, sturdy and strong, ruggedly beautfiul despite the scars of time, wind and lightning.
Busy With Party Tasks
It was here that Antoinette Konikow died, busy with party tasks up to the very end.
Antoinette was not only a great teacher and leader of the Trotskyist movement. She was an Integral part of the Boston branch of the Socialist Workers Party. The members counted her as their closest friend and advisor. Most of them she had nurtured as budding revolutionary socialist politicians of the working class, and she took great personal interest in the development of each one. Her classes in speaking, in the principles of Marxism, and in the history of the movement gave most of the Boston comrades their first insight into Trotskyism.
No one saw through sham and pretense quicker than Antoinette. No one had more contempt for the traitors, the liars and the tyrants who occupy the high places. No one was more revolted than she over the medals showered by Stalin on his sycophants. But that did not prevent her from seeing the value of genuine leaders and of appreciation well earned. In fact she probably understood the pricelessness of these things all the more because she was a real iconoclast. One of the most moving incidents in her political life was her reaction to an autographed photograph and letter from Leon Trotsky on her Fiftieth Anniversary in the Marxist movement. In response to the tribute paid her by those present on the occasion, she responded:
Trotsky’s Warm Tribute
“The comrades have received me with warmth and friendship. It gives me tremendous happiness. The kind words written by Comrade Trotsky on his picture presented to me remind me of the greatest honor—the honor that was! —given to comrades in Russia, the Order of Lenin pinned upon their breasts. I feel as if Comrade Trotsky has pinned the Order of Trotsky on my breast! Not that I am a hero- worshipper—for I have helped to pull down too many heroes from their pedestals, But in the last ten years of darkness, of despair, the words of Leon Trotsky have been like a bell for a ship in distress, leading it to safe harbor.”
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1946/trotskyist-to-the-end.htm#top
From The Militant, Vol. 10, No. 28, July 13 1946, p. 3.
Antoinette Konikow was a revolutionary socialist to the last day of her life. A striking incident the night before she died indicates her spirit.
One of her friends in the medical profession, a leading Boston psychiatrist, visited her. Antoinette has long been famous in the medical world. But the conversation quickly turned to questions far more important than shop talk. Antoinette raised the question of dialectical materialism. The doctor responded with an attack on the dialect method claiming that it has not been borne out by latest developments in science.
Antoinette did not spend much time on the defensive. Almost 60 years as a Marxist had taught her the extraordinary importance of the dialectic method, and all her experiences in the medical field as well as study in other sciences had only confirmed what she had learned from the great Marxist teachers. She opened up with a counter-attack that quickly won her the upper hand. And then to pursue her advantage she persuaded her foe in dialectics to continue the subject the following night.
Antoinette wanted to pass on to the younger generation the lessons and truths gleaned in a long lifetime of hard experience. Three years ago, she retired from active practice, intending to devote the remainder of her life entirely to recording the most important things she had learned.
She assembled the great mass of notes she had jotted down from time to time and began putting them in order. First on the agenda was her memoirs. After writing about her childhood and youth in Czarist Russia and Germany as a background, she took up her political recollections. These begin with her impressions of George Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism and teacher of Lenin.
Still Learning—At 76!
To facilitate her work she decided last winter to learn touch typing—at the age of 76! Her letters to the Political Committee changed all at once from the long-familiar, diffieult-to-de- cipher handwriting to neatly typed communications.
But she did not succeed in finishing her memoirs. The considerable body of material she leaves will have to be assorted and woven together by someone else.
Her main objective in this work was to leave the younger generation with a true impression of more than a half century of revolutionary socialism. She had seen what damage opportunism can do. With her own eyes she saw the Second International brought to ruin and betrayal. In the light of this experience she understood to the full the need for battling Stalinism tooth and nail, for the Stalinist regime not only spreads the same poison-of opportunism as the Second International, but wields totalitarian state power with utter ruthlesness. Consequently she devoted a great deal of her last days to analyzing the revolutionary period of the Communist International in order to show what the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky really set out to do. The task of her gener- action, she felt, was to hand on the program of revolutionary socialism as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had shaped it. Her study of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International resulted in an outline for class use and much additional unpublished material.
She wanted especially to write down her impressions of the Bolshevik generation that led the October 1917 revolution. Many of them she knew personally. They were the men cruelly slandered by Stalin as fascist “dogs gone mad.” She knew them to be victims of Stalin, framed- up in the Moscow trials organized by the Kremlin dictator.
In 1940 she visited Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia at Coyoacan. There the friendship with the great revolutionary couple, already many years old,: was still more firmly cemented. The assassination of Trotsky by a GPU agent was a terrible personal blow to Antoinette. Despite her age, Antoinette followed the press very closely. She intervened actively in political events, following the Militant and Fourth International and sending in her criticisms and opinions.
Recently she pointed out the necessity for the European Trotskyist movement to start up a paper in the Russian language. She mentioned the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking refugees now in various countries. The paper, she thought, should be popularly written, and even if her own Russian wasn’t “classical” she was willing to become a contributor.
Antoinette spent her last days in the kind of surroundings she loved most, a cottage on the shores of Morse Pond, a beautiful lake at Wellesley, Massachusetts. The green surroundings reminded her of the Black Forest country of Germany where she one lived. She particularly admired a great pine tree standing between the porch and the lake. Some time ago a bolt of lightning ripped through the branches of this tree. After every storm Antoinette came out to see hour it had weathered the ordeal. But it always stood, sturdy and strong, ruggedly beautfiul despite the scars of time, wind and lightning.
Busy With Party Tasks
It was here that Antoinette Konikow died, busy with party tasks up to the very end.
Antoinette was not only a great teacher and leader of the Trotskyist movement. She was an Integral part of the Boston branch of the Socialist Workers Party. The members counted her as their closest friend and advisor. Most of them she had nurtured as budding revolutionary socialist politicians of the working class, and she took great personal interest in the development of each one. Her classes in speaking, in the principles of Marxism, and in the history of the movement gave most of the Boston comrades their first insight into Trotskyism.
No one saw through sham and pretense quicker than Antoinette. No one had more contempt for the traitors, the liars and the tyrants who occupy the high places. No one was more revolted than she over the medals showered by Stalin on his sycophants. But that did not prevent her from seeing the value of genuine leaders and of appreciation well earned. In fact she probably understood the pricelessness of these things all the more because she was a real iconoclast. One of the most moving incidents in her political life was her reaction to an autographed photograph and letter from Leon Trotsky on her Fiftieth Anniversary in the Marxist movement. In response to the tribute paid her by those present on the occasion, she responded:
Trotsky’s Warm Tribute
“The comrades have received me with warmth and friendship. It gives me tremendous happiness. The kind words written by Comrade Trotsky on his picture presented to me remind me of the greatest honor—the honor that was! —given to comrades in Russia, the Order of Lenin pinned upon their breasts. I feel as if Comrade Trotsky has pinned the Order of Trotsky on my breast! Not that I am a hero- worshipper—for I have helped to pull down too many heroes from their pedestals, But in the last ten years of darkness, of despair, the words of Leon Trotsky have been like a bell for a ship in distress, leading it to safe harbor.”
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1946/trotskyist-to-the-end.htm#top
How to Trap a Wild Squirrel
In US eastern cities, before the Civil War, squirrels had been hunted to extinction. Cities with large populations like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were free of squirrels because people had hunted and eaten then since colonial times.
Around 1870 nature boosters began to release birds and squirrels into newly constructed urban parks. The animals were seen as a way to bring wild creatures back into the city for all to experience a bit of nature.
Now, squirrels are everywhere in cities across the US and spend a lot of their time chewing on things. As rodents squirrels have sharp teeth that grow continuously. Squirrels have to chew on hard things to keep their teeth the right length and sharpness. So, they chew on trees and houses and power lines and telephone poles and....anything. They get in people's houses or businesses and chew, chew, chew.
So...people want to get rid of the squirrels in their homes or property. If they are inside a building one can leave out cubes of rat poison stuck in peanut butter. Large spring rat traps can be baited with peanut butter and peanuts to attract a squirrel. There are many brands of catch and release traps available for about $30 or $40 and up.
If one catches or traps a rodent or squirrel inside a home or property one can kill it. Some removal experts say that they have put color code marks on squirrels fur and released them ten miles away and then caught the same animal later. So putting a squirrel down is perhaps the best way to stop squirrel problems in a home or business. One way is to fill a barrel with water and put the trapped animals cage into the water for a quick death. Squirrels cause millions of dollars of damage and untold numbers of fires and danger to humans.
Trapping a squirrel outdoors is a different story. One can not release a capture squirrel onto a public park or woods. If one catches a squirrel on their city property the only legal way to release the animal is to buy property in the country and release the animal there. Check local rules and regulations.
Monday, April 17, 2017
Syrian rebels massacre at least 126 civilians in suicide bomb blast
17 April 2017
A convoy of buses evacuating residents from the government-held towns of Foua and Kefraya in Syria’s Idlib province was targeted by a suicide bomber Saturday, claiming the lives of at least 126 civilians. The attack occurred west of Aleppo as the buses made their way to government-controlled areas.
The evacuation of the residents of the two towns began Friday morning and was part of a swap deal agreed between the government of Bashar al-Assad and rebel forces. In exchange for allowing the evacuation of residents from Foua and Kefraya, rebels agreed to resettle the populations of Madaya and Zabadani, two towns they control near Damascus. In total, around 7,250 people were evacuated from the four towns. It was part of a broader plan brokered by Iran and Qatar to move up to 30,000 people over a 60-day period.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is linked to the rebels, 68 children were killed in the blast. Other sources have put the figure as high as 80.
The observatory confirmed the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device carried in a vehicle, backing up an earlier report on Syrian state TV which said the attackers used a van meant for delivering aid to gain access to the area.
An al-Jazeera reporter at the scene described how many of the buses were completely destroyed and dead bodies littered the ground. Ambulances rushed those from the scene who had been injured.
Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, it occurred in a rebel-controlled area. Ahrar al-Sham, a conservative Islamist militia, condemned the bombing and called for an international investigation to determine who was to blame.
In stark contrast to the moral outrage expressed by politicians and the media in the wake of the alleged gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun earlier this month, which the Trump administration seized upon to launch an illegal missile strike on a Syrian air base, the death of over 100 Syrians in a suicide bombing—substantially more than the number who died in the alleged gas attack—prompted virtually no condemnation from the Western powers.
The US State Department released a weasel-worded statement which, while condemning the killings, sought to strike a pose of impartiality and refused even to identify the rebel Islamist militias as being responsible. “We deplore any act that sustains or empowers extremists on all sides including today’s attack,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
At a comparable stage in the aftermath of the Khan Sheikhoun incident, just hours after the alleged attack, US government officials had already acted as judge, jury and executioner, and were proclaiming the guilt of the Assad regime without presenting any evidence.
President Donald Trump, who invoked the deaths of “beautiful babies” and the need to defend the “civilized world” in justifying his April 6 cruise missile strike, which killed nine civilians, did not even comment on the bloodbath carried out by forces linked to the American CIA.
For their part, the servile corporate-controlled media reported on the incident, if at all, in a largely routine manner.
The New York Times published a lengthy front-page report concentrating almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Assad during the war, alleging that “the largest number of violations by far has been by the Syrian government.” It criticized the failure to bring government officials before the International Criminal Court in the Hague and blamed Russia for blocking any action by the UN Security Council.
The general indifference shown by the political and media establishment to the victims of this brutal massacre exposes once again the hypocrisy of the crusaders for “human rights” in the United States and the European imperialist powers. It demonstrates the fraudulent character of the propaganda campaign in the wake of the alleged gas attack, designed to conceal the real aims of US imperialist intervention in Syria: regime change in Damascus and the consolidation of Washington’s hegemonic position in the energy-rich Middle East against any challenge from its geopolitical rivals.
The reason for the lack of reaction is not hard to find. While it remains unclear precisely which faction of the rebels carried out the mass slaughter, Washington and its Gulf allies have the main responsibility for arming the collection of right-wing Islamist militias fighting the Assad dictatorship and enabling them to continue the civil war. The opposition is now dominated by the al-Nusra Front, which was formerly affiliated to Al Qaeda.
If any journalist were honest enough to follow the evidence, they would have to apportion a significant part of the blame for the bus convoy bombing to the criminal and reckless policies of US imperialism. More than six years after instigating the Syrian civil war, Washington has the blood of an estimated 500,000 Syrians on its hands.
This does not even take into account the upwards of 1 million people killed as a result of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the hundreds of thousands of deaths due to wars either led or sponsored by Washington in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and the millions throughout the region forced to flee their homes as a consequence of conflict and societal breakdown.
The highly selective concern shown for “human rights” issues by the representatives of US imperialism is nothing new. Saturday’s bombing came less than a month after a single US air strike launched as part of the ruthless onslaught against Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, claimed the lives of as many as 300 civilians sheltering in a basement. This horrific war crime, coming on top of the thousands of civilian deaths that have occurred since the US-backed offensive was launched last October, was largely buried by the media.
The ruling class considers the deaths of civilians to be collateral damage—a price worth paying in their ruthless struggle to uphold US imperialist interests in the Middle East and around the globe. Barely 24 hours after the bus bombing, Trump’s National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster vowed in an ABC News interview that Washington was ready to escalate tensions with Russia still further, not only over Syria, but over Europe as well.
McMaster said of Russia’s alliance with Assad, “So Russia’s support for that kind of horrible regime, that is a party to that kind of a conflict, is something that has to be drawn into question as well as Russia’s subversive actions in Europe. And so I think it’s time though, now, to have those tough discussions with Russia.”
https://archive.is/lpV1C
Friday, April 14, 2017
Verizon Strike 2016 - One Year Anniversary - Challenged a Giant and Won
April 13 marks the one-year anniversary of the start of a nationwide strike at Verizon that won important gains for Verizon workers. Danny Katch talked to Dominic Renda, a call center worker and member of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1105, and Amy Muldoon, a technician and shop steward in CWA Local 1106, about their memories of the strike, and some of the lessons it can hold for workers and others fighting to defend their rights under the Trump presidency.
..............
WHAT WERE you striking for?
Dom: Verizon wanted to eliminate our job security. We had known they wanted to lay us off by the thousands since 2002, when they did lay us off by the thousands and the union took the company to court, won that battle and those thousands of employees got their jobs back. So Verizon has wanted to lay us off since then, and they need to eliminate our job security language to be able to do that.
Amy: They wanted to reorganize their workforce to be more "flexible." They wanted to be able to transfer us, lay us off and basically be able to change everything in the contract: vacation days, personal days, overtime regulation, right of transfer. Then they wanted to change all our benefits and protections as well. So it was kind of from the bottom up that they wanted to rewrite the whole thing.
WHAT WAS the result of the strike?
Dom: We beat them back on their attempt to eliminate job security. We won restrictions on outsourcing--there was quite a bit of our work that we got back, which was pretty much unprecedented. How often do you hear of outsourced work coming back anywhere, whether it be a union location or a non-union location?
We won the creation of 1,000 new jobs, and that was also something that pleasantly surprised me because I think a lot of us didn't see that coming. We had lost about half our membership over the years as a result of people quitting, getting fired or passing away, and Verizon hadn't replaced the people that had left. So this was the first time that we got new people hired in a long time.
Amy: People talk about the couple of years in the run-up to the contract expiration as the worst years in their careers at Verizon. Morale was incredibly low, attendance was terrible. In the last six months before the strike, there was the imposition of a disciplinary program called the Quality Assurance Review (QAR), which meant that you could be questioned about literally every minute of your day.
It was used to fish for any violation that a technician might have incurred in the course of their workday. And even if they didn't find anything, these interviews would go on for six hours--some people were repeatedly interviewed. In Manhattan they racked up 700 days of suspension while the QAR was in effect. It was just horribly demoralizing and people felt harassed and insulted.
So I think dignity on the job was one of the things that people felt they were fighting for and that fueled a lot of anger on the picket lines. And QAR was gotten rid of in the course of the strike.
They haven't gotten rid of all the jerk managers, that's for sure. But I think that upper management has realized that they want to stick with the wire line side of the business because wireless is not the cash cow that it was two years ago. So they want peace, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we won the strike.
They could have had peace on their terms, which was a terrified, disorganized workforce. But now we're seeing peace on our terms, which means less mandatory Saturdays and less harassment. And the QAR has been eliminated and been replaced by something called Performance Plus--we don't fully know what that means yet, but we do know that we haven't seen people being called in week after week and their entire day being gone over with a fine toothed comb.
We've also seen more leniency on disciplinary cases. Where before managers might have felt entitled to just send someone home for 30 days, we've now seen cases in my own garage where that hasn't happened. So even though the strike was a real hardship, it did have positive benefits for our working lives.
Dom: Also, the most inspirational part of this contract victory was Verizon Wireless workers in Brooklyn winning their first contract--they had been negotiating for two years prior to that. That was huge because now we can use that to organize and mobilize other wireless workers.
DID WINNING the strike make a difference in the daily quality of your life?
Dom: Absolutely it did. Before our strike happened I felt like the union was going to be in a perpetual decline until it didn't exist anymore, and our jobs were just going to be eliminated somehow. I remember talking to my family and saying I might have to move into your basement again because I don't know how much longer I'm going to have a job.
So I went from concerned about whether I'm even going to work for Verizon in the future to having a sense of security that we can reverse this tide of decline that's been going on for years with our union.
CAN YOU give me one particularly strong memory from the strike that still sticks with you to this day?
Dom: Just a lot of uncertainty. You don't know you're going to win the strike when it's happening; you don't know how long it's going to go on. So it's just the uncertainty, but also the inspiration, because so many other workers--janitors and random members of the public--were coming out to support us. So even though there was a lot of uncertainty, there was a lot of cause for hope.
Amy: The two things--I'm going to cheat--were being in my doctor's office and getting a phone call that the police had just escorted scab vehicles through an active picket line, which just inflamed people to no end. The company was bringing out-of-state contractors up with their own equipment and putting them up in the outer borough hotels and a mass picket went to greet them in the morning. It was one of those expressions of people's pent-up rage finally boiling over. You could see all the forces in society that wanted us to lose lined up on one side, and to know that we triumphed against that is pretty incredible.
The other thing I remember was being part of a solidarity event the day that the contract was settled, and just the feeling of excitement that we didn't know what was in the contract, but we were pretty certain that we had won. And it was a different feeling than any of us had had before. Because it was really our victory: we knew we fought for it and we earned every letter of that contract.
YOU'VE BOTH been on strike before. What was different this time among the members?
Dom: I really was impressed with a lot of members' eagerness to picket at Verizon Wireless store locations, where we were organizing a boycott. I was also impressed with our membership--that we didn't fall into management's traps. Management had sent us all letters on how to scab. People literally burned those letters and got creative on how to destroy them.
Amy: We had a terrible strike in 2011 that was floundering and then cut short. There was a resentment and distrust in the union, and then there was a change in the leadership, and I think they really won the respect and trust of the membership. Part of the way they did that was they gave people the room to fight and organize on their own terms. That experience for some individuals was transformative, and I think it healed our union in a lot of ways. People feel much more confident and less cynical post-strike than they did pre-strike.
THE STRIKE happened in the spring of 2016, at the same time as Trump was running for president on the theme of the decline of blue collar America. But while the strike made news while it was happening, why do you think it didn't have more of an affect on the national conversation about how to defend decent working-class jobs?
Dom: Even while our strike was going on, it didn't get the media attention that we deserved. Our strike was the largest strike in the United States for five years prior. There was a You Tube channel called Redacted Tonight that said our strike got less coverage than Donald Trump's tweet about a taco bowl.
Working people don't necessarily have confidence in their own self-activity. So even though our strike beat back a huge corporate behemoth, it doesn't translate into the entire working class realizing that they have power again. And that's why I feel like it's important to remember the strike one year later to remember that working people do have power and that they can take on huge corporate forces that make over a billion dollars in profit every month and we can win.
Amy: Who would remind people of the lessons of our strike? Trump? Clinton? It's up to people like us to keep that memory alive. Too many people still think that change is going to come from above. So until the working class movement in this country has more of its own institutions and more of its own voice, it's going to feel like these things happen in isolation from each other. But I was on a picket line today at Spectrum and the people there remember our strike very well. So I think that for people who are forced to be in a situation of fighting for their jobs, it is a relevant lesson.
My favorite strike action of the Trump presidency thus far was the strike of the taxi workers who refused to go to JFK during the first go attempt at the Muslim travel ban. I don't think we can take credit for that action, but these things provide reference points for people who are trying to figure out what's the most powerful way you can push back.
WHAT LESSONS can we take from the strike for the Trump era?
Dom: I hope that people learn from our strike and use the strike weapon to their advantage, whether it be at their workplace or for whatever cause their fighting for like LGBTQ rights or immigrant rights or against war. I just hope the strike weapon is used more because it is effective.
Amy: One lesson is, don't drink management's Kool-Aid. Donald Trump thinks that he's utterly unbeatable, to the point that he doesn't recognize losing when it happens. Verizon thought they could replace a skilled workforce with people who they trained for a week who never worked on fiber, and look how that turned out. It was a combination of overreach on the part of management--and every time we turn on the news we see overreach on the part of the administration--and then when people take it in their own hands to push back, it's possible to win.
https://archive.is/7sv1W
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Children prefer to read books on paper rather than screens
There is a common perception that children are more likely to read if it is on a device such as an iPad or Kindles. But new research shows that this is not necessarily the case.
In a study of children in Year 4 and 6, those who had regular access to devices with eReading capability (such as Kindles, iPads and mobile phones) did not tend to use their devices for reading - and this was the case even when they were daily book readers.
Research also found that the more devices a child had access to, the less they read in general.
It suggests that providing children with eReading devices can actually inhibit their reading, and that paper books are often still preferred by young people.
These findings match previous research which looked at how teenagers prefer to read. This research found that while some students enjoyed reading books on devices, the majority of students with access to these technologies did not use them regularly for this purpose. Importantly, the most avid book readers did not frequently read books on screens. Why do we think children prefer to read on screens?
There is a popular assumption that young people prefer to read on screens. This was mainly driven by education writer Marc Prensky who in 2001 coined the term "digital natives". This term characterises young people as having high digital literacy and a uniform preference for screen-based reading.
But young people do not have a uniform set of skills, and the contention that screens are preferred is not backed up by research.
Despite this, the myth has already had an impact on book resourcing decisions at school and public libraries, both in Australia and in the US, with some libraries choosing to remove all paper books in response to a perceived greater preference for eBooks.
But by doing this, libraries are actually limiting young people's access to their preferred reading mode, which in turn could have a detrimental impact on how often they choose to read.
Young people are gaining increasing access to devices through school-promoted programs, and parents face aggressive marketing to stay abreast of educational technologies at home.
Schools are motivated to increase device use, with Information and Communication Technology being marked as a general capability to be demonstrated across every subject area in the Australian Curriculum.
The drivers toward screen-based recreational book reading are strong, but they are not well-founded. Why are students more likely to prefer paper books?
Reading on devices through an application leaves more room to be distracted, allowing the user to switch between applications.
For students who already experience difficulty with attention, the immediate rewards of playing a game may easily outweigh the potentially longer-term benefits of reading.
Digital literacy could also be an issue. In order to use a device to read books, children need to know how to use their devices for the purpose of reading books.
They need to know how to access free reading material legally through applications such as Overdrive or websites such as Project Gutenburg. Tips for encouraging your child to read
Research shows that reading books is a more effective way to both improve and retain literacy skills, as opposed to simply reading other types of text. Yet international research suggests that young people are reading fewer and fewer books.
While equipping children with devices that have eReading capability is unlikely to encourage them to read, there are a number of strategies, supported by research, that can help encourage children to pick up a book. These include:
Be seen to enjoy reading. This study found that a number of students did not know if their literacy teachers actually liked reading. Teachers who were keen readers inspired some students to read more often and take an interest in a broader range of books.
Create (and regularly access) reading-friendly spaces at home and at school. Loud noises, poor lighting and numerous distractions will not help provide an enjoyable reading experience, and are likely to lead to frustration.
Encourage regular silent reading of books at school and at home. Giving children time to read at school not only encourages a routine of reading, but it also may be the only opportunity a child has to read self-selected books for pleasure.
Teachers and parents should talk about books, sharing ideas and recommendations.
Continue to encourage your child and students to read for pleasure. While we know that children tend to become disengaged with books over time, in some cases this can be due to withdrawal of encouragement once children can read on their own. This leads children to falsely assume that reading is no longer important for them. Yet reading remains important for both children an adults to build and retain literacy skills.
Find out what your child enjoys reading, and support their access to books at school and at home.
https://archive.is/bCnLx
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