Why the Party Survives

Introduction

Chair: If everybody's ready, we'll begin tonight's discussion, which is on the early years of the American Marxist movement and on the general question of why the Marxist movement in this country has survived through the long and hard years. Tonight's speaker, having well over 50 years of experience in that movement, is in a good position to discuss with us that topic. He was an IWW organizer, as they called Wobblies. He's a founding member of the American Communist Party, a national committee member, political committee member, and delegate to the Comintern at five of its international conferences. He was the founder of the Communist League of America, which was composed of the expelled Trotskyists from the American Communist Party, and a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party. He's the author of several books, innumerable pamphlets, and volumes of magazine and newspaper articles. Several of his books were The First Ten Years of American Communism, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, The History of American Trotskyism, and Notebook of an Agitator. And I'd like to point out that these books are available in the bookstore now. And now, without further delay, Jim Cannon.

Why the movement has survived

Cannon: The chairman forgot to add that while I was doing all those things, I was having a lot of fun, too. I wasn't working and writing all the time. We have a saying among the old-timers who've been through these experiences such as he's related, that working in the revolutionary movement gets tough at times, but it never gets boring. Something's always happening or is about to happen. That keeps you from getting bored.

Now the party that we represent here, it seems rather difficult to realize, had its origin 38 years ago next month, when I and Martin Abern and Max Shachtman, all members of the National Committee of the Communist Party, were expelled because we insisted upon supporting Trotsky and the Russian opposition in the international discussion. And it seems remarkable, in view of the death rate of organizations that we have noted over the years, that this party, which is 38 years old next month, still shows signs of youth, more of youth than of age. And that is, you may say, the hallmark of a living movement, its capacity to attract the young. Many attempts at creating different kinds of radical organizations have foundered and withered away over that problem. The old-timers stuck around but new blood didn't come in, and the organizations one by one either died or just withered away on the vine, which is probably a worse fate than death.

Now, in my opinion, there are certain reasons for the survival of our movement and for the indications of a new surge of vitality in it. And I'll enumerate some of the more important reasons which, in my opinion, account for this. First of all, and above all, we recognized 38 years ago that in the modern world it is impossible to organize a revolutionary party in one country. All the problems of the different nations of the world are so intertwined today that they cannot be solved with a national policy alone. I guess the latest poor boob to experience the truth of that dictum is Lyndon B. Johnson. He's trying to solve the problems of American foreign policy with Texas-style arm-twisting politics, and it does not work.

We decided that we would be internationalists first, last, and all the time, and that we would not try to build a purely American party with American ideas, because American ideas are very scarce in the realm of creative politics. By becoming part of an international movement, and thereby participating in international collaboration and getting the benefit of the ideas and experiences of others in other countries, as well as contributing our ideas to them, we would have a better chance to create a viable revolutionary movement in this country. I think that holds good today more than ever. A party that is not internationalist is out of date, very sadly, and is doomed, utterly. I don't know whether our younger comrades have fully assimilated that basic fundamental first idea or not. I have the impression at times that they take it for granted rather perfunctorily, rather than in its essence, that internationalism means above all international collaboration. The affairs, the difficulties, the disputes of every party in the Fourth International must be our concern, as our problems must be their concern. And it's not only our right, but our duty to participate in all the discussions that arise throughout the International, as it is their right and their duty to take part in our discussions and disputes.

A second reason that I would give for the durability of this party of ours is the fact that we did not pretend to have a new revelation. We were not these men from nowhere whom you see running around the campuses and other places today saying we've got to start from scratch. Everything that happened in the past is out the window. On the contrary, we solidly based ourselves on the continuity of the revolutionary movement. And in being expelled from the Communist Party, we didn't become anti-communist. On the contrary, we said we are the true representatives of the best traditions of the Communist Party. And if you read current literature, you see that we are the only ones who defend the first ten years of American communism. The official leaders of the Communist Party don't want to talk about it at all. And yet those were ten rich and fruitful years which we had behind us when we started the Trotskyist movement in this country. And it didn't end with 10 years of the Communist Party. Before that, some of us had about 10 years of experience in the IWW and the Socialist Party and various class struggle activities around the country. And we said we continue that, that we are the heirs of the IWW and the Socialist Party, all that's good and valid and revolutionary in it, and we honor the Knights of Labor and the Haymarket martyrs. We're not Johnny-come-latelys at all. We are continuators, and we even go back further than that. We go back to the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and Marx and Engels, the authors of that document, and their other writings, and the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Lenin and Trotsky, and the struggle of the Left Opposition in the Russian Soviet Party and in the Comintern.

So we said we are the continuators, and we really were. We were dead in earnest about it. And we were very active from the very beginning. I think this is one of the marks of a group, however small, and its confidence in itself. We engaged in polemics against all other pretenders to leadership of the American working class. First of all, the Stalinists and the reformist social democrats and the labor skates and anybody else who had some quack medicine to cure the troubles of the people. Polemics is the mark of a revolutionary party. A party that's too nice to engage in what they call bickering and criticizing is too damn nice to live very long in the whirlpool of politics. Why, politics is even worse than baseball. In that respect, you know, Leo Durocher, who had a bad reputation, who carried the New York Giants to a championship of the National League and then to the world championship over the Cleveland Indians with the help of Willie Mays, he explained that in the title of an article he wrote. He said, nice guys finish last. And that's true in politics as well as in baseball. If we disagree with other people, we've got to say so. And we've got to make it clear why we disagree, so that inquiring young people looking for an organization to represent their aspirations and their ideals will know the difference between one and the other. Nothing is worse than muddling up differences when they concern fundamental questions.

Now another reason for the survival of our movement through the early hard period was our orientation. Being Marxist, our orientation was always toward the working class and the working class organizations. It never entered our heads in those days to think that you could overthrow capitalism over the head of the working class. Marxism had taught us that the great service that capitalism has rendered to humanity has been to increase the productivity of the society and at the same time create a working class which would have the interest and also the power to overthrow it. In creating this great million-headed wage working class, Marx said, capitalism has created its own grave diggers. And we saw it as the task of the revolutionists to orient their activity and their agitation and their propaganda to the working class of this country.

Another reason, I would say, for our exceptional durability was that we did not merely study the books and learn the formulas. Many people have done that, and that's all they've done, and they might as well have stayed home. Trotsky remarked more than once in the early days about some people who play with ideas in our international movement. He said they have understood all the formulas and they can repeat them by rote, but they haven't got them in their flesh and blood, so it doesn't count. When you get the formulas of Marxism in your flesh and blood, that means you have an irresistible impulse and drive to put the theory into action, as Marx and Engels themselves described it. As Engels said to the sectarian socialists in the United States in the 19th century, our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action. And one who studies the theory of Marxism and doesn't do anything to try to put it into action among the working class might as well have stayed in bed. We were not that type. We came out of the experience of the past and we were activists as well as students.

And I might add one more reason, which I mentioned today in conversation with some young comrades on the committee, that one factor working in our favor was our modesty. And they thought at first I was joking, but I wasn't. Modesty is the condition for learning. If you know it all to start with, you can't learn anymore. And we were brought to the painful realization in 1928 that there were a lot of things we didn't know after all of our experience and study, that new problems and new complications which had arisen in the Soviet Union and in the international movement required that we go to school again. And to go to school to the best teachers, and they were nobody else but the leaders of the Russian Revolution. After 20 years of experience in the American movement, we put ourselves to school, as I said, and tried to learn from the great leaders who had made the only successful revolution in the history of the working class. And in trying to learn, we had to learn also how to think and to take time to think. We believed in a party of disciplined action, but disciplined activity alone does not characterize only the revolutionists. Other bodies such as the fascists have that quality. The Stalinists have disciplined action. Disciplined action directed by clear thinking distinguishes the revolutionary Marxist party. And I might say thinking is a form of action, although it isn't always recognized as such.

And discussion is a form of action. And in the early days of our movement, we had enough discussion, I'll tell you. We had enough discussion, not all of it pleasant to hear, but out of which came some clarification. And if my hearing is not quite as sharp and acute as it ought to be, it's because my ears have been pounded too much in discussion. And we had to learn to be patient and listen and out of the discussion formulate our policy and our program. Now those were the qualities of our movement in the first hard years of our almost total isolation that enabled us to survive, because we had confidence in the American working class, and we oriented toward it. And when the American working class began to move in the mid-30s, we had formulated our program of action and we were in the midst of it and we began to grow, some years rather rapidly.

The New Left and the working class

Now you have a new phenomenon in the American radical movement, which I hear is called the New Left. And this is a broad title given to an assemblage of people who state they don't like the situation the way it is and that something ought to be done about it, but we mustn't take anything from the experiences of the past. None of the old left or any of its ideas or traditions is any good. What's the future going to be? Well, that's not so clear either. Well, let's think about that. What do you do now? Well, I don't know. Something ought to be done. That's about a fair description of this amorphous New Left, which is written about so much and with which we have to contend, because we know where we came from. We intend to maintain our continuity. We know that we are part of a world and that we have to belong to an international movement and get the benefits of association and discussion with co-thinkers throughout the world. We have a definite orientation, whereas they say the working class is dead. They sound like these new atheists who are suddenly announcing that God is dead, as if that just happened yesterday.

The working class was crossed off by the wiseacres in the 20s. Now that was before two or three of you were born, perhaps. But you probably heard about it from your grandparents. There was a long boom in the 1920s. And the workers not only didn't gain any victories, they lost ground. The trade unions actually declined in number. Strikes started in the early part, say in 1923, a great railroad strike was broken by strikebreakers and the unions broken up. And in all the basic industries where you see now great flourishing industrial unions, the auto workers, aircraft, steel, rubber, electrical, transportation, maritime, the unions did not exist. It's a scattering here and there. You had company unions in all these big basic industries run by bosses' stooges, to which the workers were entitled to belong for as long as they did what the stooges told them to do. And it took a semi-revolutionary uprising in the mid-30s to break that up and install real unions.

And in the 20s, in this booming prosperity, when the workers were either defeated or apathetic, and unionism was on the decline, and the revolutionary appeal seemed to bring no echo anywhere, there were a lot of wiseacres who crossed off the American working class and said, that's Marx's fundamental mistake. He thinks the working class can make a revolution and emancipate itself. And he's dead wrong. Just look at them. They didn't say who would make the revolution if the workers didn't do it. Just like the New Leftists today. Don't give us any precise description of what power will transform society and make it a decent place to live. But they were proved to be wrong, as they will be proved to be wrong again.

We will maintain our orientation toward the working class and to its organized section in particular. And I hope that our party and our youth movement will not only continue but intensify and develop its capacity for polemics against all pretenders to leadership of the coming radicalization of the American workers. And above all it will continue to learn and to grow. That's the condition for survival as a revolutionary party. I don't merely get impatient with Johnny-come-latelys who just arrived from nowhere and announced that they know it all. I get impatient even with old-timers who think they have nothing more to learn. The world is changing. New problems arise. New complexities, new complications confront the revolutionary movement at every step. And the condition for effective political leadership is that the leaders themselves continue to learn and to grow. That means not to lose their modesty altogether.

What can one person do?

Now I'd like to add one more point before turning over the floor to the hecklers from one thing or another. The question is raised very often, what can one person do? The urgency of the situation in the world is pretty widely recognized outside of our ranks. The urgency of the whole social problem has been magnified a million times, you may say, by the development of nuclear weapons and by the capacity of these inventions and discoveries to destroy all life on earth, not merely a single city like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but all life on earth, and it is in the hands of reckless and irresponsible people, and it's got to be taken away from them, and it cannot be done otherwise except by revolution.

Now what can one single person do in this terribly urgent situation? Well, I heard a program on television a short while ago, an interview with Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, former pacifist, fighter against nuclear war, very prominent world figure, not one of us but an absolutely dedicated opponent of nuclear war and a prophet of the calamity that it might bring. He was asked what are the chances in his opinion, what are the chances... All right, all right, sport, just settle down. What are the chances of preventing a nuclear war that might destroy all life on Earth? Well, you know, I didn't complain, because I've learned one of the first rules of demagogic politics. Always be a lover of dogs. At least pretend to be. He said the odds are against us. He was asked how would he rate the odds of being able to prevent a nuclear war which might destroy us all. He said the odds are about 4 to 6 against us in his opinion. And the man said, well, what can you do about it? He says, I don't know anything to do except keep on fighting to try to change the odds.

Now suppose as a result of all the protests and enlightened activity of ourselves and other people, we change the odds to 50-50. And you have a scale, evenly balanced, where just a feather can tip it one way or another. And if a situation such as that exists, which in my opinion is just about the state of affairs in the world today, one person's activity in the revolutionary movement might be the feather that tips the scale in favor of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the disarming of the nuclear war makers, and the preparation of the human race to really begin the revolution, to really begin civilization. Now that's worth thinking about, that every single act you do, every day's work you put in for the movement, every time you write an article or sell a newspaper or attend a meeting, that might be the extra feather on the scale. And that would inspire us to continue trying, adding our weight to the struggle with confidence, as all Marxists always have had, that they will be historically victorious. Thank you.

Questions and discussion

Chair: We're going to ask the people asking questions to come up to the microphone, because we've learned that the microphone will not pick you up unless you're right in front of me. So now we'll open it up for discussion. Comments, questions, heckling? No comments?

Question: I have a question. One of the questions that I saw in terms of the first 10 years of American communism was the significance of character and, if you want, character defects in politics. And Trotsky goes into this in, for example, Lessons of October. He cites two political character types. That is, one, the super-Bolshevik, who is extremely optimistic on all occasions. And then when he comes to the time of the insurrection, in meeting the problems of the insurrection, he becomes very conservative, because all of a sudden all of these problems that he missed, as Trotsky says, all the time he had seen that the ocean is only knee deep. And now he finds that the ocean is several miles deep and he's afraid of drowning. And then on the other hand, a type that is very conservative, and sees all of these problems, and when it gets to the time of the insurrection, it also becomes very conservative. This is at least one of the main pamphlets in which Trotsky deals with the question of character.

But in the first 10 years, we see these, you know, Ruthenberg, Foster, Lovestone, various kinds of character types. And even later yet, Shachtman and Abern and other comrades who have left us, for that matter, have their own peculiar defects in terms of character. And I was wondering if you could go into this problem, particularly in relation to, in some ways, the question that we took up today of Marxism and psychoanalysis. It's not exactly relevant in terms that, you know, X person should go see a psychiatrist, but in the sense that I have always felt that character is a very important aspect of politics, and it's something that a politician has to weigh in as calculations. I was wondering if you could go into that problem.

Cannon: I'll make a note. I'd rather take a bunch of them together.

Chair: Further discussion?

Question: Some people in the New Left do try to provide an answer to the question of what force, what group of people or what social force would be the agent of social change. I remember taking an SDS course in which we had to read Herbert Marcuse, who decided that this society, who's looking only at America, which is probably his first mistake, he decided that this society had become so technological that it was impossible for the mass of people even to conceive of the problem, let alone begin to answer it, and that therefore the people who were going to begin the social change and continue it were the social outcasts, you know, the random intellectuals, Negroes. And he listed a whole bunch of types who would be called the dispossessed. And these, he said, would be the force for social change. And these were people, unemployed, for example, people who have no relationship, in the Marxist sense, to the means of production. They're not at the point of production. And I wonder if you'd comment on that particular theory.

Cannon: I'll make a note.

Chair: Comments? If they, come on up. Is there anyone else who wants to speak? Please move up this way so we don't have to waste time waiting for people to come up. Is there anyone else? Why don't you move up to the front of the room, Jim, to save some time that way.

Question: In doing some research on the foundations of our movement in Canada, I've come to the conclusion, as other comrades have done as well, that there really wasn't a Trotskyist organization in Canada until around 1935. This is seven years after Morris Spector, along with Comrade Cannon, being to Russia, got the document from the conference and had agreed to become sort of proponents of Trotskyism. We haven't really had a very thorough discussion on why there wasn't a movement in Canada before then. But in discussing with one of the founders of the Canadian Communist Party, who much later became a Trotskyist, this is Malcolm Bruce, he pointed out one interesting fact, and that was that there were no factions at all in the Canadian Communist Party, and that even Morris Spector and Jack McDonald, who did become Trotskyists, never had any faction in the Communist Party of Canada. And the Communist Party of Canada looked on the American Communist Party as being some kind of circus because of the factions that existed there. I would wonder if Comrade Cannon has any observations on that situation or any opinions why the development of the two parties was different.

Chair: Is there anyone else who would like to speak?

Question: The question of Stalinism, of course, is still raging around us. But an immensely significant problem is that most of those of us who are young, which is most of those of us, have not, with the exception of the National Coordinating Committee convention last Thanksgiving in Washington, D.C., really had direct conflict and royal battle with the Stalinists. And of course the problem that this sets up for us is that partially we're not prepared. We intellectually can understand and hate the Stalinists, but we don't yet know how to hate them from our guts, which is an absolute must if we are to survive and succeed, which we will. However, I would like Comrade Cannon to comment on this whole problem, just, you know, sketch the whole problem that relates to the youth and not having dealt with these problems. Another question, of course, is the whole period of when the workers are on the move. We also haven't felt that, and it is a definitely extremely serious problem for those young people here.

Question: The question that's on my mind is, during the first world war our movement, as represented by the Russian Bolshevik Party, raised the slogan of revolutionary defeatism. And I was wondering, in our present struggles against an even more reactionary war, we do not raise precisely this slogan, and a couple of weirdos have criticized us on this ground. But I was wondering whether Comrade Cannon could outline why he feels that the slogans that we're raising in the antiwar movement are the most progressive and the most transitional slogans that can be raised at this point.

Cannon's replies

Cannon: Well, I thank you very much, comrade, because I got off easy. Now, this question raised by the first comrade about the character of individuals, and what do you do to deal with it. In my experience in the world, you know more about the character of people after you have known them a while than you do to start with. There are certain people who claim that they can judge human character by looking at people. There may be people with certain insights. I've known such people. But that's a very, very frail lead to lean on. People themselves don't know what they're capable of under the stress of circumstances. Not only have there been examples such as Louis [?] gave us, of people who were revolutionary and looked good as gold up to the moment of the decisive action and then crumbled. There are all kinds of examples of people who in ordinary everyday life appear to lack any initiative or any great interest or anything else. If you've been taking part in strike actions, you know. All of a sudden somebody that appeared to know nothing or do nothing turns out to be a very inventive and courageous strike leader under the stress of circumstances. And I don't know any prescription to judge all those things beforehand, one way or the other.

What I do know from my own observation and experience is that when people get into motion, and that takes up the question raised by the comrade about workers on the march, when workers who individually don't stand out or don't show much inspiration or enthusiasm or courage get together in a mass action, they become completely transformed. That's known to all students of revolution, that there's a fundamental difference between 10,000 workers suddenly propelled into strike action and mass picketing and those same workers going home meekly every day from work. The action itself generates enthusiasm. It also generates a feeling of strength, not the weakness of the individual, but the strength of 10,000. And also brings out of people resources of character they themselves perhaps didn't know they had. Every strike, every important big strike, especially if it's one against determined opposition, brings new leaders to the fore who were never suspected before. You comrades who have taken part in strike actions know that. It's just amazing the inventiveness and the resourcefulness that ordinary workers can show when they get in action in the mass. We saw that particularly in Minneapolis. All the inventiveness and all the devices and resources and sacrifice and courage that those workers showed was unsuspected by their bosses when they were quietly slaving away until they got mad enough to go on strike. And then they suddenly discovered they not only had courage multiplied by their numbers, but they also had resources and ingenuity and inventiveness and so on.

Now this Marcuse business about the revolution being made by the outcasts and the dispossessed, including the unemployed and so on. Well now, first of all, I'd make a distinction between the outcasts, or what you might call the lumpenproletariat, and the unemployed. The unemployed worker is still a worker and is still a force to reckon with, not only as an unemployed worker, but as a potentially employed worker. Why, in the 1930s the Communist Party, despite all the signs of degeneration that had begun in the party and had not been completed, was still oriented toward the working class. And the only place they could find workers in motion in the early 30s was in the ranks of the unemployed. The workers who had a job were not budging. They were not sticking their necks out. They were accepting wage cut after wage cut without protest for fear they'd lose their job altogether and be on the bread line. The Communist Party and other radical organizations organized councils of the unemployed. That's the way the Musteites first called themselves to our attention, by their unemployed leagues. And you'll read in Art Preis's book, that wonderful book, which I'm sorry isn't reviewed more, that wonderful book about the rise of the CIO, Labor's Giant Step, he tells about the first strike in Toledo, which became a famous center of labor militancy. It was a strike of the unemployed led by Art Preis and two other Musteite leaders, Sam Pollock [?] and Ted Selander [?], a strike of the unemployed demanding cash payment for relief instead of food. They were just giving them food packages, and they conducted a strike to demand cash relief. Such a small demand as that galvanized into action some thousands of workers.

And these very same workers there, the Communist Party organized in other places, formed these militant bodies for unemployed demonstrations of various kinds. Then later, when under Roosevelt's pump-priming operation some of the factories began to reopen, these people who had been educated and trained in speaking and making motions and organizing in one thing and another in the unemployed councils were sent into the factories and became the organizing nucleus of radical influence there. It's remarkable what one man can do among a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand inexperienced workers if he's already had some experience in meetings. And all of you know that who've had this experience, able to speak and to formulate motions and one thing and another. The Communist Party became a tremendous power in the labor movement, especially of the CIO, largely as a result of cadres they recruited in the unemployment movement and in the college campuses. Kids who had never seen a factory were converted to communism and they organized strikes on the campus and antiwar demonstrations of various kinds and were drawn into the Young Communist League and into the party, and then sent into the factories, equipped with a certain knowledge and technical skills they'd acquired in these movements, and they became leaders of many unions. Many leaders of the powerful Stalinist-controlled unions in the 30s and 40s originated either on the campus or in the unemployed ranks.

So I wouldn't make that rigid distinction between the unemployed and the employed workers. The working class is going to make the revolution, and it is not going to be made by any other force, because there is no force capable of doing it except the workers. Marxism postulated that the socialist revolution is a revolution of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority. That's the most democratic revolution imaginable. All previous revolutions have been revolutions of minorities and in the interests of minorities, but the socialist revolution will be different. And if you cross off the working class, as anyone tries to do, which includes the employed workers, don't forget, you're crossing off the revolution and you're giving up the fight before it starts. And I don't think there's any inspiration or intelligence in that.

Now, the Canadian comrade took up the question of the lack of factions in the Canadian party and the numerous factions in the American party, and that might have accounted for the difference in the American Trotskyist movement getting a better start than it did in Canada. Well, I wouldn't want to be an advocate of factionalism unless somebody picks on me and runs the party the wrong way and doesn't want to give me a chance to protest about it. The general experience of the international movement has shown that excesses of factionalism can be very dangerous and destructive to a party. I think in my book, The First Ten Years of American Communism, I put all the necessary emphasis on the negative side of the factional struggles, which became unprincipled and all the rest of it. But on the other hand, a party that can live year after year without any factional disturbances, it may not be a sign of health, it may be a sign that they're asleep, that it's not a real live party. Because in a live party, in the most democratic party as ours is and always has been, I'm proud to repeat an expression I used at the height of one of the big faction fights we had, when the minority faction was complaining about our regime. All factions do that, of course. I said, our regime is the most honest, most fair, and most democratic in the history of the human race. And I really believe that's so.

Not the least of our reasons for remaining alive and growing a little, and being in a position to capitalize on new opportunities, was the flexible democracy of our party, that we never tried to settle differences of opinion by suppression. Free discussion. Not every day in the week, but at stated regular times, carefully regulated with full guarantees for the minority. That's a necessary condition for the health and strength of an organization such as ours. Now, there's no guarantee that factionalism won't get out of hand. I've always found that the other faction is always very unreasonable. And you have differences of that sort, differences of appraisal, but that's a sign of life. But I don't know where you strike a balance in between. You just go ahead and experiment and do the best you can. And bear in mind that one of the reasons we haven't got socialism now on this planet is that we haven't got big enough parties directing the revolutionary struggle in the different countries. And the reason we haven't got bigger and stronger parties than we have is that you can't build parties without people. And people are the difficult ingredient. The ideas can be formulated, the rules and regulations can be laid down in the bylaws, the whole program can be elucidated and the whole pathway illuminated, and then if you haven't got people to carry it out, where are you? So my suggestion for the cure of that thing is go out looking for people and keep looking for people. Some of them will turn out to be good. If you look hard enough and get enough people who are good enough, then you'll have a party able to lead a revolution, and then we'll be on our road to socialism and the preservation of the human race. Thank you.

Chair: And with that we'll conclude tonight's program and ask if there are any announcements to be made.

Cannon: He asked me if I wanted any more questions and discussion and I said no, I want to quit while I'm ahead. That's it. Thank you.