Sunday, March 6, 2011

Fitch

I just learned that Bob Fitch has died. He broke his leg last month, and then a few days ago a blood clot went to his brain, causing a stroke that left him in a coma; he also suffered several heart attacks. He died yesterday.

I hadn't seen Bob in several years, maybe not since 2005 or 2006. But there was a time when I used to see him regularly, meeting at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square or his studio apartment around the corner on 17th St. There was a Japanese screen dividing his bed from the rest of the tiny space, and a huge portrait of Stalin on the wall. We'd talk about whatever he was working on at the moment -- the Nietzschean roots of the postmodern Left, his critique of Immanuel Wallerstein (two long, brilliant essays that as far as I know were never published), the status of the dollar, the politics of land use, the structural reasons for union corruption (the argument that eventually became Solidarity for Sale), the need for a new political party. "Let's start a party, Josh," he said to me on a couple occasions in that warm and yet somehow wheedling voice I can hear now so clearly in my head, that teasing tone he used in argument that always seemed to suggest that of course you already agreed with him and he was just humoring your perverse insistence on pretending that you didn't. "Well, don't you agree that..." he'd begin, socratically, when he realized you weren't with him. That makes him sound dogmatic, which isn't true at all; it's just, I think, that he was so caught up in his ideas that he genuinely couldn't understand it if you didn't share his enthusiasm. Once I walked with him as he took his laundry to the laundromat down the street; it seemed a little sad, this original, brilliant, genuinely important writer, probably nearing 60 then, still living such a penurious bachelor lifestyle. Like something out of Dostoevsky.

Fitch knew something about founding parties. In Berkeley in the '60s (Berkeley in the 60s!) he'd been friends with Bob Avakian, and helped him start the Revolutionary Union, which later became the Revolutionary Communist Party. Once, he recalled, the two of them were driving around Oakland and saw some police. "Let's shoot these cops," Avakian says. "They'll think the blacks did it, and when they crack down it will start a riot. We could make the revolution happen, we'd be like Lenin and Trotsky." "No," Fitch said," we're not Lenin and Trotsky. We're just Bob and Bob." No cops were shot; I'm not sure how long after that Fitch left the RU/RCP. He was a bit older than most of those Berkeley radicals, and had gotten there a bit differently; he'd been in military intelligence in the 1950s or early '60s, seconded, I only just learned, from the 82nd Airborne.

Not that that's why we'd admired him. Around the Grey City Journal at the University of Chicago, we mostly agreed that two of the most important areas to be thinking about were labor, and cities. We all read Jane Jacobs Death and Life and Mike Davis' City of Quartz, but The Assassination of New York was the book that made the deepest impression. It didn't just have an inspiring or dystopian vision of the city, it told a story, it had an explanation, a political theory for why New York had evolved the way it had.

Fitch was one of that small group of unaffiliated intellectuals who exist only in New York. (Or maybe I should write existed, since there doesn't seem to be a next generation.) Fitch, Doug Henwood, Barbara Garson, Dan Lazare, Steve Fraser. None of them academics (Fitch had a PhD and adjuncted, mostly at CUNY I think; I don't know if he ever had a regular academic job), all of them in the same broad region of the non-sectarian Marxist (or Marx-influenced) left. New York has a unique set of institutions that make that kind of milieu possible -- the Brecht Forum, the Socialist Scholars Conference (now the Left Forum); a handful of progressive, even radical, unions (Fitch worked for a while for CWA Local 1180; Arthur Cheliotes was impressed enough by The Assassination of New York to hire him to come up with an alternative economic development strategy for the city); and magazines like The Nation, Dissent and The Village Voice. Bob wrote a bunch of articles for the Voice, back when the Voice printed real political journalism and paid real money for it; Chris Lehmann also printed some of his op-eds when he was editing the opinion pages at Newsday.

He didn't write that much, considering. An early book on Ghana; Assassination; and Solidarity for Sale. (I don't know what he was working on when he died.) There was also the long series of articles he wrote with Mary Oppenheimer for Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review, still later Radical Society) on "Who Rules the Corporations". That should have been a book; it certainly had enough influence. David Kotz, well-known to most readers of this blog, was part of the radical political milieu in Berkeley at that point, making his living typing manuscripts. (A different world!) "Who Rules the Corporations" was one of the things he retyped; it inspired him to go to graduate school in economics, and his own dissertation, published as Bank Control of Large Corporations (a very good book) was essentially the working out of Fitch and Oppenheimer's argument.

If there's a theme that ran through his work, it's political agency -- an attention to the particular choices made by those with power. You could call it conspiracy theory, but in a positive sense, since after all there are real conspiracies, in the sense of decisions taken behind closed doors. There was a certain continuity from the question of how business was ruled by big banks, to how New York was ruled by the Rockefellers and their ilk, to how labor was ruled by ... well, here's where he lost me. "There are three great monopolies," he used to say. "The monopoly of capital, the monopoly of land, and the monopoly of labor." He'd written about the first in "Who Rules the Corporations," the second in Assassination, the third in Solidarity for Sale. Me, I could never accept the parallel. "Monopoly of labor" applies maybe to a certain kind of job-control craft labor, but where does that exist now? in a few big-city segments of the building trades, and in Hollywood. And it's under siege in both. This disagreement probably contributed to my not seeing him these past five years. I was working for the Working Families Party; I believed that the union movement, for all its flaws, was the only substantial American institution not ruled by money. He thought it was hopelessly corrupt, and needed to be replaced, refounded from scratch. "You could just as easily clean up a garbage pile by spraying it with attar of roses," he like to quote Debs, "as reform the AFL." (But didn't Debs spent years trying to arrange a merger of his own American Railway Union with the AFL-affiliated railroad brotherhoods?)

Conspiracies, that was in a sense what his work was about. He sort of acknowledges this point in the preface to Assassination. "A focus on the [Rockefeller] family may annoy academic Marxists," he wrote, "for whom the capitalist is only the personification of abstract capital and who believe, austerely, that any discussion of individuals in economic analysis represents a fatal concession to populism and empiricism. But New York is not capitalism in general..." His journalism on labor corruption in New York, however much he may have (in my opinion) overgeneralized it into a critique of unions in general, was incredibly valuable. "Orgies," I remember him excitedly whispering to me at one point, "orgies in the penthouse!" This was the top floor office of "Greedy" Gus Bevona, then-president of SEIU 32BJ, the giant NYC building-services local, whose corruption Fitch was one of the first people to expose. Soon enough Bevona was out and 32BJ became one of the best-led locals in the city; that same penthouse became the public meeting space for all kinds of progressive groups. I've been there on various occasions, looking out over lower Manhattan; no little credit to Bob.

Maybe he was too smart for his own good. He always had some project; there was always some question which he, finally, had found the no-one-before-recognized answer to. "You realize how conventional that is," he'd say to you, after you laid out what you thought was some original argument. Everyone read The Assassination of New York. Maybe it never established itself academically. But among radicals it was a touchstone.

All of us have an angel on our shoulder; all of us, doing practical politics on the left, have an angel asking if we aren't too ready to make compromises, if we aren't too quick to sacrifice principle for getting something done. Probably for almost all of us that angel has a name. For me it's Fitch. I learned as much sitting in that apartment as I ever did in a classroom. Maybe not concrete material -- altho there was enough of that -- as much as a sensibility. What it means to be an intellectual on the left. And what, more specifically, we need to demand from the labor movement. I hope I'll never commit myself to any organization without asking at some point, what would Fitch think?

Bob Fitch was a communist. He didn't, I believe, believe in any organized religion. But here is the moment when we have to acknowledge that something of the person does outlast the person. "From the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous, and benevolent, and clean, is so much pure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe, and throughout the whole scope of it forever." What would Fitch have thought? I'm sorry I didn't ask him.


UPDATE: It's a real honor to have Jonathan Fitch and others use this space to share their memories of Bob. If you're reading this, please do read the comments as well.

25 comments:

  1. This is really moving and terrific. Bob was working on an amazing project about the collusion between corporate-funded foundations and "community organizations" (and organizers like Barak Obama) in the 1980s and 1990s to rebuild American cities and destroy public housing. That does not, even remotely, sum it up, but he did a great presentation for our Urban Studies group at LaGuardia Community College last year (where he had been adjuncting for quite a while). He was tremendous, and it was really fabulous to have him there. I didn't know him well, but was honored to be among his colleagues. Thanks for your posting.

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  2. Hi Karen. Thanks for the comment. Housing seems like a natural thing for Bob to have been working on; if I learn any more I'll post about it here.

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  3. Dear JW Mason,

    I'm sorry to get to know you this way, but you've written a lovely tribute to a great writer and a dear if difficult friend. When Bob wrote for the Village Voice I was his editor--I think I may have introduced him to Doug Henwood. Bob in turn was introduced to me by Marty Gottlieb, the paper's then editor in chief, who told me if I hadn't read Bob's essay Planning New York, in the invaluable (but long out of print) Alcaly and Mermelstein book on the fiscal crisis) I would never begin to understand how New York really worked. (This was probably in response to my making some wise-ass remark about Robert Moses based on the standard reporter's reading of Bob Caro).

    Anyway, I read the essay, and in an experience familiar to many of Bob's readers, the scales fell from my eyes. I thought 'Who is this guy? And why haven't I heard about him before?' We were putting together a response to Bobby Wagner Jr.'s "New York 2000" plan (this was in 1986 or 87, so 2000 was a long way in the future!) and Marty and I got Bob to agree to write an overview which completely took the thing to pieces. After that I wanted him in the paper as often as possible. We also became friends, and I was astonished that such an erudite and brilliant man lived such a luftmensch lifestyle. We also sound found mutual connections from his semi-distant past at Ramparts, where he'd known my friend Andy Kopkind.
    When I first met Bob he was working as an organizer for Local 802 of the Musician's Union--a historically corrupt union fallen into the hands of reformers. The pieces he did for the Voice--and later for the Nation--eventually led to The Assassination of New York, a book which predictably enough got savaged by the establishment (when they couldn't kill it by pretending it didn't exist).
    Bob's energy for tackling and analysing new power structures was boundless, and though your description of booth the slightly wheedling tone and the slightly patronizing way he assumed that if you only knew as much as he knew you'd have to agree with him were very evocative, I also will always remember the incredible warmth of his voice on the phone regardless of the months or even years between conversations.
    If there is any justice in the afterlife Bob will be sitting with his comrades among the great inspirers and fighters for human dignity--small c communists to a man or woman. And if not, then whoever runs things up (or down) there had better look out, because Bob will be on the case, organizing and writing and making a stink.

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  4. A friend for many years, Fitch and I came out of the same political ferment that rocked the Bay Area. We stayed in touch for years, and I was delighted to offer him work when I became chair of the Political Science Department at LIU's Brooklyn Campus. He loved teaching the introductory courses -- he constantly talked about how "rich" he found teaching working-class kids about politics. And they reciprocated -- over the many years he with us, the students were uniformly impressed by his kindness and erudition and, more to the point perhaps, they became interested in what he had to say. He was a good man, a principled man, a courageous man, a deeply intelligent and curious man, and he left far too soon. He leaves an important political legacy and a model of integrity for all of us.

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  5. I edited Solidarity for Sale, a taxing process that took four or five years. But what an experience-- everything you would expect: Riveting perceptions that stood conventional wisdom on its head. Startling historical excavations. Linkages that were only obvious once Bob pointed them out. And digressions, wheels-within-wheels, lurches of thought and counter-ideology that left me holding onto my hat. He was a brilliant hedgehog with ADD and I wish I could chat with him again.

    Josh, thanks for the acute and vivid remambrance, which don Guttenplan pointed out to me. Through it I heard Bob's voice again.

    Do you know whether there was a service? Will there be one? Did Bob happen to leave thoughts about where to make a contribution in his name if the unexpected occurred?

    He was a stunning special presence and a mensch.

    My best wishes,

    Marty Gottlieb

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  6. Josh,

    I was stunned when I heard the news from Doug Henwood. Bob and I were going to get together at his place next week, and his death staggers me. I just want to say how much I appreciate your comments. You got him right. New Politics will shortly run a tribute to him, but not by me. At least not yet. I can't begin to put together just how much Bob meant to me, personally, intellectually and politically. You did, and I'm grateful.

    Mike Hirsch

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  7. I had a chance to meet with Professor Fitch last week in a business capacity. It was not long enough. His apartment was filled w/ leftist literature but it didn't phase me. In the hour that I spent with him he taught me something every chance he had to speak freely. Thank you Mr. Fitch.

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  8. I don't remember when I met Bob Fitch, but it may have been at a rally supporting Chinese Staff and Workers Association - a group he admired. I do remember the apartment and the pitch to start a new political party (just as you describe it). I was not close to Bob but met him from time to time through my work at CUNY and at the Association for Union Democracy, an organization whose work he respected but whose premise he rejected. He was a kind of gadfly to the gadflies, challenging assumptions and pushing for grander visions.

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  9. Bob was my older brother.

    We spoke often, usually about his work as you might imagine (Bob: "Well, enough about me. Let's talk about my work."), but that was never a bother. His mind was so nimble; it was such fun to jump with him from tree to tree to tree. No one else has or is likely to be my partner in this sort of badinage, intense but joyous. I flatter myself to think that these conversations, and my point of view as both a sympathetic and skeptical layman, helped him to keep his arguments from becoming opaque arcana. I'm going to miss these talks terribly.

    Josh's reminiscences and the comments by all the rest of you have put to rest the only nagging worry I had about Bob. He hit this worry squarely when he said that he sometimes thought of Bob as someone out of Dostoevsky (by the way, he had just re-read "The Brothers Karamazov" and was knocked out). I used to worry that he was socially isolated, that he was a sort of Underground Man. Reading the evident love that so many of you had for him convinces me that I was, thank goodness, very wrong.

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  10. I am so sad to hear of Bob's death. Bob and I were in graduate school (SUNY-Binghamton) at the same time and I have fond memories of our many discussions on state theory and capitalist crises, and his energy and intellectual fervor in general. He will be missed.

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  11. Bob was my cousin.

    I remember asking him once where he got his politics, since dialectics are very much the exception in our family, not the rule.

    He said that when he worked for Military Intelligence, part of his job included reading the classified dispatches from Cuba. And our own intelligence showed that everything our government was saying about the Cuban Revolution was a lie.

    It's a measure of Bob's strength of character and fierce intellect that working inside an institution like Army Intelligence, during the height of the Red Scare, could turn him into a committed communist.

    Bob was a sweet, passionate opponent of injustice whose commitment was an inspiration. He will be missed.

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  12. Josh, this is the first I've heard of Bob Fitch's death. Thank you for writing that fine obituary. And thank you for including me among his cabal of free lance leftists of New York. But I never had anything like Bob's intellectual energy. Barbara Garson

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  13. Bob was my big brother. I am in no way the intellectual that either of my brothers are, particularly Bob, and I was always so grateful that he would allow me to blather on about the kids and the dogs and other happenings in my life that had so little to do with the research that meant so much to him. The tributes to Bob from all of you mean the world to me and my family and validate what I have been telling my mom all along. Bob did not live alone. He had a rich life, with true friends. So this is really what I have to say....

    Dear Bob,

    I'm sorry that we didn't talk much recently. Regrets are really the pits. But I can tell you that I promise to try my best to take care of Jo for you and make the rest of her life as loving as you would have made it for her.

    I will miss you and love you.

    Laurel

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  14. Berkeley, late August, 1964. Bob was just out of the army, where he'd been a Spec4 high-speed radio operator, monitoring Cuban radio traffic. He came to Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, poised to do a Ph.D. in history. He ran into Oberlin classmate Jerry Rubin talking about his trip to Cuba on the steps of Sproul Hall and knew he was in the right place at the right time.

    Bob was intense; he was funny; he was always full of ideas and opinions and projects. He reveled in research. He'd pour over microfiche and dusty African newspapers until his eyes were red. Writing was a slower process. He was meticulous. Every fact had to be correct, and every sentence had to be just right. Plain prose would not do!

    But Bob was not just a scholar. From Jo, his mother, he'd acquired an appreciation for good art. Hence the ironic portrait of Stalin, acquired with scarce dollars in Berkeley in the '60s, and kept for all these years. He loved theater and film and classical music and listening to John Handy on the saxophone at the old Albatross on San Pablo. He doted on kittens, Kautsky and Bernstein. (They'd been neutered.) He loved Kraft dinner and finding good cheap ethnic restaurants and getting together with Jerry and Yippie buddy Stew. He often had a sharp tongue, but his heart was kind. He was a lot of fun.

    As many have said, he will be missed. Thank you, Jane, for letting me know.

    Mary

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  15. Thank you so much, Jonathan, Laurel, Mary, and everyone else who's shared memories of Bob here.

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  16. I didn't know Bob. In fact, I never heard of him until I read on Groupwise that he passed away. After Joanne's email about the preventable circumstances under which he fell to his demise, I was (and continue to be) outraged. The city needs to be aware that negligence is negligence. Deciding which borough to de-ice is classism at its worst. This is precisely why Bloomberg needs to be held accountable for his failure of duty. Would his life have been more valued if he lived in Manhattan? I think not!Often I took alternate routes rather than risk slipping on the icy bridges that lace LaGuardia.
    I plan to host a web radio show about Bob, his accomplishments,and to address the issues that led to his death. In addition, I have contacted the school newspaper to write an article on Bob.Bob, I wish I had known you.
    Linda

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  17. Context for the above: I ( Joanne) am a professor at La Guardia Community College where Bob had been a valued colleague since 1993. I posted reflections about his tragic death on our college website and will append them below. As you all probably know, Bob also taught at NYU, LIU and John Jay, but it was his eagerness to teach at a community college that best reflected his profound belief in the empowering possibilities of the spoken and written word. He practiced what he preached. Here is my La Guardia post:

    Bob Fitch's death leaves us all numb--not only because of the kind of person he was, but also because of the horrific, avoidable circumstances that led to his demise. Bob's dedication to education reflected his love of the life of the mind. Characteristically, he worked on several projects simultaneously and eagerly shared (tested) his ideas with colleagues as well as students. They respected him because he respected them. His many refereed, widely acclaimed publications notwithstanding, Bob was not a garret scholar. Rather, he was a public intellectual with a deep commitment to social change. Bob was a muckraker--always on the cutting edge of contemporary issues, always original, always provocative, always controversial. But he was also always friendly, cooperative, constructive and collegial. His energy and enthusiasm were contagious.
    Perhaps those qualities spelled his doom. It all started about a month ago when Bob slipped on the ice and broke his leg trying to navigate the treacherous bridge from Court Square to the college. Somehow, he managed to get to class anyway, but soon had to be taken to a hospital where the leg was set. Within a few days, he returned to teaching in a wheelchair, but slipped and fell again on his way home. Although the doctors decided not to operate, a clot formed in his leg, traveled to his lungs and triggered two heart attacks, which left him comatose. The end came quickly.
    Bob was an activist and he would want us to think, even as we mourn. How can we best honor his memory? What inspiration can we derive from his life and what lessons can we learn from his death?

    Joanne Reitano, Social Science Department, LaGuardia Community College, March 9, 2011

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  18. I knew Bob and am curious about in what hospital he died.

    John Ernst
    jernst1@nyc.rr.com

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  19. Linda above is referring to a post (see below) that I made at La Guardia Community College (CUNY) where Bob was a valued adjunct since 1993. He also taught at NYU, LIU, and John Jay. However, his eagerness to teach in a community college best reflected his profound faith in the empowering potential of the written and spoken word. He practiced what he preached. Here is my La Guardia post:

    Bob Fitch's death leaves us all numb--not only because of the kind of person he was, but also because of the horrific, avoidable circumstances that led to his demise. Bob's dedication to education reflected his love of the life of the mind. Characteristically, he worked on several projects simultaneously and eagerly shared (tested) his ideas with colleagues as well as students. They respected him because he respected them. His many refereed, widely acclaimed publications notwithstanding, Bob was not a garret scholar. Rather, he was a public intellectual with a deep commitment to social change. Bob was a muckraker--always on the cutting edge of contemporary issues, always original, always provocative, always controversial. But he was also always friendly, cooperative, constructive and collegial. His energy and enthusiasm were contagious.
    Perhaps those qualities spelled his doom. It all started about a month ago when Bob slipped on the ice and broke his leg trying to navigate the treacherous bridge from Court Square to the college. Somehow, he managed to get to class anyway, but soon had to be taken to a hospital where the leg was set. Within a few days, he returned to teaching in a wheelchair, but slipped and fell again on his way home. Although the doctors decided not to operate, a clot formed in his leg, traveled to his lungs and triggered two heart attacks, which left him comatose. The end came quickly.
    Bob was an activist and he would want us to think, even as we mourn. How can we best honor his memory? What inspiration can we derive from his life and what lessons can we learn from his death?

    Joanne Reitano, Social Science Department, La Guardia Community College, March 9, 2011

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  20. I met Bob about 25 years ago.
    The last time we spoke was about a month ago, after his accident.
    I called to see if he wanted to go to a celebration of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at Cooper Union, which would've been a convenient impromptu opportunity for us to get together & enjoy a cultural evening. Bob & I spoke politics (or, rather, he spoke & I listened) but we also went to theater, dance, museums, etc. together over the years. His goal of making this a more just world included spreading not only the money around, but the opportunity to be passionate about "important" things like art. He valued it as much as politics.
    There are a few people, for all of us, who are considered the "important people" in our lives. Bob was one of mine.
    I was planning to visit him that weekend, but never got around to it.
    We spoke again when I cancelled, & I think he mentioned the clot.
    I don't remember (I know that it's serious, another friend was in the hospital for a leg clot), but I vaguely remember being concerned and, at the same time, not wanting him to worry.
    I met his mother Jo many years ago. She is a talented artist & Bob proudly showed me her work.
    My heart goes out to his family, and all of us.
    We will miss him.

    Beth Glick Loven

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  21. Bob once told me that Harry Magdoff was "the nicest guy on the left." Indeed. But Bob was the second-nicest guy.

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  22. I came across his name as a multiple presenter for this weekend's Left Forum & as the subject of a remembrance. Then I started searching the net,finding an excellent piece on unions he'd penned & Doug Henwood's
    paean & thus this. Someone had introduced us & I became a source for a book mentioned here & by Henwood. Found my name in the than yous.
    Didn't appreciate the cover. Felt there was more to the subject's malaise than two brothers. Anyway, shocked to learn of his death.

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  23. Sorry to hear about Bob. I'm a Carpenters Union shop steward/dissident/labor blogger, and one of the reasons that my words have ever see print is because I had a chance to work with Bob on a now defunct construction worker zine called "Hard Hat News".

    RIP, Bob!

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  24. I knew of Robert Fitch only from his books, articles and scandalously rare media appearances. Entirely based on these, he became one of the two or three main influences on the way that I look at politics and the world generally.

    The sentence which came to mind when I heard of his passing was Bob Dylan's on Johnny Cash: "he was your north star. You could guide your ship by him."

    That's what Mr. Fitch was for me and I'm sure more than a few others.

    My sincere condolences to his friend and family.

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  25. Bob wrote a fantastic investigative report for Ramparts magazine ages ago, on H. Ross Perot as a "welfare billionaire" who made his fortune by playing the government for a sucker and overcharging on all the processing of Medicare/Medicaid payments, in the mid-late 1960s, that his company did. When I was a young editor at The Nation, many years later, I got to know him a bit, and when I decided to start a little side-project called The Perot Periodical, Bob gave me our first cover article and it was a doozy, attacking Perot for making a quarter-billion dollars from his presidential campaign by turning deficit-cutting into a national passion, and driving up the value of government bonds (of which Perot owned at least $2 billion). Needless to say, this story also scored a direct hit on Perot.

    I was shocked and saddened to hear of Bob's passing. We hadn't been in touch in a number of years, not for any particular reason other than the fact that life is too busy. He was one of the smartest economic journalists I know and his commitment to social justice never wavered. And he made a difference with his time on this earth. My condolences to his family.

    Micah Sifry

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