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Ace Hayes’ 62nd
Ace R. Hayes (1940 - 1998) would have enjoyed his 62nd birthday today. Ace Hayes was an American Revolutionary, historian, scholar, educator, humorist, writer, poet, journalist, editor, atheist, activist, fighter, philosopher, columnist, commentator, reporter and researcher. He was an irreproducible blend of all of these things, a unique historical personality forming an invaluable legacy for the American people and oppressed people who struggle for freedom and justice everywhere.
Ace fought to expose the system which U.S. governments have protected and defended -- a system of war, spoils, terminal corruption and exploitation serving the anti-human profit motive and feeding the ruthless avarice of a tiny minority in America and the world.
With penetrating insights expressed in pithy, popular, acerbic and salty terms, Ace exposed the operations of the "New World Order" while suggesting that there could be an alternative in the form of a long-overdue American revolution which would oust the ruling plutocracy and realize actual democracy serving human needs and abolishing rapacious capitalism and its related manifestations of fascism and imperialism.
Ace opposed all forms of slavery -- debt slavery, wage slavery, taxation slavery, along with that most pervasive and crippling of slaveries, the chaining of the human mind, which is subjected to an incessant barrage of indoctrinating material as pumped out by the ruling money matrix. "Capitalism Is Fascism," Ace would say. He railed against the treatment which produced "all-American mushrooms," the people kept in the dark and fertilized with the ruling class government's lies and deceptions.
Ace called for total accountability and transparency of all government activities, denouncing the "secret government" which, through modalities such as those of the CIA, actually rules autocratically and conspiratorially to serve the most narrow interests of its directors.
Ace was a deep lover and proponent of an American revolutionary tradition with its roots in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. An ardent defender of the Bill of Rights, he took on all comers who sought to censor or suppress the freedoms annunciated in that document. For Ace, it was never about "Left" or "Right" but always about who was on top and who was not, always about the right and wrong contained therein.
Ace assumed many incarnations in a rich life of struggle and engagement against the enemy. He ran guns to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the revolution to oust Somoza, he supported the Vietnamese in their harrowing ordeal at the hands of the imperialist war machine, worked with the Black Panthers in Oakland, and was a brilliant machinist widely acknowledged for his trade craftsmanship and ingenuity.
He worked in education with Oregon Prison inmates, drawing the ire of prison authorities. He was the perennial “outside agitator,” lending his skills and knowledge to any and all he would encounter. He never tired of trying to reach people and engage them in the process of knowing and changing the world. His was an unyielding, implacable quest to live as a revolutionary and bring about the revolution.Hayes was the editor of the Portland Free Press for the last 5 years of his life. Before his most untimely death at age 58 on February 13, 1998, he had reported on and published stories, analyses and commentary on virtually all of the major scandals and political events on the American and world scene in the 1980s and 1990s, including the following as a small sample:
***The Iran-Israel-Contra-Oliver North operations.
***FBI complicity in the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings.
***The mass murder of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.
***The ongoing holocaust against the land and people of Iraq.
***The activities of "progressives" who do the dirty work of the government.
***The massive looting of the S&Ls.
***The ADL spy case in which thousands were monitored and results shared with the Israel Mossad, the FBI, and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
***The "October Surprise," with the Bush-Reagan forces making a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages so that Reagan-Bush could supplant then-incumbent President Jimmy Carter.
***The C-130 scandal in which CIA-related operatives used cargo planes intended for fighting domestic forest fires to ferry guns and ammunition to keep the slaughter going in places such as Rwanda.
***The CIA involvement in drugs, which Ace had been investigating for over 30 years.
***The identities of an interlocking "directorate" of power brokers and policy makers, including Organized Crime, Big Business, Politicians, Military/CIA Brass, and the Judiciary, among others.
***The emergence of a "progressive community" acting as a "left wing" of global fascism.
As the guiding light of the PFP, Ace Hayes conducted countless interviews, built a massive library of annotated books, periodicals, documents and records. He audiotaped thousands of conversations, videotaped dozens of his own "Secret Government Seminars" and received all sorts of materials from sources around the world. The Archives of Ace Hayes with its extensive collection of files, correspondence, audio and video tapes, artifacts and memorabilia, are the very stuff of Ace's exertions to help the American people and all people in our struggle for freedom.
Ace can often be seen on American Revolutionary Television, a cable television public access program which can be viewed in the Portland, Oregon area on a weekly basis as per the following schedule:
Sundays 5:00 p.m., channel 22
Wednesdays 9:00 p.m., channel 23
Saturday 11:00 p.m., channel 11
The Portland Free Press is still being produced in both hard-copy and online versions. The PFP Website, which can be found at
www.portlandfreepress.com, will be refurbished and operational by January 19, 2002. A special 9/11 edition of the PFP (hard copy) is in the process of being assembled.Husayn Al-Kurdi,
Executive Director, Ace R. Hayes Memorial Foundation
Editor and Publisher of the Portland Free Press
