Most Recent Additions
Fifth Estate Collective
Feds Get Fred
Fred Chase was wearing an “I am Tom Sincavitch” button pinned to his Levi jacket. Fred was waiting for the FBI to take him from his sanctuary at Sacred Heart Church in much the same way that Tom had waited for the same thing almost a year before in St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church.
Fred was supposed to begin trial on May 4 for destroying the draft records of some 34 draft boards in Chicago last May, but was refusing to cooperate with the court system. “I didn’t show up for the trial because I don’t think they have a legitimate right to try me,” he told the Fifth Estate the day he and his supporters and family moved into the church.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
J. Oint
High officials face White Panthers
“What the fuck are we going to do about those crazy White Panthers?” “I don’t know, man....I’m too wasted to even think about it.”
“Me too, man, shit, how are we gonna have a legislative session this afternoon?”
“Look, go wash your face with cold water and drink some coffee,” the fat one said, “I’ll call Schweigert and tell him what’s happening. If we can’t get it together, we’ll call the State Police and have everyone thrown out. It’ll be rough for those junior high kids from Petoskey, but we sure can’t let them see us like this.”
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Kennedy and Brentz
Kids Are People
...Only Smaller
(Women’s News Co-op) As women step out of their passive housewife role and become more active outside of the home they are discovering the need for child care centers. Many women are interested in starting their own, collectively run centers, because the present day care centers are run as money making ventures and glorified baby sitting services.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Alison Sand
Psychology of the Diaphragm
Reprinted from Off Our Backs (February 27, 1970), a Woman’s News Journal.
“My doctor told me that if using a diaphragm were a test of mental ability I’d be given a moron rating.”
That quote is unique to one woman’s experience with one strange gynecologist but it is, unfortunately, revealing. Most women don’t receive adequate instruction or encouragement from their doctor and leave his office insecure about their ability to use it.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Rehearse for the Apocalypse
Reprinted from The Seed / UPS
YES FOLKS! NOW YOU CAN BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO EXPERIENCE THE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER.
WHY WAIT TILL 1980? DON’T LET THE FUTURE TAKE YOU BY SURPRISE.
PREPARE NOW FOR THE END OF CIVILIZATION.
REHEARSE FOR THE APOCALYPSE.
HERE ARE A FEW SUGGESTIONS:
Better start preparing your palette and stomach for the fare of the ‘80s:
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Dave & Debby
Street Scene
We were walking down Forest near the freeway after buying some smokes when a carload of Wayne State cops were breaking away from the light and saw us. They cruised up and junior pig sitting shotgun pulls us over.
“Let’s see some I.D.,” the two-year college grad stated.
“Hell, man, that’s bullshit. We’re just walkin’ down the street and you ain’t got no right stopping us from doin’ just that.”
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Marlene Wicks
The Diaphragm
Reprinted from Off Our Backs (February 27, 1970), a Woman’s News Journal.
This article is the second in a series on birth control, compiled and presented with the aid of the Women’s News Co-op. The first article, which dealt with “the pill” and the recent unsettling facts brought to light surrounding its use, clearly indicates the necessity for information on other birth control means. Because of the capitalist media’s big push for the pill over the last few years, little information has been readily available on other birth control methods. We will endeavor, in this series, to rectify this situation.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Lee Webb
U.S. in recess
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Nixon’s public relations men are calling it an “economic readjustment,” but in English it’s a full blown economic recession.
U.S. Labor Dept. unemployment figures show joblessness for April at 4.8%, the highest since 1965, when U.S. “escalation” of the Vietnam war began.
Lines at unemployment compensation offices in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, Ala. are spilling out onto the sidewalks. 3,700,000 Americans can’t find jobs—and that’s one million more than a year ago.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Women’s News Co-op
A good cigarette is like a woman—the best ones are thin and rich.
If there ever was a time to be a woman, Woman it’s now!
You’ve come a long way Baby—now you’ve even got your own cigarette!
The capitalist media has copped all the rhetoric and jumped on the Women’s Liberation bandwagon. Woman’s newfound freedom has opened up a vast new market of products and ad campaigns-everything from vaginal deodorant sprays to her very own cigarette.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Harriet and Harry T. Moore
Marius Mason was struck by the story of these early civil rights activists and their assassination by the Ku Klux Klan. He painted this portrait (“Harriet and Harry T Moore”, 2022) using prison coffee as the main medium.
The Moores incurred the wrath of the Klan for their advocacy of voting rights in segregated Florida in the 1940s. They were both killed on Christmas night 1951 by a bomb set at their home in Mims, Florida. This followed their both being fired from teaching because of their activism.
Jul 19, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
Fifth Estate
Radical Publishing since 1965
Vol. 57, No. 1, #411, Spring 2022
The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades.
www.FifthEstate.org
No ads. No copyright.
Kopimi — reprint freely
Jul 19, 2022 Read the whole text...
Bryan Tucker
Subverting Establishment Suppression
ACT UP & Explosions from the Margins: Against gentrification of the mind
The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—known by its acronym ACT UP—coalesced in the late 1980s with a simple motivation: the desire to live.
This group is a striking example of the influence marginalized people using radical approaches can have. The ambitious and judicious group, founded in New York City on March 12, 1987, set their initial sights on exposing neglect and falsifications about the AIDS epidemic. They demanded attention and significant action from politicians, Wall Street, and the Catholic church.
Jul 18, 2022 Read the whole text...
Nick DePascal
Magma
Three sisters
Sit in judgment-
Darkly, mutely on the mesa,
Apportioned their appointed part
In the cosmic monotony.
.
A man is shot dead
On ancestral lands (now
“Ran” by the national park
service) praying to
The four directions, hand
On his chest & over
The heart. Belligerent
At the command to leave,
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Precarious Dreams
Defending our Imagination from hi-tech Takeover
Just as obtaining job-related income is being made more precarious every day by automation, our sleeping hours are now increasingly under siege by the forces of techno-capitalism. In order to more fully understand the growing vulnerability of our dreams to corporate manipulation, the recent phenomenon of “dream incubation”, which involves the implantation of marketable dreams in our heads, is worthy of further investigation.
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Michael Dunn
The Modern School Movement
Anarchist educational ideas and practices offer many lessons
In the wake of the punitive No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top legislation of the Bush and Obama years, education reform has turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Today, many schools are implementing much more non-coercive practices, like restorative justice and culturally sensitive teaching.
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
E.Z. Ryder
The Persecution and Assassination of Draft-age Men
as Performed by the Inmates of Fort Wayne Under the Direction of Medical Officer Capt. Floyd
About 400 men a day take their Pre-Induction Physical at the Fort Wayne Armed Forces Entrance & Examining Station (AFEES) at 6300 W. Jefferson Avenue. The physical is usually the final step in the Selective Service system prior to induction.
For most men this is it. They are 1-A. If they pass the physical, they go into the Army or face prison for draft refusal.
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Worker’s Letter to Wayne Strikers
One morning last week I was approached at the plant gate after my shift-by a student passing out your handouts. I spoke to him briefly, and noting the peace symbol painted on my lunchbox, he asked me to pass out your sheets in the plant on my lunch break. How can you expect workers to relate to your programs when your people are so uninformed about conditions in the plants they don’t even know a worker can be automatically fired for “distribution of unauthorized literature?”
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Jason Rodgers
Stashing the Tacky Little Pamphlets
As more of our daily geography is occupied by a coercive media ecology, a tool to regain some ground
You might assume that a Tacky Little Pamphlet (TLP) is just another name for a mini-zine. In a way, you are correct. It usually refers to a format of a single sheet folded into eight sections, cut up the middle, and folded up like origami to form a miniature zine. However, the term includes additional meaning that expands far beyond into a form of tactical media or strategic prank.
Jul 14, 2022 Read the whole text...
Simoun Magsalin
Against Revolutionary Cynicism
for Anarchist Consciousness
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him with absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar.
—Mikhail Bakunin
Modern fiction is replete with stories of revolt and failure. The setting might be a brutal dictatorship, maybe it is a medieval fantasy or a cyberpunk dystopia, but the ending is similar. The usual tropes are presented: violence of policing, spy agencies and brutal military forces, all of whom perpetrate torture, disappearances and murders.
Jul 13, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Detroit Seen
Answer to last issue’s quiz: The designer of the nationally known Willow Run bomber plant was Charles Lindberg, former Warren-Forest resident and grandson of John C. Lodge, of X-way fame...
Rumors of the week: The J.L. Hudson Co. will announce after this Xmas that it will abandon its downtown Detroit store due to lagging sales. The last day of business will be after Xmas of 1971 (of course)...
Jul 13, 2022 Read the whole text...
Marius Mason
How a Forest Really Grows
a review of
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021
I was hanging out in the dayroom of the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Conn. late last year. It was noisy with the sound of the guys playing cards and Scrabble, when a friend brought a book with an intriguing cover to the table. It was Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, and it jolted me back to another place and time in my life, when so much of my world was about saving the trees from destruction. Her book is full of the wisdom gleaned from decades of careful and loving observation.
Jul 13, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
Fifth Estate
STAFF
Debby Brentz
David Gaynes
Carol George
Alan Gotkin
Mike John
Keep on Truckin’ Co-op
Resa Jannett
Jim Kennedy
Lee Ann Kennedy
David Levison
Julie Medvecky
Harvey Ovshinsky
Dave Riddle
Bill Rowe
Marilyn Werbe
Peter Werbe
Cathy West
POLITICAL PRISONER:
John Sinclair
Jul 13, 2022 Read the whole text...
J.R. Kennedy
Strike Back
Last week we went out on strike. We shut down universities and colleges across the country. Over 400 schools learned the power of the political strike. Hundreds of thousands of students moved militantly in rage over the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State murders. We trashed ROTC buildings, occupied administration centers, fought police, and made demands that put our schools against the wall.
Jul 13, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Thackary
Like a Hitchcock thriller with smart devices
Even an agoraphobe can’t be alone
a review of
Kimi, Dir: Steven Soderbergh, 2022
Director Steven Soderbergh is well-known for both prolific output (an astounding 47 films and counting) and speed of production (roughly a movie a year over the past decade). Yet his work’s quality seems not to suffer from such a pace.
On the contrary, something about its fleetness belies a fascinating realism of the outlandish. Fittingly, in Soderbergh’s latest, his third collaboration with the streaming arm of HBO, a film simply titled Kimi, a villain’s posture bumbles unceremoniously. A tech millionaire conducts a Zoom interview in his garage before a pitiable, fake bookshelf background. The manner in which these characters are painted, all through edits and camera framings, bleeds with an obscure intentionality. Form as function.
Jul 8, 2022 Read the whole text...
David Annarelli
Twenty-four and Counting
Stemming the tide of Christian religious fervor
a review of
24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity: Why Christianity’s Perverted Morality Leads to Misery and Death by Charles Bufe. See Sharp Press, 2022
Charles Bufe’s jeremiad is a scathing rebuke of Christianity filled with lurid details that support the charge made in the subtitle of 24 Reasons. It traces religion’s fearmongering and fire and brimstone manipulation by faithful zealots in service to the powerful, but also chronicles its inherent dishonesty, authoritarianism, sexual morbidity, hypocrisy...,well it’s a long list.
Jul 8, 2022 Read the whole text...
Jason Abdelhadi
Just another rusty seismographkid
Steven Cline wants to re-invent Play
a review of
AMOK by Steven Cline. Trapart Books, 2022
Alone hitchhiker sticks out his thumb on a dusty Georgia back-road. He is wearing an all-white paint suit, clutching an ambiguous briefcase. His bearded face is ornamented in haphazard colors, ghastly reds and yellows. Disturbingly, he is not wearing any shoes. Does he not know where he is headed? Maybe he just wants to go, to go out there, to go with you, to show you...What? Do you pick him up?
Jul 5, 2022 Read the whole text...
David Annarelli
Clancy’s novel starts with everyday work-consume terror
...then Things Take a Strange Turn
a review of
We Take Care of Our Own by Christopher Clancy. Montag Press 2021
Imagine Amazon, Walmart, Exxon, Mobil, Pepsi, Coke, Fox News, Blackwater, the AMA, and Haliburton all rolled into one messy Play Dough ball of a supraconglomerate. The only corporation.
Add the military, and you have USoFA Worldwide with its finger in every pie, in bed with everyone and everything. And, it’s leading the War on Terror around the world the way a rock band goes on tour.
Jul 2, 2022 Read the whole text...
Bob Lynetter
GIs Picnic for Peace
The American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) at Selfridge Air Force Base is inviting the peace movement to join them on the base in a “Picnic for Peace” on Memorial Day, May 30.
This is an excellent opportunity for the entire anti-war movement in the area to give support to and show solidarity with a vital faction of the movement, the GIs who are standing up to be counted.
Jul 2, 2022 Read the whole text...
Peter Werbe
How to print zines, posters, flyers, and stickers
The Old Fashion Way...A reminder that printed matter was often the key to social change in earlier years
a review of
Cheap Copies! Cheap Copies! The OBSOLETE! Press Guide to DIY Hectography, Mimeography, & Spirit Duplication by Rich Dana. Obsolete Press, 2022
The first question many people have when looking at a how-to manual like this one is, why bother? What’s the motivation for doing something the hard way with antiquated techniques and materials? Scouring junk shops and the Internet for the equipment and supplies, that, in printing, have been made obsolete by the machines that produce what you’re holding in your hands—computers.
Jul 2, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Black Detroit In Photos
The photographs of Ken Hamblin, photographic director for Detroit Scope Magazine, will be featured in an exhibit combining photography and poetry in the Fine Arts Corridor of the Detroit Main Library from May 12 to June 14.
Hamblin’s photos have appeared several times in the Fifth Estate and the WSU South End.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Common Ground Exhibit
On Sunday, May 18, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the Detroit Artists’ Market, 1452 Randolph will open an exhibit entitled “The Common Ground” which will include new work by 22 artists of the Common Ground of the Arts.
The exhibit will continue through Saturday, June 14.
Contributors will be Patricia Duff, George Ettl, James Lewandowski, Jonnie Russel, Marilyn Schechter, G. Alden Smith, Jerry Gibbons, Al Hebert, Stanley Rosenthal, Bradley Jones, William Jordan, George Rogers, Arthur Wenk, Marie Tapert, Gary Boyll, Stanley Dolega, Edmund Morais, Jean Pollack, Nolan Ross, Michael Frantz, Bette Klegon, and Aris Koutroulis.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Barbara Weliner
Ivana Gottfried
Events Calendar
Those events marked with an asterisk (*) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office and pick up some papers.
THURS. MAY 15
* ROCK CONCERT, Savage Grace, Red, White and Blues Band. WSU Upper DeRoy Aud. 8 p.m. Adm. $1.
FRI. MAY 16
* FACTS OF DEATH “Death and the Human Imagination” with Eugene J. McNamara from the University of Windsor. Rackham Aud. 8:30
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—Strange and very hypocritical how Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to have been loved and revered by everybody. While he was alive one could scarcely hear a good word for or about him; now he’s dead the air is full of unctuous, oily tributes to his role as a beloved father figure. Wasn’t it he who took over our role in Vietnam from the French? Wasn’t it he who blew the whistle on the military/industry cartel? And yet strange, strange, apparently everybody loved him.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Rock ‘N Roll Revival
The Michigan music scene will rock on over the Memorial Day weekend with the First Annual Detroit Rock and Roll Revival.
Rather than hire performers at random out of the Billboard charts or the record ads in Rolling Stone, producer Russ Gibb, of the Grande Ballroom maintains that rock and roll is the true culture of America’s youth, and must be presented as such.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
Sun Ra
The ageless Sun Ra and his thirteen-piece Astro-Infinity Arkestra will unite with the MC5 and the people of Detroit at the Grande Ballroom May 16 and 17 for a mass manifestation of revolutionary culture and energy that’s sure to bathe the city in its vibrations for weeks to come.
The Arkestra will also appear at the 1st Annual Rock and Roll Revival, May 30 and 31 at the State Fair Grounds.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Ralph J. Gleason
The Revolutionaries of Columbia
LIBERATION News Service — Columbia Records is owned by CBS. It owns the Yankees and God knows what else. Its offices are at 51 West 52 Street in New York in a new skyscraper whose walls are already peeling and crackling.
Right now it is the home of the revolution.
Or almost. It is certainly spending more money promoting the Youth Revolution than one would think possible for a standard American corporate enterprise. Columbia ads divide the world into “we” and “they,” with the “we” including the longhairs, the youth and Columbia and “they” including anyone you want to include because you happen to be against him or he against you.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Unclassifieds
UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.
Happy Birthday, Thomas C! May you always think of me...Bev.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
Dave Watson (David Watson)
In the High Schools
“Hey! What’s that sound?”
Free Speech Fight in Plymouth—Students around Detroit may have been misled by the so-called “news reports” on what recently went down in Plymouth. I cleared up the story after talking to Jim Kalliel, editor of Free Verse, an underground paper which the Plymouth officials tried to silence.
The fascists in Plymouth were beaten out of a victory when Jim faced the Court, the pigs, and the “powers that be” in the tradition of all those who have dared to print what they believe in the face of much opposition and a repressive ruling group.
Jun 28, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
John Watson
League of Revolutionary Black Workers
An interview with John Watson, Part 2
This interview was conducted and transcribed by Dena Clamage.
[Part 1 of the interview appeared in FE #78, May 1–14, 1969.]
Editors’ Note: John Watson, editor of the Wayne State University South End, has been involved in Detroit revolutionary politics for a number of years. Former editor of the black community newspaper, The Inner City Voice, Watson was one of the original founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He is currently serving as a member of the Central Committee of the League.
Jun 28, 2022 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
We just finished reading your paper “the 5th Estate” dated April 3–16, which couldn’t be classified as good trash. After wasting 4 books of matches we finally got your paper burning so we could heat our C-rations.
You probably are wondering why we are writing this letter to you. Well, we read some articles concerning Vietnam and some of the letters from men in Vietnam which we will call clerks, because we know they haven’t seen any combat by the letters they have written. The rest of the articles were written by the girlish boys back in the world.
Jun 28, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sandy Feldheim
Still Hungry in America
a review of
Still Hungry in America, text by Robert Coles, photographs by Al Clayton, introduction by Edward Kennedy. $2.95, 115 pages. World Publishing Co.
Still Hungry in America may be considered a sequel to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962. Harrington’s book described the America most middle and upper-middle class whites never see.
Jun 28, 2022 Read the whole text...
Dennis Raymond
War and Peace
film review
Most movies leave us with so little that it probably seems unfair to dump on Sergei Bondarchuk’s film of “War and Peace” simply because it doesn’t leave us with enough.
What it does give us is some rich and memorable images: a pregnant woman sewing by the light of an open window, reminiscent of Vermeer. The coming of Spring heralded by a variety of colors and textures that send the senses reeling, almost as if you could touch and smell the infinite sweetness of that budding flower up there on the screen.
Jun 28, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Cops at Cranbrook
Police representatives from twelve suburban communities have been training in methods of riot control on the Cranbrook School campus once a month throughout the year.
The newly-formed Cranbrook SDS concentrated on their removal as a primary goal. A victory was scored May 8, when the pigs failed to appear, apparently aware of the increasing militancy of certain students at Cranbrook School. This eliminated the necessity of an open confrontation between SDS and the cops, as this was the date when such a confrontation was supposed to have occurred.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Do It in the Road
MADISON, Wisc. (LNS)—Students and non-students in the University of Wisconsin community, responding to publicity which asked “Why don’t you do it in the road?”, found out why when they turned up for a block party on Saturday, May 3.
They were driven off the streets by police with clubs and gas in what led to three nights of fighting between cops and at least 1,000 young people on the tree-lined Madison streets.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
HipPocrates
QUESTION: I am writing to you in regard to my weight problem. I am 22, five feet six inches tall and I weigh 134 pounds. I would like to weigh 125 pounds. I have been as heavy as 145 pounds and really have had no trouble losing the first ten pounds but the second are a problem.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
HipPocrates Here for Open City
Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, known and loved “Hippocrates,” will be at WSU’s Community Arts Auditorium on Wednesday May 28 at 8 pm in a benefit for Open City, Detroit’s service organization for the free community.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
More Say No to Draft
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—In spite of government repression, draft resistance continues to increase. There are nearly twice as many draft cases in Federal courts as there were a year ago.
If the same rate of prosecuting holds true for the next few months, Selective Service cases will probably be the third greatest producer of criminal court business.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Partial Victory at Ft. Jackson
FT. JACKSON, S.C.—The Army has dropped charges against some GIs affiliated with the group GIs United Against the War in Vietnam at Ft. Jackson, S.C., and will discharge others without ever bringing them to trial.
Of the nine soldiers originally arrested following an anti-war meeting on the base March 20, only three now face charges.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Clark Kissinger
SDS Founder Attacked
CHICAGO (LNS)—Dick Flacks, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and founding member of SDS, was severely beaten in his university office May 5.
Flacks was beaten over the head, causing multiple skull fractures, and his right hand was almost cut off in an attempt to leave him to bleed to death.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Marc Kadish
The Further Adventures of Tom Sincavitch
Editors’ Note: Marc Kadish is Mid-West organizer for the National Lawyer’s Guild and is active in Detroit with the National Organizing Committee (NOC).
Fort Riley is a sprawling Army base located between Manhattan and Junction City, Kansas about 200 miles from Kansas City.
Included among the 15,000 GIs on the base are approximately 3,000 soldiers who are being “rehabilitated” at the Correctional Training Facilities. If they don’t get rehabilitated they get shipped to the Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...