Solidarity With the People of Lebanon

 

Paul Robeson and the Peetskill Riots

Speaking at a news conference in Harlem the following day, a still-shaken Robeson indicted the violence, singling out the police in particular as "fascist storm troopers". Of course, it was only four years since the end of World War II, what many of Robeson's leftist colleagues called the "war against fascism".

The term had a concreteness and pungency that has, for many, declined over the decades. But raising the spectre of fascism was a rhetorical tactic that many in Robeson's circle used to bring vehemence to state-sponsored racist violence in the form of police brutality, and to link that violence to more sensationalised practices associated with the South, like lynching.

In a speech at Harvard University a few weeks after the riots, Robeson's friend and associate William Patterson, head of the radical, Black-led Civil Rights Congress, affirmed this focus, insisting that "the men who rule us are bent on fascism. They brought about the anti-Negro and Jew demonstrations at Peekskill just to see how the people would react to their big step to fascism."

Passengers hold up some of the rocks that battered their bus as they left the concert grounds in Peekskill 

By 1949, Paul Robeson was a household name, but for many white and some Black Americans, his left-wing politics had begun to overshadow achievements in previous decades as an athlete (football at Rutgers University and in the young NFL), student (a bachelor of arts from Rutgers and a law degree from Columbia University), riveting actor (on stage and in movies), and charismatic singer.

In the 1930s, he devoted increasing time and energy to supporting the labour movement, anti-racist agitation, and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. He vocally supported the Loyalist (socialist) side in the Spanish Civil War, and paid a friendly visit to the Soviet Union, where he claimed to "feel like a human for the first time in my life".

Peekskill Riot - Gus Stadler

Robeson, like others drifting past the left-most reaches of the Democratic party, noted similarities between European fascist ideology and American capitalism. State-sponsored racism was one of the main points of alignment. As genocidal energy accelerated in Germany, the Black left, in particular, saw parallels not only in the enforcement of Southern Jim Crow policies but also in police brutality in Northern cities.

After the war, President Harry Truman and much of America assumed a warlike stance toward the nation's recent allies, the Soviets. But Robeson and others on the left continued to praise the communist nation as an experiment in social and economic equality. The "Popular Front" alliance of liberals and radicals split, with liberal groups - including major civil rights groups such as the NAACP - taking up the anti-Red line and distancing themselves from groups and individuals who had not denounced communism.

In this political environment, Robeson's radical politics made him unpopular with a wide swath of Americans. And, to be sure, the combination of his Blackness with his accomplishments, confidence, intelligence, grace and many talents - his status as what cultural critic Shana Redmond calls an "everything man" - meant he drew extra resentment and derision from many white Americans.

 

 

Paul Keating Blasts Libs over Super Annuation

Paul Keating has blasted “little bitchy Liberals” for undermining the retirement savings system he helped to create, using a rare breakfast radio appearance to ridicule the idea Australia cannot afford to increase superannuation contributions from employers during a recession.

Speaking on RN Breakfast on Thursday, Keating said Australia’s vast pool of super savings of close to $3tn was vital to fund nation-building infrastructure projects and accused a “miserable little backbench group” of trying to undermine the system because it included industry super funds, which are jointly run by unions and employers.

He denounced the “meanness” of Liberal politicians who get a 15.6% rate while trying to deny 12% to “ordinary working people”.

“You know what the Libs are saying? Too good for them,” he said.

Superannuation versus wages: will workers really end up paying for their own super rise?

However, the Morrison government is under intense pressure to ditch the increase from the business lobby and a ginger group of backbenchers, both of which argue that the coronavirus recession makes the move unaffordable.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, is believed to have told backbenchers that the increase to 10% next year will happen because it was an election promise, but he wants to stop at that level.

However, in recent days treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been signalling the government may renege on the election pledge, telling Sky News he was “considering the issue”.

Keating said he had seen all the arguments against lifting the super guarantee rate during the recession of the early 1990s, when he was in government.

“All this was said to me in 1992, ‘Oh if you put the superannuation guarantee on, you know you’ll just lift the cost of wages’,” he said.

“You know, you could hear all the small business organisations out with a handkerchief out crying.”

Critics, including the Grattan Institute, have argued that any increase in super will reduce future wage rises.

However, other economists – and Keating – have pointed out that wage growth has stalled, arguing super increases may be the only way to get an increase.

Keating said that the experience from the early 1990s onwards was that real wages increased until 2013 and at the same time business enjoyed massive boosts to productivity and profits.

Naysayers cry that a measly super increase after years of flat wages will ruin the country. It won’t

He said employers could afford to pay the increase, pointing to national accounts figures released on Wednesday that showed the share of income going to wage earners has fallen below 50% for the first time since 1959.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in the profit share in the economy, and a longtime decline in the labour share of the economy, now what we’re talking about here is 2.5%, 0.5% a year.” he said.

He said this was a third of the most recent increase in the minimum wage, and a sixth of the one before that.

“In an economy like this you want, if you’re the government, you want everyone pulling along, you want everyone in there trying, you want everyone having a go,” he said.

“The last thing we want is some bitchy performance from the Liberal party, trying to knock off the wages of ordinary people.”

He criticised Frydenberg for allowing people to draw up to $20,000 from their super during the coronavirus crisis, saying people hurt by the downturn should instead have been supported by the state.

He said super should be “putting money into investments, into infrastructure, aged care”.

“Instead of that, what have we got, a bunch of little bitchy Liberals trying to knock off 2.5% of people’s income for the rest of their lives.”

He said superannuation made it possible to fund large infrastructure projects, which he said banks were unable to finance.

“There was no capital market before superannuation and there now is,” he said

He said the Australian super regime was the best in the world “because it’s all personally vested in everyone’s name, not some government fund”.

“And these, these monkeys, want to destroy it,” he said.

“They’d like to crack it open for for housing deposits, they’d like to crack it open for health, they’d like to crack it open because they want to be rid of it.”

Keating urged Frydenberg to keep up government payments that have supported Australian households rather than tapering them off as planned.

“What we’ve got to do is support people on the way through,” he said.

Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd 'angry as hell' over signs of delay in super rise

Read more

“We don’t dump them, like, all we’re happy hanging five on the big waves and all of a sudden they’re in the dumper.

“What we’ve got to do is see the wave into the beach, you know, what the government shouldn’t do is do the dumper, you know, which I think they’re getting ready to do.

“In other words, pull jobkeeper back and pull jobseeker back.”

He also lashed Reserve Bank “bureaucrats” for not doing enough to support government spending.

The RBA should stop producing “silly little minutes” of its meetings once a month and wade into the bond market, he said.

“What they should do is get off their tails and buy more of the government debt, in which case we can afford the jobkeeper, and the jobseeker, right to the beach, not the dumper 100 metres out.”