Letters of March 12

Pete Seeger Inspired by Workers’ Struggles
In early January 2014, Pete Seeger, an icon of American folk music, passed away. He was known worldwide for his progressive music accessible to everyone from coal miners and factory workers to college students and professors. His years as a musician and political activist spanned need nearly seven decades reaching all generations.
In 1936 at age 17, Seeger joined the Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its popularity and influence. He attended Harvard College with the dream of being a journalist but lost his partial scholarship because he did so much political work in the YCL that his grades suffered. He left Harvard in 1938. In 1942 he became a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) itself, but left in 1949.
In the 1950’s, he was a member of The Weavers. Many of their songs were controversial and they were banned and/or censored by most mainstream radio and television stations for years. Even today, You Tube clips with Pete trying to play controversial songs such as “The Big Muddy” on the TV show “The Smother Brothers” are cut out.
When not performing publically on networks he went to summer camps and performed for children. This may have planted the seeds in the minds of these very young children that contributed to the social rebellions of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Despite the setbacks and obstacles with television networks due to his socially radical ideas, Pete Seeger continued on and had a show called “Rainbow Quest” on CBS network out of New York in the 1960’s.
A number of progressive artists performed on the show. Tom Paxton sang  “Buy a Gun for Your Son,” a subtle and sarcastic song criticizing the patriotic war-supporting agenda of the far-right political agenda. Seeger also was closely associated with the 1960s Civil Rights movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall concert, featuring the youthful Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This event and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in August of that year brought the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” to wide audiences. A version of this song, submitted by Zilphia Horton of Highlander, had been published in Seeger’s People’s Songs Bulletin as early as in 1947.
On July 26, 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) voted 373 to 9 to cite Pete Seeger and seven others (including playwright Arthur Miller) for contempt, as they refused to cooperate with HUAC in its attempts to investigate alleged subversives and communists (later PLP members would also refuse to cooperate with HUAC). Seeger testified before the HUAC in 1955. This was one of his darkest moments, when his personal freedom, his career, and his safety were in jeopardy. Seeger had an international following of millions of workers and progressive-minded intellectuals who were anti-war and pro-union and supported workers’ rights.
Even though Seeger was the product of the revisionism/reformism of the “old” communist movement, much of his music and lyrics about workers’ struggles are inspirational. By playing and sharing his music today, we may have a way to reach and politicize both young and old people alike. His music is a valuable tool to use with friends on our jobs and in other organizations if they are progressive enough to begin the conversation about fighting back and the problems of capitalism.
All that hear Seeger’s message can gain a historical context for the workers’ struggles against racism, too. By listening to his music, people learn the history of the struggles and tribulations of the working class as they started to organize collectively in the mid-to-late 20th century. In his “Songs of Struggle” album his music encourages workers to think for themselves with songs like “Which Side are You On?” and “Talking Union” written with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. The last verse of “Talking Union,” written by Seeger, illustrates the potential to use his works in PL our own attempts to win workers struggling for their rights and to help students understand these struggles:
But out in Detroit here’s what they found,
And out in Frisco here’s what they found,
And out in Pittsburgh here’s what they found,
And down in Bethlehem here’s what they found,
That if you don’t let Red-baiting break you up,
If you don’t let stool pigeons break you up,
If you don’t let vigilantes break you up,
And if you don’t let race hatred break you up —
You’ll win. What I mean,
Take it easy — but take it!”
Pete Seeger is gone but his message lives on to empower the working class.
A comrade fan of Pete Seeger
Community Fighter Won to Communism
I am a person who since I became involved have learned what communism signifies. It gives me joy and confidence that a struggle exists that understands the necessities of all of us who are part of the working class and that we are not alone.
I would very much like to pass on the word to more people that because of fear they remain quiet and that like me, I have learned what the word communism means. Now it is our job to inform and transform everyone, that because of capitalism, we are all suffering the consequences of bad administraters of the country and as always, these politicians pass the guilt around, blaming each other, pretending to fill a well-intentioned agenda with a president on his way out and being replaced by another and finally never doing anything. That is why I think that the Progressive Labor Party should never disappear. With organization, intelligence and anger, we shall keep communism alive and not lose the hope that in the not-so-distant future, we can say we’ve gained more ground against capitalism.
First and foremost, I very much congratulate your Party for letting me get involved in your fight against the corruption of the world’s monster named capitalism.
Pro-communist fighter CIA-Owned U.S. Media
Comrades, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the media’s role in reproducing the superstructure continually oppressing us. Last August, we saw how privatized the news is when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. Some may think these purchases are relatively recent in history. However, subversion of the press leaves a trail extending back to the 1940s, draped in secrecy.
In 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created the Office of Police Coordination (OPC), a psychological and paramilitary action organization. OPC was specifically designed as the CIA’s covert action branch. Per its own secret charter, the department’s goal was spreading “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
To lead this department, the CIA enlisted Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner, who had strong hatred for the U.S.S.R. Later that year, Wisner created Operation Mockingbird, a program where the CIA bribed journalists from multiple media outlets to spread their propaganda.
Per Katherine The Great by Deborah Davis (which first exposed Mockingbird): “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst.”  
Mockingbird managed to influence at least 25 newspapers and wire services throughout the United States. The CIA even used it to influence 1949 elections in Italy, after Italian communists joined the race. Their efforts helped lead to the communists’ defeat.
It should come as no coincidence that this happened alongside the dawn of McCarthyism, where anyone who even looked different was suspected of being a communist.
The ‘50s saw Mockingbird take up one-third of the CIA’s covert operations budget; three-thousand salaried and contracted Agency workers eventually became involved in the propaganda efforts. Fast-forwarding to the present day, we see Mockingbird’s continuing effects. Mass media still presents stories from a racist and sexist perspective, routinely attacks students protesting fascist militarization on campuses and gives virtually no attention to government programs such as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) This act, signed by Obama, authorizes $662 billion in funding, among other things, “for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad.”
This only further proves that what we see, read and hear daily will never serve our class interests. The government has literally owned hundreds of journalists for decades now. It is important we learn this because many still believe in the lie of “unbiased” reporting the bosses’ love pushing on us. And when you believe their dangerous lies, you’ll be less likely to take up workers’ struggle.
This is also why it is so important that we all read and distribute CHALLENGE newspaper. Our revolutionary communist paper is the only paper that truly reports on, and represents the interests of, the international working class. We should all make or renew our commitment to distribute many more as this is our strongest weapon against our enemy, capitalism.
Red Journalist
‘Top Secret America’: NSA Exposed Before Snowden
In July of 2010, more than two years before Edward Snowden published his revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and two years in the making, the Washington Post newspaper published three articles describing what it called “… an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” To be sure, the motives behind the Post stories were far from those of Mr. Snowden. On the contrary,  The Post was alarmed that the entire national security apparatus had become too large, too in-grown, and quite incapable of even performing a protective role.
The idea was not to expose any of the by-their-own-laws-illegal activities of the U.S. government. Rather, the Post saw itself as a totally patriotic organization alerting the country to severe problems that needed to be fixed so that the U.S. could continue as the world’s leading capitalist economy.
The Post saw nothing inherently wrong with what was going on; it only wanted to get rid of the vast waste and inefficiency that it believed was crippling “our” ability to defend “ourselves.” Moreover, the Post claimed that its “…online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.”
It is noteworthy that the Post knew that the NSA (only a part of the national security apparatus) was collecting daily 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. In other words, the overall activities of the NSA that Snowden exposed were quite well-known. The Post mentioned this data collection to show how ludicrously immense it had become because even with their super-fast computers, the NSA couldn’t analyze the majority of the information it was gathering. Clearly, the facts that Snowden exposed were well-known to Washington insiders; the only ones who didn’t know were the so-called “American people.”
The articles make it clear that only very high-ranking individuals could afford to identify themselves when substantiating the articles’ claims. This thoroughly demolishes the idea that “Snowden should have and could have gone through the proper channels rather than publishing the information the way he did.”
The Post said that its online database is at www.washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps they took it down after Snowden’s exposures to perpetuate the fiction that “no one knew what was going on.”
A Reader