Finally, a collection of first-hand accounts of the Fare Strike, in which thousands of San Franciscans openly and spontaneously united along class lines and rode mass transit for free. Popular anger over service cuts, fare hikes and threatened driver layoffs on Muni (SF Municipal Railway that runs a system of buses, streetcars and cable cars) set this action in motion. The working-class was being saddled with increasing costs for declining service in a system that was already very poor. Anger at this was transformed into the joy of refusal as many people rode mass transit like any other day, yet withheld their money from the fare box. The alienated space of public transportation was briefly transformed into an arena of solidarity and radical possibilities.

This pamphlet serves to restore a critique grounded in theory and practice to a subject which has been mischaracterized as a “debacle” in one prominent but distorted account circulated on the internet. Instead, we give the views of ten participants, coming from a diverse set of radical (some being radicalized in the process of fare striking) perspectives, united by their focus on this collective action as a heightened moment of class struggle. The pamphlet presents an analysis of the organizing that led up to the Fare Strike, the various working-class community groups who participated, and the first-hand accounts of the strike as it happened on the first day and beyond.

There is also a useful section on “historical precedents” for such actions, touching on transit-based resistance in the U.S., Italy, Scandinavia and elsewhere. A focus on Bay Area resistance to urban redevelopment/gentrification, from the fight against the destruction of the I-Hotel, to the “Freeway Revolt” against the commodity-logic of car culture, provides context on the deeper meaning of the 2005 Fare Strike.

The pamphlet FARE STRIKE!: First-Hand Accounts, published by Insane Dialectical Editions, is available for $4 (postage included, send cash or checks with the payee left blank; free to prisoners and low-income people) from PO Box 3684, Oakland, CA 94609 or by e-mailing: contact@FareStrike.org. FARE STRIKE! has contributions from IDP members, participants who were drawn into the strike, as well as other Bay Area radical authors not affiliated with IDP.

Insane Dialectical Editions has also published pamphlet versions of essays by Loren Goldner, Martin Glaberman, Jean Barrot/Gilles Dauvé, Stan Weir and Ron Rothbart (See the IDP Pamphlets 2007 Catalog at: http://flyingpicket.org/?q=taxonomy/term/8).

FARE STRIKE! was introduced at the recent 12th annual San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair. IDP members gave a participatory presentation, under the workshop heading “Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Struggles: The 2005 San Francisco Transit Fare Strike,” at the BASTARD anarchist conference in Berkeley on March 18th of this year. The workshop was attended by a member of Chicago’s “Midwest Unrest” who had been part of organizing a successful fare strike in 2004, participants in the 2005 Vancouver Fare Strike, and roughly 40 others. A lively discussion indicated the level of interest in and excitement about driver/rider social strikes on transit, the successes and failures of these actions, and their implications and usefulness in future class struggle.

FARE STRIKE!: First-Hand Accounts is available on the FareStrike.org website.

–INSANE DIALECTICAL POSSE

There's another account of this; more critical, it looks like. At infoshop.org. "fare strike debacle," or something like that.

Kevin Keating's version is fun, but pretty self aggrandizing. There are a few points worth considering, but his account has not stood up well as more information on the strike comes out. Apparently everyone in his group got as far away from him as possible due to his vanguardism regarding attempts at top down control of the strike, resulting in the main grouping for the strike not including Kevin.
I would say read the one at farestrike.org and Kevin's version(s) and decide for yourself which is more accurate, or take what you can from both.
Thanks for the heads up rover!

1. How was my version of the transit fare strike fiasco "self-aggrandizing?" be specific.

2. here's one that will be difficult for you to get; there are lots of leftists in the SF Bay Area -- incuding virtually all anarchists that I know. It's easy to get leftists together for a leftist bullshit effort, but an authentic opposition to capitalism is another matter

1. How was my version of the transit fare strike fiasco "self-aggrandizing?" be specific.

2. here's one that will be difficult for you to get; there are lots of leftists in the SF Bay Area -- incuding virtually all anarchists that I know. It's easy to get leftists together for a leftist bullshit effort, but an authentic opposition to capitalism is another matter

Kevin, thank you for your interest in our pamphlet, have you read it
yet? You mentioned on the other site we were debating at that you
didn't feel the need to. Just wondering.


KK:
1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly
intended for the consumption of people who were far, far away from San
Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, and who might be hoodwinked
into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the 2005 fare
strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other
I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;

CM: Now you keep harping on how long our pamphlet is ("prolix"). It's
interesting that when I combine your four Train In Vain articles on
the Fare Strike/Social Strike, they are 27 pages (with part five on
it's way you note). Your "social strike out article" is 24 pages long.
That's 27 and 24 pages (text only) from one person, versus 27 total
pages from ten people with pictures, analysis, historical background,
footnotes, etc. Who is more longwinded? You are.

As for the claim we are trying to fool people outside San Francisco,
can you please show me the people INSIDE San Francisco who are backing
up your weird version of events? I don't believe there is a single
one. The pamphlet we put out has ten writers. The person who designed
the web site is from Social Strike, and another person from Social
Strike is writing an account we are going to add. People outside SF
might not know how alienated you've become, but they do know in the
Bay Area.

You claim our account is naive and false, but the reality is that
thousands of people did fare strike, It's not hoodwinking anyone to
say that I think some people were radicalized in the process of Fare
Striking. As one person in one day, I personally witnessed many
hundreds Fare Striking. That's why I think it's accurate to say
thousands did, and very possibly tens of thousands. I have no exact
count, but it's been suggested that looking at Muni's revenue losses
for the first day may be a good approximation. Can you back up your
charge that all ten accounts were wildly inaccurate?

2. The people behind it, Gifford (GH), etc, intervened from the right
against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to
turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint
phenomenon. Any allegedly anti-capitalist politics that they claim to
profess were so well-concealed from the working class Muni riding
public as to be invisible.

CM: CM: We didn't intervene, we joined with an exodus of people who
were moving away from association with you. That's a big part of why a
second group was needed, you surely must know this by now.
If anything, our methods were far more participatory than your
attempted framework (rejected roundly) for Social Strike, and that
means that everyone was expected to be smart enough to represent
themselves, instead of just handing out your literature (virtually
unchanged since the 1990s) and relying on you as their representative
from above mediating between them and the drivers. Our efforts had
nothing to do with any undefined "leftist culture of failure" red
herring. Our pamphlet contains a lot of stuff written while the fare
strike was still going, and it was never a single issue campaign with us.
If anyone has consistently denied the possibility of meaningful
working class struggle in this process, it's you. Your hierarchical
approach was deemed oppressive and counterproductive.

KK:
3. They were successful in turning the effort into a typical
single-issue, SF Bay Area leftist culture of failure event. They were
able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more
accurately lack of vision. Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the
Muni operators I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were
unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge
than anyone else.

CM: Note that you are engaging in a "post hoc" logical fallacy here.
Nowhere have you ever shown that anything "everyone else except you"
did was directly responsible for the alleged debacle as you have
called it (and certainly not for the drivers' actions during the
strike), or that it was connected to a "vision." Ideas alone did not
establish the material hurdles we came up against. In the case of
the drivers, they were under different types of pressure, from reports
of layoffs, to the actual disciplining of two drivers who had proposed
a wildcat strike. At the meetings with drivers, your literature and
posters were overwhelmingly rejected by them. You attempt to paint
this as a "Kevin and the drivers versus the Leftists" but no where
have you ever established you had any credibility with any of the
drivers. It's nice that you talked to drivers after the strike, but
you also fail to acknowledge their many acts of solidarity with riders
during the strike, and these are important to gauge the possibility of
cooperation between riders and drivers. Again, this is a disservice to
readers, who you claim we're trying to hoodwink by giving both
positives and negatives.
Now when we look at the collective Social Strike/Fare Strike
effort, we come to the Day Laborers, who more than anyone else
actually did establish driver rider connections, which is why the
Mission was among the major strong points of the entire effort. This
was one of the SUCCESSES of the Fare Strike, and had nothing to do
with you. We don't take credit for their work, but they did come
onboard through our group, not you. Aside from this, many in the Fare
Strike/Social Strike, rode and talked to drivers, delivered literature
to band barns, met with drivers, despite your efforts to exclude
people from the start.
One important reason people became fed up with you was your
hierarchical approach. You acted as a choke point between the riders
and the drivers, hand picking who would get to meet with drivers,
despite their telling some of the people involved that they wanted to
meet more of the riders in the campaign, as the saved e-mails from the
Social Strike web site indicate. In fact, two of the core people
involved with these early meeting groups were harassed out by you when
you labeled them "leftists." These were among the first casualties of
your sectarianism. Eventually, every single person was labeled a dupe
of the evil Leninists who allegedly stole "your fare strike" which you
apparently own. But as has emerged in the Bay Area discussions, most
anarchists and ultra-leftists, including our own group, see you as a
liability, a liar, and unprincipled.

KK:
4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character
comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the
abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear
and obvious failure was somehow really a
great-moment-in-proletarian-history,

CM: CM: You're one to talk of lies. You reposted several accusations
here that were already debunked, and you act as if you never received
a response from us!
You don't seem to get that what we're doing is presenting first
hand accounts in a democratically organized effort in which all
authors participated directly. Nothing is papered over here. There is
a lot of self-critique in the pamphlet, in the accounts and the group
conclusion. You are displaying your basic contempt for materialist
analysis when you insist that the "abject failure" is to be explained
by someone's supposed "politics," which you also misrepresent, or
don't grasp.
Your model was to plaster your politics onto the entire effort, to the
point that you didn't consider who would be reading the flyers, or how
to quickly get peoples' attention. Our efforts included flyers (NOT
written solely by Marc Norton as you've erroneously claimed for almost
two years now), that were shaped by our experiences talking to people,
comments from the drivers (remember them Kevin? They dissed your
literature.), the Day Laborers suggestions, and discussion at
meetings. The reality is that our flyers did not sum up our
"politics." They were something we used to introduce the topic of a
Fare Strike quickly. They did mention working class unity and the
threatened layoffs of drivers. Where the class struggle politics realy
came in, almost always, was in the individual discussions. But there
were a lot of people who never read _Capital_ who were interested in
the Fare Strike for less fully developed reasons.

KK:
5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit
self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area,
left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book
version in pdf format -- garlanded with quotes from Guy Debord!

CM I prefer to describe it in this way. Your ego went nuts in your
dealings with the Anarchist Action and Social Strike groups. They
combined forces with us without alerting you. Together the groups
moved forward. As more than one person pointed out at the recent
BASTARD anarchist conference (which you've also denounced), valuable
time was wasted over the fights that arose between you and Marc,
mainly from your undisciplined sniping, and this delayed a well
coordinated action, especially given that everyone who has actually
agreed to sit down and think about the fare strike has stated we
needed more people involved. But those of us who were actually still
working together all knew the essential judgment of your role in the
months leading up to the strike. We can say we're anti-capitalist and
you can scream "no you're not" forever, but until you can back up your
bizarre claims, our writing and actions will be the deciding factor.
And I do encourage people to read our pamphlet at farestrike.org to
see if they think we're all leftist leninist dupes.

KK:
These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual
anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't
reverse that.

CM:
CM: I think your efforts at control from above are far more indicative
of a sort of Bolshevik/pro-capitalist position than ours. Your one man
management is very different from actions based on spontaneous action
from the participants themselves. We worked with radicals or people
who were becoming radicalized in the process of fare striking. In
contrast, you demanded a fully developed party line be parroted by
everyone in your orbit. As I've explained many times, and you've never
acknowledged, our class struggle focus was always front and center in
our interaction with people. You were not at our meetings; you were
not with us flyering; you weren't with us during the fare strike; and
you seemingly have not read our pamphlet; but you claim to know
everything about our actions and the content of our efforts.

KK:
Oh yeah, by the way, did any of these clowns ever have the backbone or
the even minimal integrity to ask Marc Norton, the guy who wrote their
leaflets for them, and gave their effort its central political
direction, what particular brand of Leninist he is?

CM: This loaded question was answered, yes, why pretend it wasn't and
repost here as if we ignored the question? That is called lying Kevin.
This is what I wrote in direct response to your question:
You are dead wrong when you say that Marc Norton wrote our flyers.
Our flyers were shaped by our experiences talking to people, comments
from the drivers (remember them Kevin?), the Day Laborers suggestions
that they be concise, and discussion at meetings. The reality is that
our flyers did not sum up our "politics." They were something we used
to introduce the topic of a Fare Strike quickly. Where the class
struggle politics came in, almost always, was in the individual
discussions. But there were a lot of people who never read _Capital_
who were interested in the Fare Strike for less fully developed reasons.
What I want to know, is since you claim we were led by a
Stalinist/Trotskyist/Leninist (your description has continually
morphed to suit your fancy), why were you ever willing to work with
people from the Drivers Action Committee? Isn't it true that their
leadership is essentially a Progressive Labor Party cadre? Doesn't
that make you a Maoist dupe? And can't we extrapolate from the fact
that you went to the retirement party of one of their members that you
were working behind the scenes to lead the Social Strike into some
kind of new Great Leap Forward, based on the teachings of your God
Chairman Mao? Come clean Kevin!!!

KK:
Four of the nine -- not ten, as claimed -- people contributing to this
prolix effort are beer-drinking buddies of the author, GH. As such I
assume they are putative members of the Potemkin-Village leftist group
"Insane Dialectical Posse." To fail to identify them as such is
manipulative and dishonest.

CM: Sorry you counted wrong, it is ten, they are actually numbered in
the online version. As for your years long ad hominem attack on
Gifford as an alleged heavy drinker,that may be based on your
friendship years ago, but as it pertains to the present, it's an
obvious case of projection. Your own reputation, complete with the
documented "air rage" incident, is so well known that it merits no
further comment.
And you claim we're hiding our identities, but our names are given in
the pamphlet, sometimes with only initials, but the initials are well
known to anyone who would care who we are. You're REALLY stretching here.

KK:
Maybe in this they are picking up some tips from Marc Norton, the
Leninist who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort some
of its most significant political coloration -- ignoring the drivers
and Balkanizing what needed to be a join riders and drivers effort
into a mostly riders-only effort.

CM: In typical Bolshevik fashion, you keep insisting that it was our
job to organize the drivers, when in fact we wanted to meet them
halfway. None of the drivers ever called for a Fare Strike. The main
liability to gaining a closer relationship with them was your self
appointed role as choke point. As stated, the drivers criticized your
literature for being too ideological and too verbose. You claim we
wanted to ice the drivers out and then imply that it was our fault
that they didn't participate in larger numbers. None of that is true.
Our crews were among the people who did meet with drivers early on,
and who also were talking to the drivers on the busses about the
strike up to and throughout the strike. The biggest show of solidarity
from drivers came from the Mission district, where the Day Laborers
helped cement their trust. Recall the Day Laborers were brought
onboard through the Fare Strike group. Your charge of our anti-driver
stance is totally false. The punishment of two Muni drivers who had
suggested a wild cat strike was partly responsible for adding to the
drivers' hesitations. It had nothing to do with how one or another
flyer was worded. To suggest that is absolutely unsupported by any
evidence, like most of your outrageous claims.


KK:
"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and
their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most
disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."

Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here
from 'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike
in San Francisco in 2005.'

CM: In response to your Marx quote, I quoted this about you:

About a year before, I had read an article of his in a magazine,
written with a terrible pretension to the most naive poetry and, at
the same time to psychology. He described the wreck of a steamer
somewhere on the English coast, of which he himself had been a witness
and had seen how the perishing were being saved and the drowned
dragged out. The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was
written with the sole purpose of self-display. One could simply read
it between the lines: "Pay attention to me, look at how I was in those
moments. What do you need the sea, the storm, the rock, the splintered
planks of the ship for? I've described it all well enough for you with
my mighty pen. Why look at this drowned woman with her dead baby in
her dead arms? Better look at me, at how I could not bear the sight
and turned away. Here I am turning my back; here I am horrified and
unable to look again; I've shut my eyes--interesting, is it not?"

(Fyodor Dostoevsky, _Demons_,85)

The reality is that thousands of people *do* fare strike, and squat and expropriate, and more, a lot more, every single day of our lives. It's not a protest. It's class war. We're not trying to convince anybody to lower their prices. Any price is too high. If it's not free, you're being ripped off.

As long as anything is a commodity, everything is a commodity. Capitalism has made even time itself a commodity. Time is what life is made of. Life, consider the alternative. It's yours or it's not. There's no middle ground.

That's what the Self Reduction Movement is really about. It's not a way to make a point. It is the point.

The ruling class has stolen the Commons. We're taking it back, one piece at a time. And we're getting away with it, too. You don't have to wait till you see a leaflet before you join in the fun.

The reality is that thousands of people *do* fare strike, and squat and expropriate, and more, a lot more, every single day of our lives. It's not a protest. It's class war. We're not trying to convince anybody to lower their prices. Any price is too high. If it's not free, you're being ripped off.

As long as anything is a commodity, everything is a commodity. Capitalism has made even time itself a commodity. Time is what life is made of. Life, consider the alternative. It's yours or it's not. There's no middle ground.

That's what the Self Reduction Movement is really about. It's not a way to make a point. It is the point.

The ruling class has stolen the Commons. We're taking it back, one piece at a time. And we're getting away with it, too. You don't have to wait till you see a leaflet before you join in the fun.

Following is an old English folk poem, circa 1764:

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common'
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

FARE STRIKE! San Francisco 2005: First-Hand Accounts...hmmmmm...an ideological truth-in-packaging law should apply here...

1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly intended for the consumption of people who were safely far away from San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, and who might be hoodwinked into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the fare strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;

2. The people behind it, Gifford (GH), etc, intervened from the right against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint phenomenon,

3. They were successful in this. They were able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more accurately lack of vision.

Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the Muni operators, bus drivers and streetcar operators, I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge than anyone else.

4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear and obvious failure was somehow really a great-moment-in-proletarian-history,

5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area, left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book version -- garlanded with quotes from Guy Debord!

These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't reverse that.


There is a big disconnect between the fact that the Potemkin-Village group "Insane Dialectical Posse," posting here, and his buddies, acted in every way like conventional leftists of the Trotskyist, social democratic or idealistic left-wing of the Democratic party stripe during the failed effort to foment a transit system fare strike in San Francisco in 2005. In the one mass action that most of them have engaged in they were the most rightward-pointing faction of the effort

Revolutionary consciousness is what it does; if what the person or people in question do in the larger world is the same old left-wing of capital crap, then that's what their politics are. All the references to Mattick, Pannekoek and the Situationists can't redeem that.

I suppose these leftists offer a good example of what results when a gaggle of nominally "Marxist" college town slackers in early middle age attempt, in the case of almost all of them, for the very first time in their lives, to engage in some kind of substantial radical collective action -- nothing happens. The haven't honed their communications skills enough to effectively communicate any message they might have to convey to contemporary working people.

"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."

Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here from

'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike in San Francisco in 2005,' is available on the 'Love and Treason' web page at the Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Infoshop:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.

'The Failed Transit System Fare Strike' article is also available on libcom.org, and in numerous other places on the internet.


Kevin Keating
proletaire2003@yahoo.com

Hi Kevin,
I came up with a list of questions for you. I hope you will end your long silence and actually address some questions put to you instead of just demanding that of others. We have answered you point by point, you have not answered us.

1. You recently wrote "Revolutionary consciousness is what it does" at anti-politics. My question is based on your actions shouldn't people define you as a crypto-Leninist ? The next questions should help show why.
2. Why did you position yourself between people in the Social Strike and the Muni drivers, even lying to people about where the meetings would be so they would not be able to attend, and putting out a false claim that the drivers didn't want to meet with others? Why was it important that you control this crucial aspect of the strike process and is such one man control consistent with a "left communist" position? Doesn't the fact that every single person that was involved with you in this effort at the start has distanced themselves from you say anything about what kind of communist you are? Can a person speak honestly of "mass action" as you do, when you are the only member of your "group'?
3. Why did you insist that others distribute your posters and flyers and dissuade them from writing anything themselves? Did you think they were too stupid and that they should follow your one man management of the strike?
4. Why do you label people leftists and Leninists who are known, through their direct actions, writings, participatory meetings, and by people that associate with them and vouch for them as being anarchists and communists, not of the "leftist" type? If they are Leninists and Leftists, why has no one else involved with these people, including communists and anarchists come forward to join in your critique of them as Leftists or Leninists?
5. Why do you stick to the claim that Marc Norton wrote the Fare Strike flyer when he didn't write it? Why do you claim to know this and yet, when pressed for evidence offer none? Why do you think that's exceptable when you claim to be such a "superior" writer? Shouldn't we see baseless assertions as a weakness in your writing, and one that typifies your entire body of writing on the subject of the Social Strike?
6. Why do you harp on people's drinking problems of a decade ago when you are currently a known alcoholic who has said and done problematic things to many in the Bay Area while under the influence, to the point of a person taking out a restraining order on you, and having a drunken air rage incident written about in the media? Shouldn't we label this as projection?
7. Why has not one single person, anarchist, communist, or other come to defend or back up your version of events?
8. Why did you write critically of the Drivers Action Committee in your "Poor the Bad and Angry" pamphlet (in the 1990s), saying you would "never" work with Maoists, but then turn around and do precisely that during the 2005 strike? Should we hold you accountable, given that you tried to paint others who worked in coalitions as "Leninists" (without ever indicating who was a Leninist in any of their history or action)? Will you ever explain your 180 degree turn around on this position, or shall we just assume that you are so in control of the orthodox ideology, that we couldn't understand the twists and turns your theory has taken?
9. Why do you think it is okay to label people as having Downe's Syndrome, and also to call people "puto"? First of all, do you think you're being funny? You have criticized other's senses of humor, but shouldn't you admit that yours is pretty weak? Also, is it just being "PC" to note that homophobia and making fun of disabled people aren't really funny or cool, and might say a lot about your "revolutionary" credentials and attitudes?
10. Also, on your prose. If your accounts are both overly long and filled with intentional distortions, why should anyone consider this good writing? Is writing in a self-assured way the only criteria for good writing? Does it matter that your paragraph structure is weak, or that you often load stilted compound adjectives two and three times in a short space in an effort to add color, when it is just repetative and clunky? Since you have made such a big deal about how you have "mastered language" shouldn't we note that you really have not?


I look forward to your responses, although I'm guessing you'll keep reposting your cut and paste piece which has already been refuted and or addressed openly wherever you've posted it, because your main goal is not rational argument and critique, but slander and smearing.

Please note the number of the question you are addressing in any response, and if possible, paste that question in and then respond to it.

CM

1. You make a reference to a "restraining order."

This restraining order was in response to your buddy Gifford Hartman, the author of the prolix and inaccurate FARE STRIKE! 2005 doc's harassment of a woman over the internet from the e-mail address on the leaflets that we agve out to Muni empolyees:

angryworkers@yahoo.com

Comrade Mobuto:

Tell the readers of this thread how and why Gifford Hartman - - GH, the author of "Fare Strike! 2005, First-Hand Accounts...", and a habitual internet stalker -- used the e-mail address on the leaflets that we gave out to Muni operators,

angryworkers@yahoo.com,

to stalk and harass a woman from France named Geraldine.

No more typing practice from you, Mobuto; let's see copies of the harassing e-mails -- and the address that they came from -- immediately.

Right now.

Kevin Keating

This has gone too far. In response to your years of slander, calling people downe's syndrome sufferers, alcoholics, making fun of their weight, calling me a "puto," claiming people are "pro-wage-labor" and on and on, I finally noted that some of what you are writing about is projecting your own battle with the bottle on to others.

I never said anything about harrassing emails, and I'm not outing the source who was with the woman who said she took out a restraining order on you when they ran into you.

And who the hell do you think you are to bark orders at me or anyone else? Don't you get it yet? That's what makes people think you are not a communist at all, but a one man circus of power. When have you EVER answered a single one of my questions to you asking you to back up your weird claims about us? NEVER.

You say that Gifford wrote the fare strike pamphlet when it was authored by ten people. You say we planned a march when it was the day laborers. You say we're pro-wage-labor when we are anti-capitalist. You say Marc wrote our flyer when he did not. You say we had a leader when we did not. You call people Leninists when they are not. You say people stole "your" social strike when you know everyone just wanted to get away from you and they did just that.

Stop already! People at libcom and other sites have now all turned against you just as they have in the Bay Area and I think you need to just stop. You've lost. Not one single person has backed your version of what happened in the Fare Strike. Even Tom Wetzel has come out and said that you were the main liability for the Social Strike outreach efforts.

You're totally out of control. It's just a sad mockery of any promise you might have shown in the past. But it's your own fault for refusing to communicate in an honest and principled way. Instead you chose sefl-aggrandizement and lying, and now you're paying the price.

In the last email I didn't mean to imply that Tom Wetzel is alligned with or in opposition to anyone. I merely wanted to point out what he had written at anarkismo in response to Kevin. I don't claim to speak for him or anyone else. Tom's articles on the Fare Strike are available at znet and elsewhere, and not affiliated with the "Fare Strike" group.