Mark Curtis Affair?

[Vngelis]

Big hue and cry in relation to the SWP-Uk regarding this event in the US SWP a couple of decades ago.

Member of the SWP-USA arrested and done over a rape/assault allegation which the SWP called a frame up and the Northites called a stitch up...

[dusty]

On Feb 4, 11:03 pm, Vngelis <meberr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Big hue and cry in relation to the SWP-Uk regarding this event in the US SWP a couple of decades ago.
>
> Member of the SWP-USA arrested and done over a rape/assault allegation which the SWP called a frame up and the Northites called a stitch up...

Yes, the Northites went along with the accusers and attacked Curtis.
But the SWP (USA?) defended him didn't they?

[Vngelis]

On Monday, February 4, 2013 12:03:28 PM UTC, Vngelis wrote:
> Big hue and cry in relation to the SWP-Uk regarding this event in the US SWP a couple of decades ago.
>
>
>
> Member of the SWP-USA arrested and done over a rape/assault allegation which the SWP called a frame up and the Northites called a stitch up...

I dont really know the case all I know is that shit happens in the USA and then it is transported over to Europe via Britain.

Cases of alleged paedophilia and children being removed from families...
Banks closing bank accounts under the guise of money laundering...

In both case they do not state the cause of the states actions, in other words you cant be told why this has occurred...

[dusty]

My gut reaction is that Curtis was rightly accused.

But in such matters, the "gut" is far less useful in determining THE
TRUTH than "the brain", and that only when tempered with "the
facts"....and the "gut"!

[Vngelis]

Cointelpro, Black Panthers, frameups part of political american history...
The alleged victim was black and the circumstances sound too good to be true ie incredulous from a cursory reading...

VN

[Vngelis]

Sounds like a plant to me a promoter of cheap labour hence the campaign over a long period of time.
Who profited from this?
The meat packing industry which relocated from the north to the south using cheap immigrant labour...

Hence the dubiousness of the charges, create confusion, allow a defence campaign promote an agenda... Clever...

Supporters Of Mark Curtis Demand Parole Now 'In The Interest Of Justice'

BY JOHN STUDER
DES MOINES, Iowa - Dozens of letters urging the Iowa State Board of Parole to grant freedom to union and political activist Mark Curtis continue to arrive at the offices of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee. The committee is leading the international effort to gather public support for Curtis's release on parole.

Curtis was arrested and brutally beaten by the Des Moines police in 1988 after speaking out in Spanish at a public meeting to defend 17 co-workers from Mexico and El Salvador. They had been seized by federal authorities in an immigration raid on the Monfort meatpacking plant where they worked. Curtis was framed up on charges of rape and burglary and has spent the past seven years in Iowa prisons.

Curtis has remained a political activist behind bars, and recently worked with other inmates at the Iowa State Penitentiary to gather more than two dozen signatures on a petition urging the governor of Pennsylvania to grant freedom to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black rights activist fighting to overturn a death sentence there. Because of his political activism and his refusal to be broken, Curtis has faced a number of attacks at the hands of prison authorities. Iowa officials have repeatedly refused him parole.

This week the defense committee received a letter signed by 35 participants in the Nongovernmental Forum on Women held in conjunction with the Fourth World Conference on Women in China in early September. Among the signers were women from Tanzania, Morocco, New Zealand, Germany, India, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Venezuela, Sweden, Korea, Israel, Ireland, and Italy, as well as the United States. Ene Obi, from the Department of Information and International Relations of the Nigeria Labour Congress, wrote, "The struggle continues" under her name.


`Served a lot of time for conviction'
"I am fully aware of all the charges against Mark Curtis. My purpose in writing this letter is not to argue the charges with you, I have already done that," wrote Larry Solomon, president of United Auto Workers Local 751, on strike against Caterpillar in Decatur, Illinois. "Mark Curtis has already served a lot of time for his conviction. Now is the time to give some credence to all of his support and do the decent thing and seriously consider immediate parole. It would be the right thing to do."

Other unionists from around the world have also addressed the board. "As retired editor-in-chief of the German metalworkers paper Metall (circulation more than 3 million) I join all those who ask to liberate Mr. Mark Curtis," wrote Jakob Moneta, from Frankfurt, Germany.

"I would like to respectfully urge you to grant parole to Mr. Mark Curtis," wrote Mark Flanigan, vice local chairperson of United Transportation Union Local 117 in Everett, Washington. "After studying his case I believe he has suffered long enough." Flanigan also told the defense committee that he was writing letters to Iowa's elected state representatives to "let them know that in the land of the free we have a person being victimized for his political beliefs."

J. Carey wrote to the parole board from Drancy, France, on behalf of the General Labor Confederation (CGT) local at ELM Leblanc. The CGT is one of the two largest national union federations in France. "We are writing to request that you free Mark Curtis on parole as rapidly as possible," Carey wrote. "We have been following the `Mark Curtis Affair' for many years and believe that he should be freed now."

Carey also sent a letter to Curtis on behalf of his local. "We support your struggle as well as that of the committee which is fighting for your liberation. We live very far from each other but our struggles are the same: it is the fight for freedom of workers, for the oppressed whatever their country or the color of their skins."

Ronald Von Scyoc, recording secretary of United Paperworkers International Union Local 7837, locked out by A.E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois, wrote "To hold Mark any longer would only increase the injustice of an already unjust action. I fully realize that to seek justice is not something a Parole Board is usually interested in, but in the interest of justice - Release Mark Curtis."

John Zippert, the co-publisher of the Greene County Democrat, published in Eutaw, Alabama, and influential throughout the South among supporters of Black rights, wrote the board, "Simple justice and common sense suggest that it is time to grant Mark Curtis a fair parole hearing and release him from jail. While I have grave doubts about his guilt, he has served his time in Iowa's prisons, and it is now well past time to release him.

"On behalf of our 3,000 readers who have also been following this case in our weekly community newspaper, we urge you to have compassion and concern for the well-being of Mark Curtis."

Many of Curtis's relatives have also written. "I am absolutely astounded" that he has not been paroled, wrote Allen Funk, a doctor in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a cousin of Curtis. "Many other prisoners convicted of the same or worse crimes have long since been paroled.

"Recent events certainly support the fact that the police in this country can be less than honest," Funk adds. "Simply take a look at the newspapers and read about detective Mark Fuhrman or the ugly incident at Ruby Ridge."

"This is in regards to my brother-in-law, Mark Curtis, who is currently serving time in the Iowa State Penitentiary," wrote Patricia Kaku, the sister of Kate Kaku, Curtis's wife. "On behalf of my family, we fully believe he is innocent. In addition, based on the time he has served and his good behavior while incarcerated, we respectfully request that he be paroled."

Dozens of letters have come from the Des Moines area. "We write to join others in requesting parole for Mark Curtis," wrote Jane Magers-Fionof and Edna Griffin of Des Moines. Fionof is a long-time peace and justice activist in Iowa and Griffin is a veteran civil rights fighter who was chosen for the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame. "The longer he is incarcerated," they add, "the longer legitimate protests can be made about the Iowa prison system - the discrimination and unfair treatment that seems to be ongoing behind the bars."

Last August, prison authorities brought charges against Curtis, claiming he had assaulted another inmate. Even though they admitted there were no physical marks to indicate an assault had actually occurred, the authorities subjected Curtis to a special prison trial, in which he was denied the right to have an attorney or to present evidence to contradict the charges of prison guards. He was convicted and sentenced to serve 30 days in the "hole" and a year in segregated lock-up.

Curtis was released from lock-up two months ago, having received time off his sentence for good behavior. Prison and parole officials have used this victimization to justify refusing to consider him for parole in 1994.


Legal challenge to lock-up
Curtis filed a legal challenge to this victimization in Iowa state court earlier this year. On September 8, William Kutmus and Jeanne Johnson, Curtis's attorneys, were notified that a trial on this suit has been scheduled for November 30. The trial will be held in a trailer on the grounds of the state penitentiary. Six trials involving inmate challenges to prison discipline are scheduled for the same day, indicating how much time the courts allot to prisoners seeking justice. These lawsuits are accorded a special judicial status, which gives inmates less legal rights than usual.

Curtis met with his counselor inside the prison this week to discuss his parole plan. He was told that the parole board will review his case on October 18 to decide whether to grant him a hearing this November or take any other action on his situation.

The defense committee is continuing to gather letters through the October parole board meeting. Letters can be sent to the Mark Curtis Defense Committee, Box 1048, Des Moines, Iowa 50311.

[Vngelis]

Northites on the issue

http://tinyurl.com/bxkjhdr

[Vngelis]

Debate here with Fred Feldman etc on the issue..

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w52/msg00009.html

I am arriving at the opinion that he was probably a plant and they go the SWP to defend him to promote 'immigrant rights' ie cheap labour for the meat packing industry that moved from the unionised north to the non-unionised south...

VN

[Vngelis]

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004, Fred Feldman wrote:

> On the Mark Curtis case, let's clear away one innuendo right away. Let
> us assume -- if it is a fact, and I don't know or care (the reasons for
> Curtis' separation from the party were never made public even within the
> party -- that Curtis was arrested for picking up a prostitute, and that
> he misinformed the party about the reasons, and was expelled therefore.
. . .
> As somebody who strongly believes in the presumption of innocence -- I
> even presume Curtis' innocence in whatever he was charged with in the
> party, unless I know better, which I don't -- I see no reason not to
> affirm Curtis' innocence today as I did on many occasions fifteen years
> ago. There was no physical evidence against Curtis whatsoever aside
> from his being on the scene. ...


Hello Fred,
i'm with you on presumption of innocence. that was the argument i
used to get the Central America Solidarity Coalition in Utah to sign-on in
defense of Curtis shortly after he was arrested...especially a presumption
of innocence on the side of an activist, a revolutionary, a socialist -
against government accusation.

a delegation from the local SWP branch uncharacteristically showed
up at a CASC meeting in 1988 - uncharacteristic because they generally
didn't participate and didn't help build the Central America solidarity
movement. what the SWPers had on their mind was to get CASC to take a
position of defending Curtis. When it appeared that our entire meeting
time was going to be taken up discussing and debating this issue, my
proposal that we take a position of support for Curtis was accepted with
the proviso that i personally would be the one to do the necessary work,
write and send a letter on behalf of CASC, etc.
because i personally defended Curtis in the following years, i.e.
later sending a letter of support as someone who had participated in the
civil rights movement (one of the facets of the SWP's defense campaign), i
also got on the mailing list of the other side. i received a long letter
from Demetria Morris' father, for example, and articles from critics of
the SWP and people who thought Curtis was guilty.

I note that you say that "There was no physical evidence against
Curtis whatsoever aside from his being on the scene." That's a more
complete statement than was given by the SWP members at that CASC meeting,
and at other meetings on subsequent occasions that i observered. The
phrase generally used by SWP members ended after whatsoever: 'there was no
physical evidence against Curtis whatsoever.'

I always thought that it was pretty significant and troubling
'evidence' that Curtis was arrested at the scene of the alleged crime.
Why was he there? How did he get there? Curtis' story was not easy to
believe, and it changed.
The implication was that Curtis was framed up by the government.
But would the government really rest a political frame-up case on the
testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl and her even younger alleged
eyewitness brother who had called the police?
Had the government generally been initiating political frame-up
cases against socialist activists during those years? Why Mark Curtis?

All in all, after several years of learning more about the Curtis
case, i came to the conclusion that the most likely explanation for
everything i thought was true was that Curtis had in fact attacked young
Demetria Morris. I didn't say that publicly but i did tell the local SWP
branch and asked to be removed from the defense committee list.

In the later 1990s, a couple years after Curtis finished spending
eight years in prison, he was a member of the Chicago SWP branch. A woman
friend of mine was also a member of the Chicago branch and was friendly
with Curtis, spending time with him personally.
Here's what my friend told me several months after it all
happened:

Curtis disappeared and missed political meetings for a day or so
and could not be reached; the branch was worried about him. Then Curtis
telephoned someone/the branch and said that he was at a hospital, his car
had been towed and would someone come and help him leave the hospital.
Curtis said that he had worked himself to exhaustion, he felt faint as he
was driving along and was afraid he was going to pass out. He pulled to
the side of the road and noticed that he was near a hospital. He walked
into the hospital emergency room and was kept in the hospital overnight.
When he recuperated and was ready to leave he realized that his car was
missing, had probably been towed.

While some branch members cared for Mark, others went to find his
car. They found where the car had been towed but discovered that it was
impounded as evidence in a criminal case. Curtis' story fell apart and
soon it was learned that he had been in police custody in some facility
near that hospital. He had been arrested for soliciting a prostitute.

Within days there was a "mandatory" meeting of the Chicago SWP
branch. Jack Barnes' flew in from NYC and told the branch that no one was
to ever say one word about this new Curtis case to anyone else, not even
to anyone else in the SWP. Barnes also indicated that money raised by the
Political Rights Defense Fund would be used to get an attorney and provide
legal assistance for Curtis.
My friend was very troubled by all this. She didn't think that
the SWP should defend Curtis, she especially objected to using funds
publicly collected to defend political rights to secretly defend an SWP
member busted for soliticing a prostitute. In combination with her
personal familiarity with Curtis, and apparently some physical similarity
between Demetria Morris and the undercover cop, this new development
eventually resulted in my friend beginning to privately think that Curtis
may have been guilty in the 1988 case.

My friend decided to share her concerns with a visiting SWP
national leader who subsequently stayed at her home. She assumed that it
would be OK to discuss the Curtis case with other SWP national leadership.
My friend was surprised to discover that apparently this visiting national
SWP leader did not know what had happened. My friend was telling me all
this after recently being expelled from the SWP for breaking the
prohibition against saying anything to anyone about the new Curtis case.

My understanding is that Curtis was not subsequently expelled
explicitly because of this second arrest. My understanding is that some
time went by before he was quietly dropped from membership.

My opinion FWIW is that Jack Barnes decided to commit the SWP to
the defense of Mark Curtis with the confidence that Curtis would maintain
his innocence, not with the confidence that Curtis was innocent. My
speculation is that the public image and the internal atmosphere produced
by the Curtis defense campaign - that the SWP was important enough that
the government would organize a frame-up of an SWP member - along with the
relatively in-group SWP-controlled nature of this campaign as a focus for
party work, was helpful in shaping the SWP into the kind of organization
that Barnes wanted.

Dayne

[dusty]

On Feb 5, 9:13 pm, Vngelis <meberr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds like a plant to me a promoter of cheap labour hence the campaign over a long period of time.
> Who profited from this?
> The meat packing industry which relocated from the north to the south using cheap immigrant labour...
>
> Hence the dubiousness of the charges, create confusion, allow a defence campaign promote an agenda... Clever...
>
> Supporters Of Mark Curtis Demand Parole Now 'In The Interest Of Justice'
>
> BY JOHN STUDER
> DES MOINES, Iowa - Dozens of letters urging the Iowa State Board of Parole to grant freedom to union and political activist Mark Curtis continue to arrive at the offices of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee.

I presume that the "defence committee" is an extension for the -
dubious - Barnesian decay product of the SWP#

What you say is possible and certainly there are elements of that in
this campaign.

I'd however question his being imprisoned for "defending" cheap labour
immigrants in the first place. That wouldn't be the kind of message
that the establishment would want to get out, particularly back in
1988. They'd want to give at least free passes and perhaps medals to
such "fighters" just as they give a free pass to the Far Left today.*

What you say about relocation (mainly South, or in another Third World
low labour cost country and its importance) has been raised on apst
before by yourself and srd who saw it as the most important device of
displacement of American labour.

But Iowa isn't in the South, so it wouldn't apply in this case. They
have brought in Latino labour into agribusiness in the midwest and
even the north no doubt. The low wage White Americans and Negro
Americans have been so displaced as we have discussed before on apst.


# Who still hog far too much of Trotsky's works, by the way - them of
all people!.

*the implication from that is that I'm sticking with my gur reaction
as things stand.

[Vngelis]

The context below...

Notice which cities were unionised which became non-unionised due to flooding the labour market with cheap labour (immigrant labour)...

_____________________________________________________________________________

In the 1920s and early 1930s, however, workers achieved unionization under the CIO's United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). An interracial committee led the organizing in Chicago, where the majority of workers in the industry were black, and other major cities, such as Omaha, Nebraska, where they were an important minority in the industry. UPWA workers made important gains in wages, hours and benefits. In 1957 the stockyards and meat packing employed half the workers of Omaha. The union supported a progressive agenda, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. While the work was still difficult, for a few decades workers achieved blue-collar, middle-class lives from it.

Mid-century restructuring by the industry of the stockyards, slaughterhouses and meat packing led to relocating facilities closer to cattle feedlots and swine production facilities, to more rural areas, as transportation shifted from rail to truck. It has been difficult for labor to organize in such locations. In addition, the number of jobs fell sharply through technology and other changes. Wages fell during the latter part of the 20th century, and eventually, both Chicago (in 1971) and Omaha (in 1999) closed their stockyards for good. Historically, the other major meat packing cities in the United States were South St. Paul, Minnesota, East St. Louis, Illinois, Dubuque, Iowa, Kansas City, Missouri, Austin, Minnesota, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa.

Though the meat packing industry has made many improvements since the early 1900s, extensive changes in the industry since the late 20th century have caused new labor issues to arise. Today, the rate of injury in the meat packing industry is three times that of private industry overall, and meat packing was noted by Human Rights Watch as being "the most dangerous factory job in America". The meatpacking industry continues to employ many immigrant laborers, including some who are undocumented workers. In the early 20th century the workers were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and black migrants from the South. Today many are Hispanic, from Mexico, Central and South America. A vast majority today is also made up a large Peruvian community. The more isolated areas in which the plants are located put workers at greater risk due to their limited ability to organize and to seek redress for work-related injuries.[1][2][3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_packing_industry

[dusty]

Vol. 76/No. 29 August 6, 2012

Unions, SWP target of
Socialist Equality Party slanders
http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7629/762958.html

A pox on both their houses.

Quote of "wsws/SEP": "The WSWS wrote, “The unions, tied as they are to
the profit system and economic nationalism, are worse than useless in
this struggle. They stand on the other side.”


I know who stands on the other side and that is these wretched
cosmopolitans, not rebuilding both destroying the very idea of Trade
Unionism...and all of its past.

What a slimy petty bourgeois excrescence they are!

As for the SWP: they too are open doors immigration US labour
displacers.

And Curtis wouldn't have been framed for supporting Latino labour. No
way!

There's something else in this case but I cannot put my finger on it
for lack of behind the scenes facts.

[Vngelis]

The Workers League and Mark Curtis (1989)



Workers Vanguard No. 480 (23 June 1989)

Why Should Anyone Believe David North?

The Workers League and Mark Curtis

Mark Curtis, a 29-year-old member of the Socialist Workers Party and union activist at the Swift meatpacking plant in Des Moines, is doing 25 years in an Iowa state prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. David North’s Workers League, meanwhile, has been relentlessly working to undermine defense efforts for Curtis in the workers movement, here and internationally. Claiming that the “government-controlled” SWP is covering up for a “depraved rapist,” the WL is vilifying leftists and trade-union leaders who sign statements or speak out on his behalf, Currently, the WL’s Bulletin is running a weekly series on “The Mark Curtis Hoax,” already in its eleventh installment. This campaign is now the Workers League’s major activity.

What is going on? Mark Curtis was convicted on 14 September 1988 in a Des Moines court of third degree sexual abuse and first degree burglary, based on the state’s charge that six months earlier Curtis forced his way onto the porch of the residence of a black family and attempted to rape 15-year-old Demetria Morris. But according to no account, not even that of the police or the young woman, did a rape ever take place, nor was anything stolen, nor was there a weapon, and there is no physical evidence of contact between Curtis and the alleged victim. Yet a young socialist militant faces 25 years of his life behind bars – for what? And why is David North’s Workers League running point for the prosecution? Isn’t there something weird here?

Let’s look at their targets. The Workers League has attacked the Socialist Workers Party as “a police-infested organization which works among politically diseased and disoriented layers of the middle class typified by the rapist Curtis” (Bulletin, 25 May). They have labeled our organization, the Spartacist League, a “politically deranged petty-bourgeois group,” claiming: “The defense of this depraved rapist has become the rallying point for a political provocation against the Workers League, the most frantic exponent of which as always, the Spartacist League” (Bulletin, 6 January). What set off this tirade was our noting that “the Northites have suddenly and cynically discovered the use of black oppression in order to get a white SWPer in Iowa sent to prison for 25 years on a dubious rape charge” (WV No. 467, 16 December 1988).

The Socialist Workers Party is a reformist political organization of the left. It was one of 16 groups singled out for special scrutiny by the FBI’s so-called “administrative index” (ADEX) a “subversives” list set up under Nixon to consolidate the earlier “Subversives Index” and “Communist Index.” In 1973, at the height of liberal reaction against the government’s Watergate “dirty tricks,” the SWP filed a legal suit against FBI spying and disruption, particularly under the infamous COINTELPRO program. Testimony and documents uncovered during the “Watersuit” revealed that between 1960 and 1976, the FBI committed 206 burglaries at SWP offices or homes, stole 12,600 documents and tapped telephones for at least 20,000 days. In August 1986, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in favor of the SWP, ordering the FBI to pay them the not very munificent sum of $264,000 in damages for its 38-year-long campaign of harassment.

The Spartacist League was also listed on the ADEX file, targeted by the government for “special” attention. The ADEX code included a group designated “SPL,” along with the Communist Party, SWP, Black Panthers, Progressive Labor, SDS and others (see illustration). The FBI’s definition of “SPL” claimed the Spartacist League “does not openly advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government at this time,” implying that we were some kind of secret terrorist conspirators. The SL, too, sued the government, in a 1983 suit over the Attorney General’s “Guidelines for Domestic Security/ Terrorism Investigations.” And in 1984 we won the case by forcing the government to delete its slanderous and deadly “definition” of the SL, thus conceding that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism.

What about David North’s Workers League? Unlike the SWP and the SL, they don’t appear on the ADEX file. And while the SWP was in court fighting, in its fashion, against government surveillance and provocation, what was the WL doing? North and his godfather Gerry Healy’s International Committee were mounting their own smear campaign, “Security and the Fourth International,” cop-baiting SWP leaders as simultaneously agents of the FBI and the Russian secret police! When a WL agent. Alan Gelfand. was expelled from the SWP in 1977, North & Co. dragged the SWP into court, demanding that the capitalist state carry out a fishing expedition, prying into the party’s minutes, finances and membership lists. It takes effrontery to haul groups into court who are the object of vicious governmental repression.

One has to ask, who benefits – cui bono?

And one has to ask, who’s doing the talking?

The rather shadowy David North is the latest in a long line of now infamous and sinister characters who have been prominent in the Gerry Healy tendency in Britain and their organization in the U.S.. the Workers League. Let us see how North now describes his illustrious predecessors. Tim Wohlforth, who was axed in 1974 as lider maximo of the WL amid allegations of CIA connections, is reviled as a “petty bourgeois American philistine.” Following the 1985 blowout in the Healyite organization, North dismissed Michael Banda. Healy’s top hatchet man, as one of many “politically diseased petty-bourgeois renegades.” Cliff Slaughter, another of the Healyites’ ex-leading lights, is described as “a consummate cynic and hypocrite” who “epitomizes in his political and personal life all that is corrupt and perverse” in the British intelligentsia, “gathering into his net the most degenerate human specimens produced by this decadent social milieu” (Bulletin, 9 December 1988).

These were David North’s mentors who showed him the ropes. Alex Mitchell, a fellow hack in the Healyite slander mills who together with North penned most of the “Security” smear job against the SWP, resurfaced with a column in an Australian bourgeois paper, the Sydney Sun Herald. Peter Fryer, who got out of the Healyites before the really dirty business got started, is described as “a degenerate middle-class journalist.” Freddy Mazelis, who did a brief stand-in performance as WL honcho after Wohlforth was axed, has so far escaped being satanized, but only so long as he serves as North’s toady. As for Gerry Healy, the evil sorcerer whose apprentices have run amok, in the 1985 implosion of the Healyites it was proven that he determined the party line in accordance with money from Arab colonels and sheiks. Now Healy is called a “political agent of the Kremlin” who is welcomed in Moscow “because he has placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB” (Bulletin, 20 November 1987). Vanessa Redgrave is thrown in as “the Kremlin’s New Leading Lady.”

This is quite a record in treachery. As we have noted, “Stalin never claimed that all the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the October Revolution were counterrevolutionary spies and traitors. Exempted were Lenin, a few who died early and a couple who lucked out and died a natural death at old age” (“David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son,” WV No. 456, 1 July 1988). But David North claims that every one of his predecessors is degenerate, if not an outright agent – Wohlforth, Banda, Slaughter, Mitchell, Redgrave, Healy, and don’t forget the arch-“renegades” Pierre Lambert and Michel Varga. If, as North writes, Banda “can no longer be counted among the living,” when it comes to “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” this must make North himself a zombie. He is the only True Believer, descendant of a long and complete line of traitors.

With this “authority” the WL pro claims Mark Curtis a “sociopath,” a “vicious rapist,” a “sadistic rapist,” a “white middle-class rapist,” and above all a “convicted rapist” and a “proven rapist” convicted and “proven” by the bourgeois courts. The SWP is labeled “a sociopathic organization, a watering hole for all sorts of degenerate elements, social criminals, filled with hatred of the working class,” of which “Curtis himself – a drug user and rapist – is a perfect representative” (Bulletin, 28 April). In the pages of the Bulletin, they endlessly regurgitate the words of the prosecution. Stranger yet, in her summation at Curtis’ trial Iowa state prosecutor Catherine Thune regurgitates virtually the exact words of the Bulletin (see illustration). They seem to be working from a common script.

Mark Curtis was a subject of FBI surveillance as an activist in CISPES in Birmingham, Alabama. At Swift, where Curtis worked in Des Moines, federal agents had been working with management for three months reviewing personnel files before staging a raid which seized 17 foreign-born workers at the meatpacking plant on March 1. After work on March 4, Curtis had participated in a meeting of workers at the plant protesting the roundup. A couple hours later he was arrested and charged with rape. Curtis says the cops grabbed him, pulled down his pants, beat him brutally at the jail, then lied in court. Mark Curtis maintains his innocence, declaring, “I am not a rapist, but a fighter for women’s rights. And I am not guilty of the crimes I have been charged and convicted of.”

So why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why? How does the WL come to possess such influence with the prosecution? What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were “The Truth “? We and many of our readers have some relevant experience on the nature of these paid thugs of the racist capitalist state. Under the circumstances we must believe Mark Curtis is innocent.

Political Bureau, Spartacist League/U.S. 12 June 1989

* * *

[facsimile illustration]

On August 5, the Workers League asks:



• How did the police know that Curtis was going to abruptly leave his house in the middle of the night to buy food?
• How did they know he would drive by himself?
• How did they know which store he would go to, and what route he would take?
• How did they know that he would be stopped at a particular red light, where he could be accosted by the girl?
• How did they know that he would agree to let the girl into his car?
• How did they know he would agree to drive her home?
• How did they know that when he arrived at her home, he would get out of his car, go to the porch and then wait placidly to be arrested?

- Bulletin, 5 August 1988


...A month later, the prosecutor’s summation:

“How did the police, or how did Demetria and Jason or their family, know that the defendant was going to abruptly leave his home, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00, to buy food? How did they know?
“How did they know that the defendant would get into a car and drive by himself?
“How did they know that the defendant would go to the HyVee store to do his grocery shopping? How did they know what route he would take?
“How did they know that he would be stopped at a particular red light, where a girl could approach him? How did they know the light would be red?
“How did they know that the defendant would agree to give this girl a ride to help her out?
“How did they know that he would agree to drive her to her home, or a home, in what the defense has brought out to be a bad or unsafe neighborhood?
“How did they know that when he arrived at the home, he would get out of the car, agree to go to the porch, and then wait calmly to be arrested?”

- Bulletin, 16 September 1988

[Vngelis]

What I meant was the dubiousness of the charged on behalf of the state.
Curtis could have been a govt plant pure and simple.

It was a muddled event so as to get the SWP on board, that aint hard to do now is it?

The SWP two years earlier sued the FBI and won!
Payback was the Mark Curtis affair and in return they campaigned for open borders for free!

Why didn't the mass media pick up on Mark Curtis re-arrest for soliciting a prostitute?

THe issue is the Defence Committe and its promotion in union halls etc...

VN

[dusty]

Pretty decent stuff in this letter. A very feasible, albeit incomplete
analysis.

[Vngelis]

SOme gems in this...

What is the Workers League?

Why Should Anyone Believe David North?

In our article “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (Workers Vanguard, No. 480, 23 June) we asked: “...why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why?” North’s Workers League made an international campaign out of helping railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, into 25 years in prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. In its lame response to our article the WL’s Bulletin (14 July) protests, “But the issue is not whether you believe the Workers League.” Of course for them it can’t be. Anybody the least bit familiar with David North and his minions would have to be completely deranged to believe anything they say.

To frame the rest of its lies, the Bulletin claims that the Spartacist League maintained a “15-month silence” over the Curtis case. On the contrary — Workers Vanguard publicized the Curtis case in the Partisan Defense Committee column in our 1 July 1988 issue (No. 456). Here we noted that the PDC had sent a letter demanding the charges against Curtis be dropped and had contributed $100 to his defense. Others were urged to do the same. It is hard to imagine that the megalomaniac North missed this issue given that it also featured an article about himself entitled “Anatomy of a Healyite Russia Hater — David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son.”

Who Is Whose Agent?

The Bulletin sneers, “Spartacist even raises its eyebrows because a 1976 FBI index of leftist groups does not list the Workers League, as though this was some sort of necessary credential.” The FBI’s 1971 ADEX file was not some kind of “honor roll,” it was the government’s hit list of those targeted as “enemies” of America. War at Home, a recent pamphlet on “Covert Action Against U.S. Activists,” details the government’s dirty war against everyone from the Black Panthers to pacifist preachers and grandmothers. Yet somehow the Workers League, which advertises itself as the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository on the face of the planet of “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” didn’t get included in the FBI’s ADEX file — the “short list” of Americans these official hitmen had lined up in their sights.

How come? If the Workers League wasn’t on that list then where were they?

This is all the more suggestive given the Northites’ claim that the U.S. government took over the SWP in order to destroy... the Workers League. In “The Carleton Twelve,” a demented saga retailed as “proof” that SWP leader Jack Barnes and his coterie at a Midwest college were groomed by the FBI (in league with Joseph Hansen) to infiltrate the SWP, we read that “The State Department’s greatest fear was that Trotskyism, as embodied in the International Committee, would emerge as the revolutionary alternative to the Stalinist bureaucracies.” Well then, how is it. that the U.S. government wasn’t concerned about the Workers League when it drew up the ADEX list?

In a recent scurrilous piece, “The Militant and the Miners,” the Bulletin (29 September) names SWP members working in the coal fields and smears them as “part of an intelligence- gathering operation on behalf of the government and the coal bosses.” Why? Because they were hired! The fact that SWPers get industrial jobs at all, when they are members of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, is offered as proof positive that they are police agents.

In concocting this paranoid conspiracy theory against the SWP the Workers League presents reality through the prism of the McCarthyite I950s, i.e., when anyone with even vaguely socialist leanings was run out of their job. What About Ed Winn? He worked for the NY Transit Authority but ran as the Workers League’s candidate for president. By the WL’s measure this should make him a cop. And how did Mark Curtis end up getting thrown behind bars for 25 years when, according to the Bulletin, all SWP. members are either cops or police dupes? How come Curtis got jail and Ed Winn got a presidential candidacy?

Witnesses for the Prosecution

Then there’s the question of a state attorney from Des Moines, Iowa eagerly taking the line of argument from the Bulletin, a “communist” newspaper, to convict a leading member of the SWP. In our article we asked if it was simply “One More Coincidence?” that prosecuting attorney Catherine Thune used virtually the same words in her summation at the Curtis trial as those that appeared in the Bulletin article “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis” (5 August 1988). The Bulletin replies: “The statement was reported by the Des Moines Register, the principal daily paper in the city, and evidently read as well by the prosecutor, who incorporated the seven questions into her closing argument on September 9.” Doubtless the state’s attorney reads the daily newspaper. The problem is that the seven questions raised in the Workers League’s statement which were picked up by the prosecutor could not be found there.

The Des Moines Register did run substantial quotes from the WL’s “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis.” The 18 August 1988 issue featured a piece entitled “Socialist newspaper calls Curtis’ claims incredible” which highlighted quotes from the Bulletin arguing that Curtis could not possibly have been framed up by the cops. Here was an apologia for the Des Moines cops, who viciously beat Curtis, coming from a “socialist” newspaper. The question still remains as to how the prosecuting attorney got her hands on the whole text. Who gave it to her, the Workers League, or someone else?

The Bulletin claims it was “compelled” to write the Curtis article. which would become the script for the prosecution, because “the Workers League was seeking ballot status in Iowa for the first time... and the first question which many workers in Des Moines raised was the party’s attitude to the Curtis case.” This is odd. Previous to “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis,” one can find no mention of the Workers League seeking ballot status in Iowa. They didn’t take their election campaign to Des Moines until after the Curtis article had been published.

Besides, why are they protesting so much? This wouldn’t be the first time that David North and his Workers League have used the agencies of the capitalist state to “get” the SWP. There’s the matter of one Alan Gelfand. RWL agent, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP’s Los Angeles branch in 1977 after filing a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s suit against the FBI, based on the wild-eyed Healyite conspiracy theory (as told by Healy and co-authored by North) that the SWP was government-controlled.

Gelfand appealed to the courts of U.S. imperialism to reinstate him as a member, to review minutes, finances and other internal business of the SWP, and to remove members and leaders from the organization. Two of the key character witnesses in the Gelfand suit, which the Workers League boasted was a “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts,” were ex-cops from the notorious LAPD red squad.

Now they retail the testimony of two Des Moines cops against Mark Curtis as unimpeachable evidence. No answer in the Bulletin reply to our question: “What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were ‘The Truth’?” By the Workers League’s lights the cops, prosecuting attorney and court were the instruments of “workers justice” in jailing Curtis.

The “Heritage” North Defends

“What is the substance of this claim that the Workers League, and David North in particular, are ‘shadowy’ and ‘sinister’?” asks the Bulletin. How about this for starters. David, who calls himself “North,” made his political career out of loyally serving as the American stooge of Gerry Healy. He made his way to the top by co-authoring the “Security and the Fourth International” smear that SWP leaders were government agents. He carried out Healy’s orders to pursue the expensive Gelfand provocation. When Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi CPers by the Ba’athist regime, North’s Bulletin duly followed suit. The payoff for these crimes was millions in money from a variety of Middle East regimes including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi.

This whole dirty business hit the fan following the downfall of Healy’s WRP as accusations flew fast and furious between Healy’s former lieutenants. A Control Commission of the International Committee delegated to attempt to control the damage reported that the sum of 1,075,163 British pounds sterling had been received from an assortment of Near East colonels, sheiks and dictators.

Here it was revealed that among other services offered was an agreement with the Libyan government to provide intelligence on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the IC Control Commission noted the “strongly antisemitic undertones” of this agreement in which “the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” An ex-WRP member told the London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) that the Healyites had taken information from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya.

In return the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press, and a month after the agreement was signed the WRP’s daily News Line was launched. So much for the Bulletin’s protests that the Workers League is neither “shadowy” nor “sinister” because it has lots of campaigns and a weekly newspaper.

Of course, the findings of the IC Control Commission, an investigation carried out by the guilty, can only be the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless it was too hot for the Northites to publish in their press. Could it be that North was worried that his current colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labor League, would be exposed as not only complicit but on the front lines shoveling Arab gold into his section?

And let’s not forget one of North’s other former collaborators, Alex Mitchell. Mitchell, who worked with North on “Security and the Fourth International,” now plies his pen for the Sydney Sun Herald in columns attacking striking airline pilots. The Australian Healyites and the Northites call Mitchell a “literary prostitute.” Nothing new here — the Healyites have long been someone’s hired pen whether as PR agents for Mideast regimes or as the servants of Thatcher’s redbaiting, union-busting press. The Healyites’ “expose” of British miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s remark that Solidarność was “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure to knife the union on the eve of the 1984-85 coal strike.

And what about North himself? When Healy was overthrown by his conniving henchmen, North, who was among this number, tried to claim that he and he alone had fought the glorious “founder-leader” over “dialectics.” But the only difference North ever had with Healy was whether 2+2=4.67 or 4.83, and they compromised on 4.5. As for the oil money received from despotic Near East regimes, none of Healy’s epigones objected to the vicious betrayals perpetrated by their organization to get the money when it was coming in. On the contrary, as we point out in an article in the latest Spartacist (No. 43-44, Summer 1989), they “moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.”

This is the only “heritage” David North defends. Nonetheless even the practiced liars who write for the Bulletin were incapable of squaring this history with their fulsome defense of the “integrity” of the Workers League leader. Quotes taken from our article are cut to conveniently disappear any mention of Gerry Healy. But North was nothing if not loyal to Healy. (Now he says that Healy has “placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB.” If North really believes this maybe he’s worried that “glasnost” might go too far and fill in the “blank spaces” that would explain the Workers League.)

How did David come to call himself “North”? When his predecessor as WL leader, Tim Wohlforth, was getting the chop he whined, “I was even attacked as being an American pragmatist for purchasing an American rather than a British web offset press.” To parody the Bulletin, we could ask whether Healy named North after “Lord North” the British prime minister during the American War of Independence who proclaimed that he would see “America prostrate at our feet” — to curb against further excesses of “American pragmatism.” Or whether David christened himself “North” as a show of fealty to his British master.

As we noted in our article, the men North today denounces as “renegades” — i.e., Healy, Banda, Slaughter, Wohlforth — taught him everything he knows about practicing politics with no concern for honesty, principles or consistency. The Bulletin chooses not to respond to any of this. But for flavor look at what North himself wrote of one of his former mentors, Cliff Slaughter:


“Slaughter, a consummate cynic and hypocrite, epitomizes in his political and personal life all that is corrupt and perverse in the British petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. He is, therefore, a specialist in gathering into his net the most degenerate human specimens produced by this decadent social milieu: from hallucinating journalists, alcoholic university professors, and aging film directors of unfulfilled promise to neurotic middle class ladies who blame Trotskyism for their unsuccessful love affairs and failed marriages. “
— Bulletin, 9 December 1988
Yet it was Slaughter who the Northites once held up as the pre-eminent authority on “Security and the Fourth International,” who Alan Gelfand included on his list of witnesses as “an expert.” Now, it is the obviously twisted North who is calling Mark Curtis a “depraved rapist”!

If one were to try to match the luminaries of the Healy cult with the more notorious Stalinists it would roughly translate into Gerry Healy as Joseph Stalin, Slaughter as Mikhail Suslov, Michael Banda as Georgi Malenkov, Wohlforth as William Z. Foster, Freddy Mazelis as Earl Browder. This leaves David North as a jumped-up, creepy little Lavrenti Beria — for now the only master of “Security.”

Bandits and Renegades

It is quite ironic that the Bulletin retails the Bolshevik Tendency’s grotesque slanders of the Spartacist League. The BT is a collection of embittered ex-members of our organization who trickled out of the SL under the early pressures of the Reagan years. Claiming political agreement with us, they needed an excuse to alibi their cowardly departure. So they “discovered” the “regime question” and their model was... Gerry Healy, a ready-made horrible example of megalomania, paranoia, gangsterism and unbridled greed. Now David North, who rode Healy’s coattails and helped build the cult of the loathsome “founder-leader,” happily quotes the BTs self-serving attempt to smear the SL with the colors of Healyism.

Of course the BT can supply no evidence for its slanders. Here’s one example of how they tried to handle it. In an article advertised as “SL and the WRP Split” (1917, Winter 1986) the BT, after noting the Healyites were notorious for beating up internal opponents, wrote, “This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge,” while claiming that “intimations of such appetites are increasingly common”! This is like asking “When are you going to start beating your wife?”! The added fascination with “finances” shared by the petty criminal mentality in the BT leadership has also lent something to its lurid tales about the SL.

It says a great deal about the unscrupulousness of North & Co. that they would attempt to pass off parodies of their own, only too true, revolting history as the “truth” about the SL. The Bulletin uses the BT’s lies to condemn our call to stop Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland, while now with the reins of government in its hands Solidarność has openly declared its drive to restore capitalism. They both denounce us for hailing the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against the darkest imperialist-backed feudal reaction. They equally find repugnant our work to bring the power of labor and blacks to bear in successful mobilizations that have stopped the fascists — the BT calls it “ghetto work,” the WL claims it is “an obsession with race.” They both look instead to the good offices of the racist labor bureaucracy.

Despite differences in style, and insofar as one can find any political logic to either group, the Workers League and the BT have some overriding things in common: a shared hatred of Soviet Russia, an abiding hostility to the black working class in America, a bloodthirsty, vicarious enthusiasm for the death of others and a distinct smell of provocation.

Political Struggle by “Other Means”...

Having failed through episodic and flawed political struggle to uproot the Pabloite revisionism that destroyed the Fourth International, the Healyites substituted their psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign, centered particularly on the charge that former SWP leader Joseph Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the GPU and the FBI who recruited Jack Barnes and a bunch of other students at Carleton College to run the SWP for the U.S. government. But while one might have to look elsewhere to explain the Northites, the Barnesites have had a linear political consistency since their inception.

They started as student cheerleaders for Castro and were recruited to the SWP, where their positions found an echo. By that time the SWP was pretty much a doddering and vulnerable organization. The brutally bureaucratic Barnes regime persisted until they had cleaned out all centrist vestiges and holdovers, i.e., any nominal Trotskyism, and completely took over.

As for the role of Joseph Hansen. Far from being the tool of both the Kremlin Stalinists and the U.S. imperialists in the destruction of the SWP, Hansen played the centrist lawyer who tried to keep a cover of “Trotskyist” orthodoxy on the galloping opportunism of the SWP. And far from brain-trusting Barnes, Hansen was the last obstacle to the full-fledged emergence of the anti- Trotskyist Barnes gang.

Barnes hasn’t changed his political positions since he joined and neither has the circle of people he was sufficiently able to also recruit. They have a central political core based on a radical program alien to Trotskyism — a Fidelista fan club of American agrarian-labor reformers. In contrast, the Northites have taken political positions all over the map as served their own convenient and grotesque opportunist ends.

In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term for a phenomenon like the Healyites: “political bandits” or, if you like, political pirates, i.e., who will show any flag to attack any target. For this, the CIA- inspired graduate departments of elite universities attended by those among North and his crew were a good classroom. It, at the least, taught them how to write on every side of the question, like the position papers of the State Department.

The mendacious practices and assertions of the Workers League (and the Bolshevik Tendency) say a great deal about the Stalinist-derived breakdown and perversion of the “far left” both in terms of proletarian morality and any connection with the class struggle. When it has suited their own episodic interests North, his past masters and present collaborators have turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, have served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of desperately striking unionists, and have generally crawled before alien class forces.

Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality North and his gang can and will say or do anything. And these are the guys that did their level best to get Mark Curtis 25 years.

[dusty]

On Feb 5, 9:55 pm, Vngelis <meberr...@hotmail.com> wrote:

This may have been the link that I was unable to put my finger on.

Were he a plant, he'd be one of hundreds who were sent by the FBI into
the SWP. So that's entirely feasible. His claimed personal behaviour
is consistent with one who was doing a job beyond his apparent genuine
political day job.

His being caught by the cops for his first "indiscretion" was made
into a political embarrassment by the WL's objection and investigation
of the SWP story. They might then have been driven into the channel of
covering their own sorry arses by setting up a "he was one of our best
and was victimised for all the wrong reasons" type campaign.

The assessment by Dayne as follows fits this well: