Fifth Estate 99, February 19-March 4, 1970 Add to the Bookbuilder

The Fifth Estate

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

ADVERTISING

Steve Dunn

STAFF

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

Nick Medvecky

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Bill Rowe

Marilyn Werbe

POLITICAL PRISONER

John Sinclair

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. Subscription rate is $3.75 for one year; $6 for two years.

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A little bit of justice was done in Detroit the other day.

Gene (Reb) Bell, president of the Highwaymen Motorcycle club, and Ronnie Rose, president of the Branded, appeared in Recorder’s Court on charges of running an illegal drinking spot. The charges stemmed from a police raid on the biker’s clubhouse January 11 when Detroit police confiscated property, wrecked the entire premises, beat one person with a pool cue and arrested everyone present.

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The future of John Sinclair, imprisoned chairman of the Youth International Party, hinges on two things at this point. John is currently serving a 9-1/2 to 10 year sentence for possession of marijuana in Marquette Prison.

The first is the expression of support for the freeing of Sinclair, and all political prisoners and the demand to legalize marijuana. This has been manifested in such events as the Free John Sinclair Day held across the country Jan. 24 that raised thousands of dollars in legal fees and educated people about the repressive use of the archaic narcotics laws.

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CHICAGO—Judge Julius (Magoo-Hitler) Hoffman finally had his day in court as he sentenced all of the Chicago Conspiracy Seven and their defense counsel to long jail terms in prison for contempt of his Kangaroo court.

Chief Defense attorney William Kunstler was sentenced to four years in prison; two years, five months to Dave Dellinger; two years, one month to Rennie Davis; one year, two months to Tom Hayden; eight months to Abbie Hoffman; Jerry Rubin received two years, one month; John Froines, six months; Lee Weiner, two months; and defense attorney Leonard Weinglass to a year and eight months.

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from Community Reporter and Fifth Estate sources

For as long as most of them can remember, Larry Johns, Ernie Elswick, Van Johnson, Jimmy Brown, and their friends have been pushed around by Wayne State University.

They’ve seen their families forced to move because Wayne State “needed” the land their homes were on “for the good of the Community.”

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Reprinted from Up Against The Wall Street Journal

“Watch out, he’s a bad one,” said one of the women in the picket line at Gate 2. The man to whom she referred was trying to drive his white Mustang through the moving pickets. Two pigs assisted him by clearing a path through the line. Three days before the man had run his car into the woman who shouted the warning.

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NEW YORK (LNS) — The three month old strike of 147,000 General Electric workers has been settled.

J. Curtis Counts, the federal mediator in the strike, called it “a triumph for voluntary collective bargaining.” Albert J. Fitzgerald, president of the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) called it “the first negotiated settlement with GE in 20 years.” And the Wall Street Journal said, “The agreement contains enough concessions for both sides to claim victory.”

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San Francisco (LNS) — The people of People’s Park received token retribution recently. Twelve sheriffs deputies involved in the struggle last May were indicted by a San Francisco Grand Jury on charges of conspiring to mistreat prisoners (many of the 423 arrested were brutally beaten), shooting persons with shotguns, and beating persons who were arrested.

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Reprinted from The Metro

ECOLOGY SUCKS! It sucks the life out of social reform. It sucks the energy out of campus movements. It sucks the irritants out of capitalism. It sucks change out of politics. It sucks reason out of thought.

Ecology has become the monster of our age. Unless revolutionaries, radicals, and liberal reformers soon recognize this, they, and humanism itself, will eventually be consumed.

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The Women’s Liberation Coalition of Michigan has opened a state office in the Ad Hoc building on Woodward, headquarters for several other movement organizations.

The Coalition’s goal is the abolition of male chauvinism—the domination, exploitation, and oppression of women by men.

The office will serve as a center for information exchange between the affiliated women’s groups and the general public. It will also be a coordinating center for the activities of the Coalition.

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NEW YORK (LNS) — On January 26, two men identifying themselves as “being from the government” dropped a subpoena off at CBS.

The FBI and the Secret Service wanted to get their hands on all the tapes, memos, notes, letters and telephone calls that CBS has concerning the Black Panther Party from mid-1968 to the present, as well as the unedited tapes—outtakes—of interviews with Panther leaders David Hilliard and Eldridge Cleaver.

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If you are a serviceman in Vietnam receiving a free Fifth Estate subscription the only notice you will get of its expiration is the sudden disappearance of the paper from your life.

We still want to get you guys the news about our culture, the GI movement, and anti-war activity, so if you qualify for a renewal (still in ‘Nam) send us a letter telling us to put you back on our subscription list. If you are short we will be glad to send you papers for your remaining time. If you are still in the service, but not in ‘Nam, a year’s sub is $2; if you’re completely free of the green machine it’s $3.75. Power to you.

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WASHINGTON (LNS/CPS) — There may be almost twice as many American deaths in Vietnam as the Defense Department claims.

Former Senator Wayne Morse has charged the Defense Department has two sets of death statistics: the real ones and those released to the public in its weekly “statistical summary.” Morse first made the charge last August, claiming 70,000 rather than 30,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam combat at that time.

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CU CHI, South Vietnam—Some time ago, Capt. Frank Smith (Bravo Company, Second Battalion, 27^th Infantry) passed the word down to his First Platoon that he needed a patrol near the Cambodian border.

The platoon, however, declined to go.

Smith, faced in fact with mutiny, said immediately that he was not asking for volunteers. He was ordering the platoon into activity and he expected instant compliance.

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Editors’ Note: The following is taken from the Ft. Bliss “Gigline,” the GI anti-war paper at that base. Its address is Box 31094, Summit Hts. Sta, El Paso, TX 79931.

Ft. Bliss, Tex.—General William Westmoreland expected to visit Ft. Bliss to perform a ritualistic inspection of the base, make a few speeches, and accept the plaudits of local citizens.

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CHICAGO (LNS)—Across America, the GI movement and draft resistance are growing. Stockade rebellions, GI coffee houses, draft board demonstrations and induction refusals have been the most visible forms of resistance to the U.S. Army.

The Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE) report an important increase in another less known form of resistance—simply not reporting for induction. In Chicago alone, there were 1,090 cases of men not reporting for induction in 1968–69. This is up from 659 in 1966–67, and means that on the average, more than 10 men a week are not reporting for induction. These figures were compiled from information publicly posted at Chicago draft boards.

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The following interview with Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld (HIPpocrates) is reprinted from the Summer 1969 edition of Sexual Freedom, the quarterly publication of the Sexual Freedom League. Subscriptions cost $4.00 a year and are available by writing to: Sexual Freedom Quarterly, Box 14034, San Francisco, California 94114.

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“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”

—Frank Zappa, December 1965

Some very strange action has been coming down at Southfield-Lathrup High School. Rick Cricow, a student there, has been selling Fifth Estates in the area and distributing them at his school. Last month the Assistant Principal of the school, Richard Leland, confiscated the papers and instructed Cricow to discontinue selling them on school property.

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No one really consciously planned the thorough integration of the middle-class worker with capitalism. Capitalists were forced to develop a more productive worker, a more extravagant consumer, simply because their own fixation on accumulation (profit) is continuously frustrated by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as automation grows.

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GHETTO...the white suburban mind conjures up visions of....

GHETTO is now a game, a “simu-life” game made by Western Publishing Company. For the outrageous price of $23.00, those affluent liberals that wish to “understand” ghetto life can do so in the comfort, privacy, and safety of their own home or school.

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a review of

1) The Matrix, Poems: 1960–1970, by N.H. Pritchard, Doubleday paperback, 1970, $2.45.

2) Arts in Society, volume 6, number 3, edited by Edward L. Karmack, University of Wisconsin, 1969, single issue $2.00, 1 year subscription (3 issues) $5.50.

Contemporary poetry covers a pretty wide range, far wider than these two examples would have us believe. Good modern poetry is as hard to find as good modern jazz and though these two volumes are approaching it, neither come close enough.

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Returning members of the Venceremos Cane Cutting Brigade encountered their comrades who will take up the work of the first contingent of the brigade in the sugar cane fields of Cuba. The Venceremos Brigade is a group of young Americans who have been and will continue to be participating in the Cuban sugar harvest of 1970, now known internationally as the Battle for the Ten Million Tons.

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Doctors have been screwing with people for a long time.

Those of us who have tried to have babies in the present structure of American medicine know how rigid, male dominated and money oriented that structure always is.

A friend of mine who had her child here in Detroit has had the following experiences. When she was six weeks pregnant she thought she was miscarrying and tried to get an appointment with a doctor, but every one that she called said he would not see her without a previous appointment (made three weeks in advance).

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WASHINGTON (LNS)—Marijuana may well be very good medicine for victims of tetanus, migraine, high blood pressure, and sunstroke, according to long-secret medical research just made public.

Encouraging studies, done ten years ago at the Army chemical warfare laboratory at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, were disclosed when proceedings of a 1969 National Institute of Mental Health conference were published, according to a February 2 Washington Post dispatch.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—If Americans ever believed there was an Olympus within their borders, the location had to be the chambers of the United States Supreme Court.

“I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court” has long been the sputtered refrain of the miffed and abused. Changes in personnel at the Supreme Court amount to a changing of the gods for Middle America.

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The Motor City Nine—nine Weatherman SDS women who invaded a Macomb College classroom last July—were convicted of disorderly conduct by District Judge Robert Chrzanowski in Centerline.

The judge sentenced five of the women to jail terms ranging from six days to ninety days. He also issued bench warrants for three women who failed to appear and delayed sentencing on the remainder. He refused appeal bond requested by defense attorney Dennis James.

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I’d like to reply to SP Marc Nadeau whose trash was published in the Feb. 4, F.E. [Letters, FE #98, February 4–18, 1970]

Baby, I’m not under 25, and am old enough to be your mother. Guys like you make me want to vomit. You made a big issue out of an article on the Northland “happening”. I don’t condone what the “kids” have done, but they were exercising a constitutional right—free assembly.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. FEB. 19

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and This Island Earth (1957) two popular Sci-Fi epics that include travel to other worlds, ray guns, and robots. DeRoy Aud. WSU. 7 p.m. Single feature 50 cents, double 75 cents.

METROPOLIS (1939) dir. Fritz Lang Industry fights labor in Lang’s expressionistic nightmare of future society. Architecture Aud. U of M in Ann Arbor. 7 and 9:05 p.m. 75 cents.

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