photo: William Jordan 2004
LIPPMAN BACKBLOGUE
"I just now read your travel blog, and ohmygod I haven't enjoyed reading anything that entertaining and
life-affirming in a while. - Valori George, Corvallis, Oregon May 2008 Feburayr 2008 December 2007 August 2007 June 2007 Washington May 2007 Wisconsin: The Sami and Dave Story April 2007 March 2007 There is, in addition to the Arab alliance against Israel, a Sunni-Israeli alliance against Iran. The divisions between Sunni and Shia existed, but are agitated by external factors. Bush told Israel he'll deal with Iran while in office. The US is ramping up tensions - blaming Iran for things, arresting people to provoke response, playing chicken - hope Iran will respond so US can respond with defensive air strikes. Ahmedinijad, the W of Iran, may fall for it. Arresting the British navy people may be just what it takes. Ahmedinijad ignores the adivce of Rafsanjani and Khatami as Bush ignores Baker et al. Ahmedinijad got 15 million votes from people who were denied university seats because there aren't any. So they go into militias or the army or unemployment. The difference between the US and the Middle East is that there the US wants secular liberals in power. If an attack is presented as surgical strikes, the public will buy it. The Dems already yanked a clause against air strikes from their Iraq resolution. Obama says we should be focused on Iran. An attack will harden support in Iran for the regime. It is presently soft. There are factions and strife. Example: A recent textile strike was led by women, who marched out of the factory and chanted "ìWhere are the men? Here are the women!î Ashamed, the men joined the strike. ( http://www.merip.org/mero/mero032507.html ). Iran will strike back in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at US bases in Bahrain and Qatar. Brzezinski says it will lead to a 30-year war. Butner, NC Fayetteville, NC Here one finds the 82nd Airborne Division Museum, which explains the invasions of sovereign countries in recent generations as necessary to save American citizens – racking my brain, how many other countries overthrow governments to save five or ten of their nationals? – and of course to prevent the spread of Soviet client states, aka countries who don’t obey the United States. And here anti-war demonstrators have pioneered the present-day unity of peace and justice-minded soldiers and veterans with civilians. Key speakers include Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, and Gold Star Parents. "They call us traitors," says Iraq vet Matt Southworth (left, in picture), "but a traitor is the man who lies us intowar. A traitor is the man who doesn't give the proper equipment to the soldiers to fight the illegitimate battle." Watch/hear their speeches here and here. Look at pix here. Durham, North Carolina Also speaking was Imam Mohamad Bashar Arafat, from Damascus now of Baltimore. He does a lot of interfaith work. He said religion is like rain: it comes down pure, but mixes with the sewage and becomes poison. GASP. He said it, not me. December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 Chicago Rockford, IL Madison, WI August 2006 Chicago University administrations have tried to ban or expel the new radicals, but they persevere in direct action, linking up with diverse student groupings and campus unions. They have organized film series, joined immigrant demos, dropped banners, died in, countered recruiters, worked against campus contracts with Killer Coke, produced multiple zines, and supported struggles in Colombia, Sudan, and New Orleans. They form grouplets like the bike group "SUV" - Students for Unfueled Vehicles - and women's adjunct, Lunar Cycle. Young activists from all around recount their recent adventures, from blocking troop deployments at the port of Olympia to demos at the Israeli consulate in New York to anti-Walmart actions in Kansas City. Students have confronted John McCain, Jeb Bush, David Horowitz, Bill Clinton, and Ann Coulter. At the Counter-Coulter event, activists evaded a ban on spoken disruption with a group fake orgasm. Sixties night (Seniors for a Democratic Society?) features stories of personal involvement from Al Haber, Carl Davidson, Paul Buhle, Penelope Rosemont and more. Torch is passed. December
2005 San Quentin Klamath Falls November 2005 School of Assassins - Ft. Benning, Columbus, Georgia Aiken, South Carolina September 2005 Billings landed on the map twelve years ago when thugs
overturned headstones in the Jewish cemetery and threw a brick
through the menorah-bedecked window of Dr. Brian Schnitzer, whom we
meet on the interfaith walk that carries the Torah from the old to
new synagogue. The response at the time was to put menorahs in
homes, businesses and churches all over town. Today’s
successor to this “Not in Our Town” movement is
“Now in Our Town,” featuring facilitated interracial
meetings for those who had previously stuck to their own
kind. We table in front of the Congregational Church that started the
menorah movement and meet numerous homeless veterans and Native
Americans adrift. An Apache man tells of his sister, a Marine
recently killed in Iraq, and his father, who killed himself after
tours in Vietnam. Shrub reaches out to a curious audience verses primarily in
improvisational comedy sketches; they accept his instructions with
unseemly warmth. Bozeman holds a reasonably sized march on the occasional of
worldwide antiwar demonstrations; next morning we fan out to
churches across town. The Unitarians happen to be sermonizing on
the Highlander Center – an important locus of organizing
activity during the civil rights movement and after – and
they welcome the Highlander-on-Wheels crowd (I flatter us). Great Falls – Some citizens take exception to having
varied views hosted by the public library, but the librarian
prevails. We do a religion class at the Catholic college and an
interfaith service at Unity Church. At programs around town we
learn from the local Zio-colonialists such interesting factoids as
that Israel never planned to take all the land of Palestine, but
God did give it to them. We also a learn a new construction term:
“concrete security fence.” And we use up a lot of tax
dollars by provoking an army helicopter to buzz us four times,
trying to ascertain excactly which danger the bus poses to civil
order. The public schools superintendent invites us to absent ourselves
from the district schools, so into the beautiful Sun River Valley
we go, to the high school in the tiny town of Simms, a majority
Mormon/fundamentalist environment with a side order of Catholics
and Methodists. Four classes are rapt, even stunned, as will happen
with war stories and accusations that our leaders are criminals and
should be in the dock, not the White House. By day’s end the
parent phone calls are pouring in, protesting diversity or, to be
fair to their point of view, treason. Our sponsor has tenure, but
we journey back to the valley anyway to reassure the authorities
that allowing anti-war views to be expressed could save democracy,
maybe. We hear that during Clinton there were school assemblies
with Clinton-bashing speakers and there were no calls on that, but
we are supposed to steer clear of politics. Impossible –
political silence is a political statement. Interestingly, two
local soldiers returned from Iraq recently came to speak and told
students to watch out for lying recruiters. We hope for the best
for Simms, and move on. Missoula: A day of vibrant tabling – we meet so many
interested folks including a very sharp Jewish anti-Zionist and a
number of veterans and military family members. Young man:
“My dad was in Vietnam, and he’s still angry every
day.” A mildly aged woman tells of her son who has just
deployed to Iraq, and her brother-in-law who is there with the
Montana National Guard – at 58. Talk about your stop-loss.
There’s also the requisite bully, who insists each person he
harangues is “stuck on stupid.” Butte: Montana Tech, the former College of Mines, produces
mining engineers including a WYOMING Then on to the peace vigil on Main Street, which many have fled
for the Wal-Mart that stands in for a mall here. Still plenty of
positive honking, including truckers, and a group of tie-dyed teens
rampantly peacifying with signs including “Where is
Osama?” and “Act like it’s a globe, not an
empire,” while blasting classic Dylan on the box. As often
happens, the high point is something that doesn’t happen: we
were scheduled for two assemblies at the high school, canceled when
it was determined that the bus is a front for the armed wing of the
PLO. There was a tentative offer to allow us in if we promised not
to be anti-war, only pro-peace. Final ruling: too
controversial. SOUTH DAKOTA MINNESOTA At St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Dave Whitman plays
jazz in the Lion’s Lair, next door to Dave Lippman’s
show in the Lion’s Pause. The jazz bleeds through into the
Lippman lair, giving me paws. I last played here in 1990, says a
professor who also claims to use “I Don’t Fight for
Conquerors” in his seder. Dipping down south of the border we meet up with Northwest Iowa
Peace Links, who take us to the Clay County Fair for a rib dinner
and a quick look at the cows and army recruiters. The military had
supplied the schools with arty book covers for the needy students,
so Peace Links arted up their own counter-covers, which were such a
hit the army ones languished lonesome. In Mankato, the home of the Jolly Green Giant and the largest
mass hanging in US history – 38 Native Americans in 1862,
still actively mourned – we discourse in sociology classes
including one on Victimology, where we examine cycles of violence
and brutalization of occupied people in Palestine, America, and
other such places. Despite local guardedness about free speech
being endangered by the Patriot Act, there is some faculty flak
about us, the bus, coming to speak freely. We are said to be
one-sided and perhaps not as non-violent as we claim to be, since
we try to explain why suicide bombings happen. To my mind, quashing
understanding of rage is a violent act. Likewise the recruiting
station blasting nationalist anthems at peace demonstrators. But
perhaps I’m overly sensitive. We’re joined here by Tom Cornell, a Catholic Worker and
Deacon who worked with Dorothy Day and went south to Selma in the
darkest days. He has a story for every occasion and lends gravitas
to the bus – humor too. WISCONSIN We speak to a community organizing class; enrollment is
conditional on activity in any of five local organizing efforts.
Lively tabling, animated by conversations of both types –
basic agreement and nearly friendly – is interrupted by
torrential and lengthy downpours. All manner of press braves the
storm to interview the bus – people!, call the press when we
come, they like it (it’s the law). Meanwhile an investigation is underway into the
university’s possible investments in Israel – in days
of old the UW was forced to divest from apartheid South Africa. Minneapolis End of Wheels of Justice bus
blogs..
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005 Neighbors for Peace shows monthly movies in the city park
building; I'm the first allegedly live act. At post-show party, I learn
again that activists get depressed, world-weary. Where's the hope? But you
never know what's coming next - sudden jolts of awareness can surprise us.
People file their knowledge and gut understandings and feelings for unknown
others under the mattress or in other places that may be readily accessed in
event of turns in history. People do feel for others - homes built on the
cliffs here fell down, swimming pools destroyed, days of headlines - what
about Fallujah? But you never know, we've seen it before Feb 15 '03 will
come again. Portland, Oregon Clear Channel's own record on free speech is interesting:
they rejected an anti-war billboard in New York on the grounds that they don't
want to put up messages that might cause children to ask difficult questions.
Heaven forfend. Would that mean questions like "why should I buy
everything I see on a sign?" Or "Why are all the radio stations in
the country playing the same song at the same time?" Oh when we win a fair contract Bystanders, many having grown up without the advantages
of knowing what a New Orleans funeral is, nor having grown up in a civilized
country - one with political culture and, oh, collective bargaining - stand
stunned or look on in idle amusement, a misdemeanor since the International
Criminal Court decided that amusement must lead to engagement. OK I lied. To
be fair, some are actually intrigued, even moved. Well, if you're not moved by
a hot brass band and, well, a movement, you need to switch drugs. In
fact I find it hard to imagine music without a march boppin' along behind the
band. Why bother? The organizers' farewell: "Go in peace, to kick the
bosses' ass."
Bemidji, MN Duluth, MN
Aiken, SC Jacksonville, FL
May 2005 Speaking of old fashioned, somebody burned three
seven-foot tall crosses all over Durham the other night. Vigils were organized
in short order and neighbors re-committed themselves to unity, but while we
wait for news and speculation on the motives of malfeasants, the school board
remains deadlocked in racial contestation and a group of businessfolk propose
to elect the board at large, county-wide - code for diluting strength of the
black community. Meanwhile the North Carolina House of Reps has passed
Instant Runoff Voting, wherein citizens express their second choice as well as
first, so that when someone is bumped out the race you get your second fave
instead of your worst nightmare. Will the Senate see its way clear to adopt a
method already used internally by the GOP in Utah, in polls for football MVPs,
and for the San Francisco mayoralty, as well as some offices in the United
States proper? Hold breath. Columbia, SC
April 2005
Where our grim, fine arsenal stands The citizens quailed, or just plain folded, when a Black
Hawk helicopter landed on the high school lawn as part of Health and Wellness
Day. Not clear how such machinery contributes to health but the climbing
wall/tunnel/bouncing inflatable inside the fair, staffed by six Marines in
camouflage, is certainly healthy, provided no one signs up for the military as
a result. School personnel declare the military's participation is harmless
and objections to it are Opinions, which should be kept out of Professional
Life. And these people are educating our children? Now it turns out the military is hitching itself to the
DARE program, with a provocative slogan: Dare to keep kids off drugs and
violence. The drugs I can understand - those are for whoever gets victimized
by the dope that seems to flow out of each country we have a war in. But how
the military keeps kids off violence - I guess I'm uneducated. It could be
that by enlisting kids in the biggest, most violent gang on the big block,
they put them above the law and keep them out of jail. Therefore the violence
has been contained? I must study
up on this. Meanwhile, suppose we had truth in advertising: the
climbing wall and chopper would have to be labeled, first, as advertising
instead of civic mindedness, and there would need to be a list of the possible
side effects of using these toys: death for you, death for unknown children of
unknown parents - some photos pasted on the side wouldn't hurt either. No,
teacher, war is not a video game. Teach our children well. Or get out of the
way so we can do it.
Little Falls, MN There
is great diversity here - both Olson's and Olsen's - and the radical
Franciscan nuns are always out to terrorize the militarists. Party activists,
more progressive than some bystanders, set the pace for reclaiming some space
for Americans to participate in politics. Seems reasonable; civic duty should
be encouraged, if not mandatory. Especially in a blue stain on a red spot in a
blue state. LaCrosse, WI Winona, MN Teaneck, NJ Anna Maria Island, FL Houston The morning after a show at the always enjoyable Millbend
Coffeehouse in the Unitarian Universalist Church in The Woodlands, I journey
to the UU franchise in Northwest Houston to offer a sermon on Consumerism and
the Soul. You heard me. Or those there did. My efforts at preaching were
accepted in the spirit of the offering - laughter at jokes, toleration of
songs, contemplation of possibilities for saving ourselves from hyper-Mammonization. March 2005 San Rafael, CA February 2005
Anaheim
St. Louis
Back on the Wheels of Justice
bus, I speak on Palestine/Israel and Shrub shows up periodically... January 2005
Then down to the local high school thanks to some fine teachers, and finally to the Sacred
Grounds, a fine gathering point for gay youth, where we combine our efforts with
local musicians and met a wide variety of folks, thanks in part to WMNF,
community radio yay! Speaking of which, when their news staff went to cover the opening of a certain large,
boxy emporium right next to the river, the manager asked "Are you the station
that's been playing that anti-Wal-Mart song?" This clearly marks them as
biased against free enterprise, unlike the stations that accept bribes to pimp
consumer fascism. One man's opinion. Sarasota
Miami
For contrast we journey to the University of Miami Law School, where most of the audience is
pro-expansionist Israel. We maintain a civil demeanor throughout. We then enjoy a visit to the
University of St.Thomas, a private Catholic school with lots of low-income students, who know
lots about the army, a low-income kind of thing to know about. The class on Religion and Suffering
is particularly keen to discuss the problems of Palestine. Finally we meet with the Broward County
Anti-War Coalition, with whom we share ideas of strategy. Work is difficult with small numbers of
activists in a large city, but they persevere in the search for what works. Priorities: combat fear,
fix the media. Gainesville, Florida
Savannah, GA
Professors at the two state colleges - black and
white, in keeping with local tradition - welcome us to talk with social work
graduate students about strategies for advocacy, and with students in the
Criminal Justice, Social and Political Science department (criminality, if not
justice, seems increasingly the dominant element in social studies any more -
though some kinds of criminality get more discussion than others. Streets vs.
suites.) The famous art college, though, seems to shy from political matters.
Training students to isolate art from society may not be a violation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it should be. Next thing you know
they'll impound the bus for violating the separation of art and politics. If you go: land yourself at the Sentient Bean Coffee
House. That's where most of the movies about Palestine are shown.
Durham, NC - Shrub was Oh-No-Gurated at the Blue Dot Ball, the Durham area
being a blue dot in a red state. The swearing (in) bibles are the corporate
reports of Halliburton and Enron.
Hundreds took the People's Pledge to be good citizens in spite of the
government, and partied on. December 2004
November 2004
All this ruckus is overshadowed at the moment by the tragedy of a confrontation
between a Hmong man from Laos who shot and killed six fellow hunters in the
woods. Fellowship seems to have been overshadowed by a combination of
racism, rage, and perhaps war trauma left over from the U.S. "effort"
in Southeast Asia. This is speculation, but one thing is clear: wars never end
till we find alternative social organization. The hunter killer trial will
unfold and hopefully clarify problems rather than deepen divisions. Jacksonville, Florida
October 2004
Bloomington, Illinois
Urbana
Madison
Chicago
Ashland, Oregon
Sylmar, California
May 2004 Saginaw
Cleveland
Youngstown Alice notes
similarities to prisons in Iraq. Lynd efforts have helped to cut suicide rates
in the pen - lofty goal indeed - by getting some prisoners transferred to
mental health facilities and bringing Human Rights Watch into the lockups for a
look. There are sleeper
effects of the outsourcing of steel production in the 70s and 80s. Children have
moved away for work, breaking a pattern of caring for elders. Retirees'
pensions are keeping the service economy afloat, but that boat could sink when
the old folks expire. Economic violence has long-term non-headline
consequences, not unlike war - in a truck stop we meet a veteran of the Army
Rangers who won't talk about what he did except to say "I have to live with
it for the rest of my life." About service to his country: "Should I
be proud? For what ? It's all about money. My dad was in Vietnam - that was
crazy. You'd never know when, he'd just explode." On veteran's benefits:
"My buddies get a check every month. But then, there's always something
popping up on your skin, you don't know what. Cancer. Who knows? They never
tell us nothin. It ain't worth it. Good luck to you guys. Keep doin' it." Syracuse Buffalo
A middle-aged
business pillar man went to Iraq, saw, awoke, came home to found a Pax Christi
chapter. Hope. Albany, NY Desperate
women - which is to say, Women Against War - came together before Iraq
Massacre '03 for a rolling 30-day fast at the Women's Center. Many of these
were folks without prior activist resumes, and it got good press. New
initiatives are in the works to re-invigorate the broken-hearted into further
action. The Amy
Goodman movie "Independent Media in a Time of War" was made here by the
brazen and stalwart Indymedia folks. On the mainstream front, a strong,
persistent campaign to get the local papers to do their jobs - sometimes they
actually print the Fisk items sent along for their edification. They got the
editor to come to a showing of the Amy Goodman movie and offer a response. Mazin
Qumsiyeh meets with the editorial staff of the Hearst paper and regales them
with stories about his grandfather and a map of West Bank settlements. Some are
more regaled than others. The editorial cartoonist is impressed, which is all
that matters in this life. In a nearby
suburb, the town's mayor is married to the schools super, and everybody
watches their back. A beleaguered progressive high school teacher doesn't
bother to balance his presentations: "I am equal time." Tenure's a
wonderful thing, but they can still make it hell for you if you protest
massacres done by our side. We pass, four
times, a monument to a soldier with the inscription "Philippines, Cuba,
Hawaii, Porto Rico." Great to know what we're proud of. Of course, that was
the age of imperialism, which was then. I remember in 1969 when someone blew up
a statue in Chicago in honor of the police who participated in the Haymarket
massacre. I'm not sayin' anything, I'm just mentioning something that
happened one time. Worcester, MA Ware, MA Lenox, MA Boston N. Andover, Mass. Then into the
community where the peace groups have six vigils a week, including one at
Raytheon. We journey to Lawrence, site of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike, now
60% Puerto Rican and Dominican. We lunch with priests who help janitors with
unionization. The local peace group vigils at the big intersection, eliciting a
constant stream of waves and honks. I might like to move to Latin America - I
like it here. Except for all the incinerators being built here, already the site
of the highest asthma rate in the state.. And the fact that there's no longer
a bus to get to the jobs they no longer have. April 2004 "Collateral Damage: The fallout from the war in Iraq"
tour Dayton Springfield Galesburg Chicago Indianapolis Cincinnati Here in Cincy
police kill at will, most famously Timothy Thomas in 2001, precipitating riots
that led to a boycott of the city. The People's Movement in the
Over-the-Rhine neighborhood features strong women's leadership battling
gentrification with a twist: the entire neighborhood is on the National Historic
Register due to the largest concentration of Italianate architecture in the
world, build by German immigrants in the 19th C. After driving African
Americans into this zone so they could build a freeway to new white suburbs,
though, the city is in no mood to preserve the neighborhood for the poor black
and Appalachian folks who call it home. As in the rest of the global South,
indigenous people are not needed. They are scattered like so many Palestinians;
settlements go up at the margins, zoning takes the place of tanks, trendy clubs
are guarded by many clubs and guns, local TV produces hit-pieces on housing
activists worthy of Fox or British dossiers. Our young student host has hosted
mini-Witness tours from nearby Miami University, zoned for rather more privilege
in the countryside nearby. St. Louis At Washington
University, Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a project of Jobs with Justice
and the United States Student Association, sponsors a rally for living wage for
campus employees. Nearby, Boeing develops smart weapons, while kids next
door grow up in despised neighborhoods, forged in the psycho-order of people put
in their place, then expelled from it. The economic draft blows through these
neighborhoods, tempting these youth to be all they can be, kill all they can
kill, and come back to more of the same. Like maquiladora workers they are fed
into the machine, processed out the other end with bruised hands and hearts. March 2004 Washington March 2004 Bisbee
February 2004 Tempe Sedona Flagstaff
Las Vegas
As always, the Catholic Workers are top drawer hosts, generous, informative
and entertaining. In addition to their soup line and other help for the
homeless, they are involved with the campaign against the Nevada test site and
other reasonably pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-world activities. The
university appears to be so far a hotbed of social rest, but folks are working
on it. The Strip - casino central - has expanded way beyond my 1968 experience
of it, when I was stopped 13 times just because the Mafia didn't give us
license plates with our drive-away car. WWII veteran Norb (shown with his car) does a daily peace vigil on the Strip. M&M's has a superstore here, site of
a demonstration right after we leave because they use child labor in west
Africa. There are also replicas of the important cities and monuments of the
western world, in case the originals ever collapse or get blown away by irate
colonial fanatics. San Bernardino
Then back to the homeless shelter at the Lutheran Mission, papered with anti-war,
anti-dying at 52 from being black with cancer, anti-militarism, anti-crack
posters. Homeless guys asking questions of our speakers: "But what can
we do? No really, what can we do to stop it?" Then the after-school program,
voted best in the area, heavily laced with liberation. Open mic brings out the
inner poet in the teens. Can't stay for the Tuesday night hip-hop-jazz
mass - too bad, this center offers such a set of lessons. In this area,
average annual wage $9,000, the banks redline the neighborhoods of used up,
tossed out folks. They aim to eventually evict the undesirables and replace them
with a lake, which will set the mountains off nicely, bringing tourists who will
never know there were once people here, before they were species-cleansed. In
the meantime the cops may not be involved in methamphetines - surely some of them
are not - but this is the meth capital of the nation, victimizing lots of
veterans fleeing their memories. It's not yet a crime to be homeless here, as
it is in San Diego, but it is a crime to feed the homeless on the street. Orange County
Duly Quoted: All over the county peace activists defy the climate of
this bastion of reaction. We foray to Huntington Beach High School, where one
student sagely informs us "We won't be safe till there's a U.S. flag on
every country." On to a direct action training where we hear of a mall-walking
demo at Fascist Island (OK, Fashion Island), where activists with matching
anti-war t-shirts and stickers on their pants went non-shopping. One store
displayed military fashions; the store manager's number was
posted on a peace site and the resulting calls forced them to change the
display. San Diego: Put It in the Mail
Well, now, that was educational. It seems to me that any
one such incident of prevention of political discourse constitutes grounds for
de-certification of the next election. Anyone? North San Diego County
A fabric designer made a 40-foot cloth version of the Arlington West cemetery - a
"Traveling Iraq War Memorial" - with crosses bearing names of the Americans
killed in Iraq. It fits nicely on the side of the bus. It was originally carried
in the military parade in nearby Oceanside, by Camp Pendleton. Mr. Suarez there
urged young Marines to go to school instead of war, and countermanded direct
orders from a sergeant to shut up. There is much conscientious objector counseling afoot here. I'm told of a soldier
who was so repulsed by killing he gave away his pet snake because he couldn't
bear to feed it mice anymore. Over in Carlsbad, birthplace of the Boogie Board, another strong minority of students
at the high school flock to the bus for buttons, stickers, and other ways to
declare themselves outside the imperial consensus. January 2004 We visit Arlington West, the mock cemetery set up on the beach by Veterans for
Peace. A cross is planted for each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, with names and
home towns, along with a sign reading "If we honored the Iraqi dead, it would
cover the whole beach."
Bakersfield
Local lore has an undercover agent in "Peace Fresno" dying in a car
crash. On seeing the obit picture with a different name, the community
group protests the infiltration after the fact, to which the police demur, "If
you're not doing anything illegal, why do you mind if we observe you?" A
copy of the Constitution is being overnighted to the chief.
Hollister January 2004 December 2003 Davis Palo Alto
Santa Cruz
Monterey
Ft. Bragg
Ukiah
Arcata, CA
Bio-diesel bus rocks through the Redwoods with edutainment.
Redwoods don't like smell of rotting freedom fries. Miami, November 2003 I People vs. Profit Arrayed against the resurgent market
fundamentalism of Bush and Bechtel are doctrines of
economic fairness and power decentralization, aiming towards the development of
equitable, sustainable economies that can eliminate poverty, and perhaps
corporate welfare into the bargain. At this particular meeting, the
refusal of Brazil and others to invite the U.S. embrace deadlocked the
discussions, which ended early in a face-saving delay of decisions. Two words
for those without time to study up on trade minutiae: people vs. profit. Sad to
say, it really is that simple. II Bad Truckma
The next day I parked my pickup, full of the sorts of unidentifiable items
associated with life on the road, in a parking deck a block from the hotel, in
anticipation of checking in several hours later when the Chapel Hill contingent
would arrive. My smoothie idyll, which was unfolding on the same corner as the
parking deck, came to an abrupt end as I looked up to see my truck jauntily
careening down the street on two wheels, kindly assisted by a tow truck. Neatly and carefully depositing my cup in a trash can, I sauntered over uncasually to
query the officers on the scene. I now saw why they had blocked the street -
my truck was suspected of harboring a bomb. This intelligence was received from
no less an authority than the FB of I. Over the next two days of my efforts to retrieve my vehicle, the bomb story was
downgraded to suspicious package and finally to suspicious vehicle. I had turned
out not to be a bomb-carrying journalist after all. Imagine my relief. My joy
turned to despair, if not anger - ok, anger - when the car was returned to
me with both door windows smashed out, along with the padlocks on the camper
top, and all my possessions thoroughly if not carefully mixed. My files,
so meticulously organized and placed in boxes, were, in a word, defiled. Since my computer had been in the truck all this time, I was unable to file stories
with my news service. This was minor suffering compared to that of my colleagues
who were shot with rubber bullets and fraudulently arrested. Still, valuable
lessons can be learned. If you plan to be in the vicinity of a demonstration
against a creeping fascist organization masquerading as a democracy, get a
normal-looking car. With no windows. Better yet, leave trade policy, war and
other such arcana to the experts. They know what they're doing, along with
what you're doing. Or might want to be doing. After you find out what
they're doing. St. Louis
October 2003 Kansas City
Rockford, Illinois Madison, Wisconsin Dekalb,
Illinois Syracuse
Hoboken Boston Warren Wilson College September 2003 August 2003 Manhattan, Kansas Salina, Kansas Boulder, Colorado Durango, Colorado Salt Lake City Meanwhile, Mayor Rocky Anderson is pro-gay rights and progressive on other issues.. Salt Lake has become the magnet for young gays and lesbians not wishing to leave the Rocky Mountain region. I heard the mayor interviewed on community radio station
KRCL, which carries Democracy Now!, High Country News, and many fine music programs. Listeners are accustomed to a having politics laced into their folk, world and bluegrass shows. A vibrant station in a rapidly diversifying area. San Rafael San Francisco Whidbey Island Bremerton Port Townsend Vashon Island Seattle July 2003 North Dakota St. Paul, Minnesota Madison, Wisconsin June 2003 Columbus, Ohio Washington DC For earlier
incidents (vintage tour stories) see the lyrics to "The
Trouble With Political Jokes," from the album I Hate Wal-Mart.
Guaranteed weirder.
New York
A stirring May Day parade comprising mainly immigrants is complemented by a showing of the 1970 film on the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, "Finally Got the News." In Detroit from the late 60s into the 70s, various plant-based insurgent groups, black nationalist and Marxist in nature, sprang up - DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, FRUM (Ford) etc. and combined in the League. Detroit was the epicenter of US manufacturing at the time, and black workers took the lower jobs. The Detroit street rebellion of 1967 was different from many of that era, being driven more by workers than the unemployed. Everything about the Detroit scene pointed to a bright future for highly conscious and strategic revolutionary black organization at the center of the industrial working class. Now, gone. They fizzled out in a spiral of internal conflict, Cointelpro subterfuge and the ultimate collapse of the industry itself. Today, immigrant workers lead the way in organization and mobilization. What happens to the long-standing permanent underclass, African Americans? Watch for globalized action and reaction to increasingly mold internal movements.
Ongoing demonstrations at the jewelry store of Lev Leviev, billionaire builder of Israeli settlements in Palestine, as well as in Brooklyn (which is OK, maybe, sorta...ok, it's not) are fostering a boom in street theater and song parodies. Chants:
You're Glitz, You're Glam
You're stealing Palestinian Land
You Sparkle, You Shine
But settlements are all a crime
Leviev (pronounced Le-VI-ev)is also involved in evil diamond deals in Angola and ruthless ruby racketeering in Burma. More info and video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=bq-carFCQbQ
UK/Eire
When we watch our own country in steady slide into barbarism, we sometimes forget it's one world out there, and Thatcherism destroyed Britain the same as her buddy did in US. I go all primed for better newspapers, only to find them downsized, tabloided and generally less informative than they were 16 years ago when last I trod here. Likewise shrinking is the national health system and the public schools. The only good news in the shrinkage department is that no one goes to church anymore, except immigrants, who are responsible for that bit of culture along with most good food and music. (Some churches have been converted to rock-climbing venues....!)
Meanwhile over in Ireland there are now jobs, which means not only do the blokes stay in country, but vast numbers of immigrants from greater Europe are on the scene. A French friend is teaching English to Poles in Galway - with his accent thrown in for free. One result of prosperity is more cars, to be followed by more roads, which will tear up and uglify the legendary countryside. Oh well price you pay eh? Unless of course you plan. Heaven forfend.
Newark, New Jersey
People for Progress, a Newark group, leads a new statewide peace coalition in the biggest march in years, led by African American and labor groups. 100 degrees is a near-match for the 1,000 peeps, but spirits are raised by the resurgence of black movement, soon to be amplified by a demo in Jena, Louisiana. Photo by Diane Greene Lent. (http://dianelent.com/)
Atlanta
Another World is Possible, Another U.S. is Necessary: The richest possible cultural and political week is not tickets to five Broadway plays or a salon of New Yorker discussions but the US Social Forum in Hotlanta. One man's objective opinion. Strong focus on black-brown relations, labor rights, 
women, poor people's campaigns, 
anti-free trade, gender non-conformist rights, Gulf Coast survivors - grass roots community organizing generally. Strong youth presence and plenty of oldth. Jobs with Justice, indigenous rights: lots of positiviy. Anti-prison system, anti-military recruitment, anti-drug war - lots of good, solid negativity. General goal: a movement of movements. Today's goal: Get to know each other, learn how to be stronger together. New: learning to be open to who is different. New to U.S.: learning that grass roots campaigns are more important than newspaper selling. YAY. Watch 4:14 video.
First national march against the occupation of Palestine - well anyway the part taken in 1967 - brings out some thousands in DC. Good to see the people who remain committed to this uphill struggle, and those just coming to it. A taped message of support from Roseanne Barr - she an anti-colonial rep on her radio show. We need more Out anti-colonialists, folks! MC: "I'd now like to introduce Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie...but they're not here." Watch 2:04 video.
New York Witness Against Torture demonstrates what they're against in street theater on Broadway. Pro-torture advocates remonstrate at the military recruiting station across the street. Watch 2:34 video.
Iraqi-American Sami Rasouli told US Rep Dave Obey that sectarian warfare is being provoked in Iraq. Obey: You don't know the half of it, and I can't tell you. Rasouli: they'll never get the differences settled this way. Obey: what makes you think the US wants to settle it?
Chicago
The fourth Latin America Solidarity Conference brings out folks who work on Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and o so many other fronts to build alternatives to empire and defend those alt.govs and alt.movements. Highlight of the weekend is a victory for the Immokalee workers of Florida tomato fame: They don't have to go demonstrate at McDonald's because Mickey caved. They'll give a penny more per pound, following Taco Bell and preceding Burger King, the next target, whose front door entry says "You're here to have it your way" - our way being presumably sub-living wages for farmworkers - and whose exit door says "Buh bye. You Out?" To which I can only reply, no YOU out, if you don't straighten up your faux-hip corporate self and fly right. Stay tuned.
New York
A very good panel of professors, mainly, on Iran and the US, put together by Adalah, the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, featuring Ervand Abrahamian, Baruch College, City University of New York; Hamid Dabashi (Columbia U); Saman Sepehri (activist/contributor to ISR); and Fawwaz Traboulsi (Lebanese American U).
Dr. Sami Al-Arian, Palestinian professor late of the University of South Florida, finally modifies his hunger strike after 58 days. After failing to convict him on any counts of aiding terror, and having promised to release and deport him, the state terrorizes him by holding him indefinitely. We rally by the freeway near the prison. Send a letter.
The anti-war movement returns to Ft. Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Forces. Here Latin American officers are trained SOA-style, resulting in, for instance, the Acteal massacre in Chiapas, 1997: 50 indigenous children and parents gunned down by our tax dollars. From here the Forces are sent out to Special-ize the world, to keep it safe for freedom for the gangsters who rule in the style so well explained by General Smedley Butler in 1933:
“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom, born in Virginia, transplanted himself to Israel, where he founded Clergy for Peace and works with Rabbis for Human Rights, and does a lot of work with doubly (or triply) displaced Bedouins and allows that they represent the dispossessed and marginalized all over the world. He says Palestinians will soon be the majority in the area between river and sea, and Israel won't be able to dominate them, and that's the good news. He says that lately it's hard to find what's Jewish about Israel. He wants to know why would you construct a solution to European anti-semitism in the Middle East, where Jews did better, and take it out on the locals. We will only come to our senses, he says, when the price of the present course is too high.
Milgrom is on tour with Melkite Catholic Archbishop Elias Chacour, from the Gallilee. "The creation of Israel was good for the Jews - we're happy for them," he tells us. But it wasn't so good for the locals - "a terrorized nation" who became "dirty Arabs" as the Jews had been dirty. Occupation corrupts both sides, he said. On the good news side, he said Israel is learning from Lebanon what defeat means. The psychological assurance of the ability to export war has ended. "Welcome back to the human community." For peace to come, stop being the 51st state of the U.S. and become the 21st state of the Middle East.
Whidbey Island, Washington
The peace forces have pushed military recruiters back into a corner at the local high school - they've yanked their hall pass and the army must bivouac in the career center, where no one goes - who wants a career?! Women in Black meanwhile made front page in the paper for their vigil and transported 1,000 signatures to Washington in a round of peacemaking visits to represenatives. You go Rural America!
Columbus, Georgia
22,000 rally at the gates of the School of the Assassins - this demo started a generation ago with 13 people. Today 13 cross the line into Fort Benning - 'twould be more but the penalties are rising. Pacifist churchies mingle with punked out youth in a festival of hope and life. One imagines a future without the "School," with thousands returning to commemorate the victory over torture pedagogy and the townies welcoming the peace troops for more than just their hotel and dinner dollars. Meantime, soldiers are being sucked out the back door by the governments of Latin America which, responding to the entreaties of Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, are refusing to send any more troops to learn the repressive arts. So far; Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela.
New York
Indymedia reporter Brad Will, along with several local activists, was murdered in Oaxaca, Mexico October 27. Two municipal police and three other government functionaries are in custody. Brad may be the first indymedia.org journalist killed. Actions occurred today at many Mexican consulates; the one in New York was shut for the day. Folks chained themselves to gates and shimmied up lamp posts; there were 12 arrests. The young people who demand access to actual information about the world are rightly outraged at the killing of a friend who merely tries to do the job the mainstream press has abdicated. And the police – apparently no one has given them a new manual lately. They are still operating as if traffic flow is more important than information flow, order more crucial than democratic participation. One street in Manhattan could be given over to public action against corrupt and fraudulent governments for a few hours eh? The cars have all the other streets. Can’t we do our part here to support the valiant and imaginative movement of Oaxacans? Festivals of mourning and resistance clearly have priority over automobile traffic. I believe it’s in the Geneva Conventions or Declaration of Human Rights, I know I saw it somewhere….
Voices for Creative Nonviolence held a sit-in at Senator Dick Durbin's office when it became apparent that US forces were planning to go Fallujah on Ramadi's butt. He phoned them up: "You've got my attention, what do you want me to do?" He brought the item to the Senate floor. Truth to power, folks.
The annual Crop Walk organized by Church World Service raises money for hungry people around the world. The local Catholic bishop ordered whoever listens to him not to participate because they give money to a clinic in Africa that gives out condoms. Well at least he didn’t forbid shopping at the new Fair Trade store – don’t anybody tell him about it!
Community theater produces Ugly Duckling, by Maine writer Carolyn Gage, in which young lesbians struggle to be permitted to exist at a girl’s summer camp. Can this play be produced anywhere besides the two or three Madisons we’re permitted in this country?
photo: Judith Mahoney Pasternak
September 2006
New York and Washington
Camp Democracy brings the war, or the idea of peace anyway, to the White House door. Tents on the National Mall host a parade of speakers and the premiere of a new film on stolen elections, "Stealing America Vote by Vote" - watch for it. At the UN, marchers overcome police resistance to permitting marches in a democracy. Democracy is relative, according to who owns it and who stands up to demand it. Hugo Chavez smells sulfur in the air from Bush's recent presence; he recommends a Chomsky book and the relocation of the UN to Caracas.
Teaneck, NJ
The Coalition to Bring the Troops Home Now pulls out the stops, bringing outstate reps and a police chief to a vigil and press conference, declaring majority opposition to the war in Iraq and urging stepped up grass roots action. State and US reps have been pushed from support of the war to opposition, and from opposition to vocal opposition. Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out emphasize that the death statistics don't include post-service suicides, and stats on the wounded leave out the 68,000 vets who have applied to the VA for help with emotional trauma. Impeachment is too good for this administration, says one vet. Prosecution is in order. A couple of youths turn out to heckle, but slide away as several families recount their suffering after their sons and brothers died uselessly in Iraq. See Families of the Fallen for Change.
Detroit
The USA bombs at will in Iraq, likewise Israel in Lebanon, but here's a town long ago econo-bombed out of existence. Auto makers continue to move actual car-making jobs abroad or down south, while the city struggles to survive with casinos and the odd computer company that brings its workforce with it anyhow, so no great gain there. While neighboring Dearborn boasts the biggest Arab populace in the US, the town of Hamtramck houses a veritable United Nations of humanity, from Bangladeshis to Kosovars to Poles and African Americans.
My three-day Detroit experience kicks off with a Palestine event that serves as opening act for the formation of a local chapter of A Jewish Voice for Peace. Second night features Venezuela, sponsored by the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, which takes an interest in health care and similar Venezuelan quirks, and attended by members of the labor delegation which journeyed there. Final night is the Shrub and Lippman concert. No one is injured.
SDS - Students for a Democratic Society - re-founds itself.
150 student types, with kibbutzing from the 1st gen veterans, gather at U. of Chicago. Complaints about undemocracy in existing orgs and lack of a multi-issue, anti-imperialist national group for students led to the reformation of the legendary 60s formation. A student calls a buddy: "Guess what, SDS is back." Response: "Let's form one." 
San Francisco
Women in
Black are joined by A Jewish Voice for Peace and International
Solidarity Movementin Union Square where we notify shoppers and
other celebrants that there is No Peace in Bethlehem This Year.
Minimal negative voices are raised against us - maybe they're
scared of our numbers. Or maybe it's just so obvious, this one. To
some of us. Work cut out, as always, for next
year.
We gather at the gates of the death chamber to protest the
execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, Crips co-founder and later
anti-gang advocate and youth counselor. The Terminator states that
Tookie has not reformed from his path of violence and so we must
kill him. Deadly hypocrisy aside, the Governor's denial of Tookie's
conversion based on the man's admiration for black
revolutionaries
is such a blatant negation of the struggle for justice that
one feels he would have opposed the French and American
revolutions, along with of course the South African. The
refusal to even glance at the startling 11th-hour testimony of
new witnesses tells us what value the Gov and the Supremes put
on the lives of those who are in any way unlike their own bad
selves. Tookie redeemed did more for oppressed youth than
these fossils ever will. First, they have to admit there is
oppression. In America, that couldn't be. Until the oppressed
write their own histories.
Once a union town based in railroads and lumber, it's now a dairy
and potato place with weakened workers. But a sizeable crowd comes
out to support the Klamath Basin Peace Forum and local artists
along with the visiting oddity. A trip to the Lava Beds and caves
where Modoc Indians fought the cavalry reminds me that every
beautiful nature spot has been expropriated - but at least, as I
read on the National Monument sign, there was a good excuse: the
settlers were irked by the "persistent presence" of the natives.
Even here in the historical and natural parks, budget cuts reveal
our government's priorities: curtailing what we can learn from
nature and history.
New Orleans
I join Common Ground for a week in their effort to empower
residents to return, rebuild and resist the opportunistic ethnic
going forth full steam in Katrina, Phase II: the human hurricane of
land grabs by the powerful. Landlords and city fathers want to turn
Dixieland into Disneyland, a tourist mecca sliced from its roots,
culture minus its creators. In the '50s they turned fire hoses on
civil rights marchers; today they flood the poor with evictions in
the wake of broken levees and promises. Join the movement to
prevent a permanent homeless Gulf Coast diaspora. (commongroundrelief.org)
As 20,000 rally at the gates of the US Army's torture school -
newly and nicely known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation - over 122 Congressional reps have signed on
to a bill to close and investigate the den of evil. Now that being
against torture is in vogue, thanks to the brazenness of Dean of
Torture Cheney and others, Congress is finding pieces of its spine.
Follow HR1217 at soaw.org.
Regulars at the weekly peace vigil notice an increase in friendly
public response in recent months, since the fanciful cover story
for Cheney-Rumsfeld aggression in the Mideast has been falling
apart. And over in Columbia 6 of 7 city councilors have signed a
statement condemning the Patriot Act Reloaded and supporting civil
liberties and the Bill of Rights. Are we not a safe Bush state even
here in secesh central? South Carolina's motto: We're not as bad as
we used to be. Vigil is always followed by a coffee hour featuring
beer and lively conversation, for some reason not filmed for the
Lifestyles of the Interesting and Committed reality TV podcast. So
much to do...
Back on the Wheels of Justice bus...(see also http://www.justicewheels.org)
MONTANA
Helena
Just
Don’t Go does counter-recruitment while the Peace Seekers
local branch does vigils and education – like Mazin’s
tour de force lecture in the Myrna Loy Theater lobby. Mazin and I
spar for an hour with Dave Berg of "Berg in the Morning," the force
to be reckoned with in Montana talk radio, on 18 stations. He is
less combative than some in his field, and 2 of 3 callers favor us.
Perhaps we have too many facts or are somehow in some way cogent,
but Berg doesn’t put up much of a fight. We do three nights
of events including a Shrub concert at the Staggering Ox. Brad
passes the gearshift to Bob Abplanalp, and I jump off, headed east,
while the bus heads for Pocatello.
At Montana State we meet
Punjabi Sikhs, Japanese, Moroccans, even a few Montanans. One
Iraq veteran tells us he saw mostly smiling children; another
says sure, any child will smile when given candy.
Mazin Qumsiyeh rejoins the bus and ramps up the discourse as
always. Onward to…
number
of internationals, who are advised to keep their heads down for
fear of attacks by xenophobes or monitoring by the gummint. (A
local demonstration was observed by guys in suits with a laptop in
their SUV – they were finally intimidated away from the demo
by mere attention. Oh, and the peace float won for most original.)
Swell way to welcome our world neighbors, and to learn from them.
We do manage to meet a Kuwaiti student who laments the sad sitch in
Palestine, but the intls stay away from our programs in droves. The
domestic students apparently have already been domesticated by
bread and circuses and lies, and thus need no warnings to stay out
of trouble, aka unembedded presentations. Our democracy seems to be
locked down tight – we have the freedom to demonstrate and
roam the nation speaking to no one – and this in a climate of
63% opposition to the war, according to recent polls. A quick
deduction would be that public opinion is not only manipulated, but
doesn’t count.
Sheridan’s lively peace community hosts us in the library,
then on the talk radio station where Limbaugh-Hannity-Savage 
are balanced by
Cornell-Lippman-Puccio. On to the community college, where a
young veteran, soon to return to Iraq, challenges our advocacy
of withdrawal and pours out the anguish of seeing Iraqi
friends killed. We engage at length and search for solutions
to an impossible situation.
We trek to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to hold forth on KILI
radio – 100,000 watts of Indian Power – discussing
links and parallels between Palestinians and Native Americans
– land theft, relocation, Palistans based on Bantustans based
on Reservations. Also Camp Casey, conscientious objection, and
changing attitudes toward occupation among soldiers both Yankee and
Israeli. A staff member of the local school tells of continuing
white ownership of most businesses on the reservation, due in part
to lack of startup capital for Native businesses. He also comments
on various projects to re-introduce buffalo on the plains,
sometimes ten by ten, from one family to the next, and calls it a
small project that’s important spiritually and historically
because of the centrality of buffalo to the traditional way of life
here.
In Winona we address a charter K-12 school, a Catholic high
school, and a Catholic university. People!, get us in your Catholic
schools, and Jewish and Muslim too, it’s the law.
The Campus Progressives in LaCrosse stay on the move, pushing a
living wage ordinance through the city council and provoking a
statewide campaign for same in the process. They are now pushing a
statewide ballot initiative to withdraw the Wisconsin National
Guard from Iraq. Senator Feingold has propounded a plan for overall
troop withdrawal. Folks are educating folks on depleted uranium and
other un-advertised effects and costs of war.
The bus starts its fall 2005 season at Macalester College, where
we table under a thunderstorm and, to be fair, a tent. A ROTC cadet
approaches us with great interest in dialoguing with our Gulf War
veteran speaker. Our current lineup features video of Christian
Palestinian leaders and the Star of Goliath song-slide cycle along
with first-hand testimony from the front lines of war. A friend of
one of our speakers is arrested in Haiti, and released under great
pressure before we leave town. There is no separating or segmenting
the struggles for justice throughout the world – we are all
in this together.
Manhattan and Topeka, Kansas
The Living Wage campaign has hit snags, but stalwarts in the unions and
the streets and even the legislature keep their eyes on it. Labor comes
out for picnics and festivals and tries to surmount the platitudes of
those who want Labor without the Movement. On the capitol steps I stick
to my pro-labor script and Shrub to his anti-labor one, while local
leaders denounce the wars on the peoples of both Gulfs, and everyone
applauds except maybe the Mayor.
San Francisco
The city has passed sweat-free
legislation, declaring that all municipal purchasing must be
manufactured ethically - no sweatshops. The law was written by a class
at New College taught by visiting prof Tom Hayden. One of many reasons
the Bay Area should become a country. The left coast cultural scene
continues to thrive, with the San Francisco Mime Troupe's summer
offering in the parks being a play based on the book "Confessions of
an Economic Hit-Man," and music from the likes of Dr. Loco's Rockin'
Jalapeno Band and the Albino Afrobeat Ensemble. Or if you're in the mood
for movies you can make it to the historic and beautiful Grand Lake
Theater in Oakland, where the marquee is always educational. This week:
"America's elections are rigged - computer voting is a fraud!"
(See a photo
log of these messages.)
Burbank, CA
There are 65 peace vigils in the Southland. These are not all silent standings
- many involve leafleting at convenience stores, farmers' markets, and
suchlike. Piles of leaflets are accepted for placement by sympathetic
merchants, some of them worldies - not Americans.
Clear Channel wants to put billboards on buildings, so Portland passed a
law prohibiting commercial speech on said walls. When the local mural projects
were ready to expand, Portland cut a deal by which they leased the paint
that comprises the murals, rendering the works Public Art, which is in a
separate category from other speech. Clear Channel is now suing the city over
this blatant violation of their free speech rights. Incidentally, commercial
messages have qualified by law as free speech only since 1968 - which makes it
the natural order of things for those under, say, 47 years of age, and for
those of us who forget the past and are willing to sign over reality to
liars.
June 2005
Madison, WI
State employees mark the creeping Dixiefication of Wisconsin with a mock
New Orleans-style funeral parade for collective bargaining. The So-Called
Brass Band leads the march with a solemn "Just A Closer Walk with
Thee;" after a eulogy at the Capitol they step off with a sprightly
"When the Saints":
Oh when we win a fair contract
How I want to be in that number
When we win a fair contract
Driving along the Mississippi River and up the country roads in a Mustang
convertible blasting Buffalo Springfield - hoo boy am I dating myself. Oh
well, couldn't get a date in Bemidji - no shame in that eh. Here they have
this other Continental Divide I'm not familiar with - between waters that flow
south and north. North meaning, as Shrub points out, into Canada and out
through the Bay to Syria. American water, going to terrorists. Gig at a bar
that's more like a museum, full of folksy artifacts. Sponsored by the county
Democratic Farmer Labor Party, which means the house is peppered with city
councilors. They should surely be able to stop the war - if the other city
councils join in, and Congress, and....
Local activists are facing court date for throwing blood on the Air Force
base. Meanwhile they tend the community garden, feed and house the many
homeless who encamp here in the summer and then migrate south. A beautiful
city, but put your car up top the hill before the big snows, or forever hold
your parking place at the lake.
Aiken Peace pulls out a good crowd for a small town, including a young Air
Force bloke who sings us a strong and poignant song on the Patriot Act, and a
self-described conservative who abhors the vacuum that is Bush: not only
empty, but full of it - and, he sucks. My words. His: they're lying and
killing, not to mention bankrupting.
Major turnout from the Democrats, thanks to a four-county aggregation of
progressives attempting to take back the Party from the slackers and
bureaucrats. Hard work when money talks: recent stats show the GOP paying $6
per vote to the Dems $1. Also, people are afraid to get involved lest their
jobs take a walk. Other forms of progress proceed apace: a revolting
development at the headwaters of two creeks is called Freedom Commerce Center.
At least they've decided to spare the 1200 year-old cypress tree there.
It'll be less lonely now.
Tampa, FL
Some
churches got it goin' on. They do everything here at the UCC. Their sister
church across town was burned down, but then they support gay rights, which is
way over the top of something.
Durham, NC
Provoked by a shoe sale, I take up jogging. I wave to the Latinos keeping
the neighborhood yards presentable, and am immediately transformed into the
bourgeois running shoe customer who can't get his exercise the old fashioned
way, as these workers do.
A testimonial party for a leading local activist provides the
opportunity
to see what people value, to witness the creativity brought to bear in a small
community of campaigners surrounded by - well, by a place Bush feels
comfortable visiting. So they try to give Him second thoughts. A radical
cheerleading team called reBELLEious eggs on the crowds. The knack for
transferring the story we live into drama, comedy, or dromedy, hooked up to
the ability to talk to anyone and both learn and teach, finding something in
common to wield while threshing through the differences - these are
essential skills in a creative, assertive, dynamic movement. Playing clarinet
on a unicycle, dressed as Uncle Scam - this sort of thing garners extra
credit.
Watervliet, NY
Hard by Schenectady, this charming town is dominated by the Arsenal, to
the point where the high school alma mater declaims:
Dares our enemies, makes them quail
Catholic farmers and Lutheran laborers combine in the Democratic Farmer Labor
Party way up here where traditions die hard. Some of these Dems do value gun
rights more than reproductive ones, yet they dug the off-the-map message and
even laughed most at W's health plan for the children (coverage from early
stages all the way up through birth). This show, combined with a lovely supper in a
supper club, is said to have drawn the line for some of these folks, either
showing them how bad things are and thus clarifying for them why they're
Dems, or irritating them enough to make them realize they're really not. The
progressives are working to de-wedge the electorate.
Hyperactivists in the campus Progressives, Native American Student
Association and other cabals have passed a living wage ordinance and held a
Native summit on nuclear waste. After attempts to thwart their demonstration
at a Bush visit, they nailed the cops for sending police chaplains to yank
duly issued demo permits. People trying to exercise their citizenship
apparently will not be thwarted. Take that, friendly fascism.
For a southern boy, even from California, this area gives the feeling of
Canada or Norway. I'm wearing long johns to Earth Day fagawdsake, and there's
white folks every time you turn around. Me aside, people are fighting to save
their limestone bluff country from agro-toxins, and small farmers persevere
after they've failed across the plains - nobody told these folks the world is
now one big Wal-Farm.
Star of Goliath receives its first banning, coyly described by the
executive ban-man as "not censorship." My flier included the cautionary note: "may be seen as highly biased
against long-range Israeli geopolitical strategies and in favor of Palestinian
Survival." Apparently one or both of those biases is too provocative for
locals who believe that peace is breaking out in the Mideast and we mustn't
upset people by mentioning facts. Oh well, we move to the handsome house of a
fine local activist unafraid to buck the bastards. Best review: "What was so
bad about that?" Seriously though, my presentation features historical
Israel-planners delineating their strategies; those who don't want to listen to their
own leaders tell the truth about their nefarious plans need to get out of the
way of those who want to get to the truth as the route to reconciliation,
rather than skipping the first step. As for peace breaking out, holding
breath: one, two, three....
The Island's End Bistro no longer exists,
technically, but that didn't stop the County Democrats from throwing a bash
there, seized by Shrub in a blatantly partisan intervention. In the spirit of
W's signal that Hezbollah might be permitted a role in the new Lebanese
government, Shrub offered to include the Dems in ours, provided they show
flexibility on minor matters, such as principle.
Big art town, lots of oil money - oil painting was invented here. Or not.
Progressive art galleries like the Art Car Museum and the Artery threaten to
link art with expression of social ideas. Police are on the case.
F'rinstance, across town at the Vine Street Studios one finds "Arab
Eyes," work by Arab photographers, part of the enormous Foto Fest that
graces Houston each spring.
(near) Redway, CA
Though I'm known for playing at clubs that later close (cause-effect?) and
getting rave reviews from papers that soon fold (direct result?), I think this
is the first time I've played in a town that no longer exists. The beautiful
Beginnings community center does, though, the community being centered
apparently not being the town. Southern Humboldt retains the prize for
ineffability and groovy good feeling. Great radio station too, KMUD.
The Rachel Corrie Rebuilding Project pulled together a smorgasbord of
entertainment from children playing classical selections to Star of Goliath
in a hilltop church with a tranquil panoramic vista that contrasted with and
stimulated contemplation of the atrocities of Gaza.
Monterey, CA
Even in the most beautiful places in the world, people can take the trouble
to look after their less fortunate relations, be they next door or across the
seas. One fella muy concerned about Arabs wanting to drive Jews into the sea
drove me back to the research lab where I learned of the time it actually
happened. The other way around, as it happens. Or happened - in Jaffa, 1947.
Good story - see http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Jaffa/Story202.html
In Orange County, the Bastion of Birch, human rights rears its ugly head in
the form of valiant activists, including some sixtyish folks just getting
involved for the first time, or for the second after having been intimidated in
the post-911 worldaphobia period. I hear tell of solid evangelicals who are
rethinking their loyalty to the system after it screwed them on the labor
front.
Only at St. Louis U is the male a cappella choir called the Bare Naked Statues
- after actual ones that local boy J. Ashcraft hasn't got to yet - though
the fountain figure "Floozy in the Jacuzzi" is rumored next on his list.
Tampa
Professor of Engineering Sami Al-Arian has been among the most effective
lobbyists in Florida and Washington for justice for Palestinians. That could
explain why he's been in solitary for two years, unless you have a mystical
faith in the U.S. court system. In any case, he heard our interview on community
radio WMNF and cautioned his wife Nahla not to miss our presentation, so we got
to meet her and a good group of hyperactivists who are fighting this sort of
horrendous red-blooded American repression. This drawing by young Lars
Underbakke shows Al-Arian going to meet his lawyer, hands bound, with his legal
papers placed on his back. This went on for a year. (First they came for the engineering
professors, but I was not Palestinian, so I didn't speak up...) See
freesamialarian.com
The Fogartyville Café in Bradenton hosts Amy Goodman in a fundraiser for a new low-power radio
station, WSLR. That night Shrub takes the boards at the café. At New College we
throw the show on an outdoor wall and learn of Aidan Delgado, who was sent back
to Iraq for an unexpected second tour of duty and became a conscientious
objector. Now he goes to college and spreads knowledge with his own anti-war
show.
At Florida International University we find a refreshing mix of international students and international relations majors, blended
into Miami's unique cultural stew. We're hosted by a vibrant supergroup named SUPER (Students United for Palestinian Equal
Rights) has been showing movies and escalated to a bus visit, bringing views not often heard here.
A diverse group turns out to the Mennonite Church, seasoned activists welcome us to the
Civic Media Center, and Shrub's concert puts buns in the bleachers at the County Museum. A
Gulf War veteran with multiple disabilities from the much-denied Syndrome joins with our
Vietnam vet driver in an emotional tag-team condemnation of the effects of war. An Iraqi
woman tells that when the U.S. bombed the mosque where her father is buried, she felt like
a little child wondering if her dad died twice. A round of Gainesville-style parties gives
us the chance for some serious political discourse under the guise of having a good time. Or
vice versa.
The stunning physical beauty of Savannah gets the
play in the tourist glossies, but every town has its dark side. In this romantic
mystery of a town, the good and evil isn't restricted to gardens; there's
also Fort Stewart, whence our youth ship out to kill and be killed. The good
news comes from the likes of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, who after nine years as an
army mechanic is refusing to return to Iraq. Around town, in the streets, on the
trains, and in the classrooms we meet army personnel with their varied opinions,
some of which they can't share within earshot of you never know who.
Another side to the town is the downtown frown of
the impoverished black community, many of whom wear a look of wonder regarding
where the jobs may have migrated to. Unemployed, with meager housing provided by
the prison-industrial complex, many migrating into the army and thence to
oil-drenched battlefield. It may not be a job, but it's an occupation.
(End of Wheels of Justice tour. For me. For now.)
San Francisco
Shrub does election calypso at a rally to challenge the tally in prep
for the electoral college meetings in state capitols. Signs:
Ukraine has cojones, where are ours?
Voting without audits? Are we insane?
If every vote counts, count every vote.
Northern Wisconsin
Folks fighting mines and power lines sometimes have success 'round here, a
rare thing when tilting at power. The recent shutdown of an ELF (extremely low
frequency) line has heartened the peeps, who have been battling to shut down
this nuclear war trigger since 1969. Now we know that power lines are not
windmills, and we may tilt at will. Native Americans and farmers
and the countrified social justice crowd have the stuff, mo' powah
to 'em. Next up: the Arrowhead/Weston line bringing power in from Canada.
And over in the Twin Cities, Alliant, the subsidiary of Honeywell that's been
cut loose with the cluster bomb and depleted uranium contracts. They need to
reconsider.
Ft. Benning, Georgia 16,000 came to the gates of the School of the Assassins,
formally known as something else - oh yeah, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
They cooperate to maintain Pax Americana, whatever the cost in democracy and lives.
More stories and great photos at http://maritimes.buffaloimc.org:8080/news/2004/11/8575.php
House concert was followed by two days of canvassing in exceedingly
poverty-bound neighborhoods, then a day of poll monitoring with Election
Protection. Apparently I didn't do it well enough, or got suckered into going
elsewhere than Ohio, or forgot about the 4 million new fundamentalist voters, or
failed to stop touch-screen, or neglected to tell voters that Iraqis are related
to us....I must have slipped up somewhere. Well, full employment for George
Shrub I suppose, and fresh angry/jolly songs on the way.
Durham, North Carolina
Fourth national conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement takes place at
Duke University despite the best efforts of contrarian parties. Good workshops
on outreach to Jewish communities, different possible forms of a
single/federal/bi-national state in Iz/Pal, the problem of attacks on civilians,
anatomy of the organized pro-Israel community in the US, and many more. In
a concert the week before with the Prince Myshkins in Chapel Hill, I premiere
the short-short version of my Palestine song-slide cycle. I am mastering the
operation of Powerpoint with my left toe.
I cross paths with the Wheels of Justice bus tour, back on the road with a new
paint job and an ever-changing, all ages cast, right up to Hedy Epstein, who
fled Nazi Germany in the 30s and speaks out today to stop Israel from
perpetrating horrors against Palestine. At the college we get the extra credit
crew, armed with enthusiasm for grade points and even some interest in the
topic. Tough crowd to do satire for, good crowd for speakers to sway. Or just to
begin to pry open. Lively debate amongst the students is a good thing, though it
seems a crime that young adults should know so little about their own country as
to believe what its leaders say.
The Socialist Forum continues to educate through a speaker series, of which I am
an alleged episode - a benefit for the new low-power FM station Radio Free
Urbana, which is added to the good work of community radio WEFT. The anti-war,
anti-racism group AWARE works against war on Iraq and also continues to combat the cultural imperialism of
campus sports mascot Chief Illiniwek. Citizens for Peace and Justice and Visionaries for Educating Youth and Adults
(VEYA) are working on a little problem with police behavior in
the African American community. Community members filming the cop stops of
motorists were busted for eavesdropping. Cops are getting tasers, which should
solve everything. The Indymedia folks put out a great paper
called Public i that helps publicize all these activities and more.
The invaluable infotainer John Ross has a new book out on his life that is the
most enjoyable look at the history of the US Left. This poet/journalist
continues to report on Mexican politics while finding time and energy in his 60s
to visit Baghdad and Palestine. Check out his tour - http://www.nationbooks.org/
- go see him!
Craig and Cindy Corrie mesmerized the crowd with the story of their daughter's
life and death. Craig has been asked whether he and his wife imparted their
values to Rachel. He responds "No, she imparted hers to us."
David Rovics and I take a break from our joint tour to open for Daniel Ellsberg,
Medea Benjamin, and Norman Solomon. Ellsberg says we are now at Germany 1932.
The discussion of strategies for ousting Bush continues.
In the farthest flung reaches of the San Fernando Valley sits Tia Chucha's Cafe,
a Latino cultural center captained by poet Luis Rodriguez. Here David Rovics and
I begin a joint tour that will take us up the coast to Seattle. Rovics covers
even more topics than Shrub, with the added benefit of telling the truth. At
Cell Space in San Francisco we complement reportbacks from the Republican
Convention demonstrations in New York.
Wheels of Justice Bus Tour
Traverse City, MI
Numerous folks hereabouts have gone to war zones to see, learn, and later
teach. A confrontation at U.S. Rep Dave Camp's office pushed him to take
action. 45 occupied his office for four hours demanding a town hall meeting on
Iraq and Palestine. They got it. Camp (R) then signed on to a bill memorializing
Rachel Corrie and one against the Israeli confiscation wall. He had been a
supporter of military aid to Israel. We're watching.
New Vets for Peace chapter is organizing. For Christmas, Women in Black and
friends went to the mall in all their favorite peace shirts on - part of the
National Keep Your Shirt On Movement founded recently - earlier in this
sentence, in fact. A local professor attacked for a pro-Palestinian Human Rights
speech was defended by his Prez after he presented him with documentation from
the UN on the Palestine sitch. The press is very conservative but did a great
story on Wheels for some reason. The reporter, informed that a singing CIA agent
was involved, demurred, "That's too controversial."
The jail-like high school has its own problems, yet some can relate to whole
countries put in jails and ghettoes. Evening finds us presenting in a convent of
social activist nuns like those who went to El Salvador in the 80s, some never
returning.
Staughton Lynd, long-time labor historian - though he quotes his father saying
"Lecturing on history is like lecturing on navigation while the ship's going
down" - is now, like wife Alice, a prison lawyer struggling for justice for
wrongfully convicted prisoners, in cases dating from a major prison riot in
Lucasville, Ohio in 1993. Youngstown activists aim to unite labor and peace
work, though it's hard to work with labor when there's none to be done -
hereabouts the steel mills were replaced with prisons, and when the guards at
one prison organized for a union, the prison was closed. The Youngstown area is
lousy with lockups, including a gratuitous supermax. Criminal Justice is the
biggest major at Youngstown State.
Shrub joins Hart Seeley ("The Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld") at the 68th
birthday bash for the Syracuse Peace Council as they push forth with their Bush
Must Go campaign, including a youth festival, "Drop Beats Not Bombs."
Lawn signs are everywhere and radical cheerleaders cavort. Oldsters stick
stalwartly and youngsters join in co-op houses full of bikes, not bombs. The
peace squad can't penetrate NPR, but they present a weekly edit of Democracy
Now! highlights on cable access TV.
Here we learn that buffalo wings really are from Buffalo. Also that
Democracy Now! is on at AM station. And about the Patriot Act from a lawyer
whose three year-old looked at a demonstration and asked "What's that,
daddy?" He: "That's America."
Vibrant, sprawling activist community has a three-story Social Justice Center
with groups working on AIDS, environment, and other minor matters. And some
joint called Revolution Hall that remains a rumor to us. Some of our potential
crowd headed over to a hearing on an incident where police shot at a fleeing
suspect and killed a bystander instead. Apparently if your only tool is a
hammer, you just throw it at every problem. And hit the non-problem. We
also compete with Laura Bush's Pay to Pray breakfast with the Governor -
much more sexy than our show. By the way, What Would Jesus Pay?
A highly diverse burg, with a couple dozen languages going on and less white
flight than usual - the MLK club marches in the St. Pat's Day parade. We
hold forth at the Spacement, a new Infoshop/Foodnotbombs kind of an enterprise
with a good spread of vintages among the crowd. Then to Worcester Artists Group,
a beautiful art gallery/political music spot (they dare to mix!) for a Shrub
onslaught.
A low-end town, pretty much down and out, unemployment and collateral forms of
abuse. A youngster views the bus hopefully, with unwarranted anticipation:
"What are you going to do to our town?" We'll try, sis. Other young folks with family in the military scream at pacifists, who coax
them over to the vigil for a civilian discussion which everyone appreciates in
the end. We repair to Agape, a rural Christian pacifist community growing its
own food and making its own way to a peaceful world, with straw bale house and
too many Mayflies.
Talking to five classes at a high school that we actually get into - the
Israeli army sent one of its teams to chat up occupation, so we were already the
equal timers. Everyone should do this - you don't need a bus. Just go to
Palestine, come back, do your job.
We roll around an emergency demo at Boston Common, blaring music, bearing local
placards, "Is your SUV worth the rape of Iraq?", "Stop Collective
Punishment in Fallujah," "Bush Lies, Another Soldier Dies," "Imagine
Cluster Weapons in Your Neighborhood." Then zoom to
where we dominate the local press for days because a presentation on Palestine
is just way outside the bounds of safety for the high school folk. Parents and
rabbis alike are raisin' a ruckus about the dangers of letting eyewitnesses
speak to defenseless teens. The superintendent decides to give us 7 minutes,
along with 7 for a rabbi, and questions from the class. The reduction of
education to sound bites batted back and forth like a pale imitation of
Crossfire is bad enough, but now's not the time for your tears: the whole
sorry sham is lauded in the press as a victory for freedom of speech. And this
after a speaker espousing weapons of mass destruction spoke at a nearby high
school the day before. This gentleman, representing the good folks at Raytheon,
did not require equal time for a peace speaker. No wonder Americans grow up
knowing how to go to war but not why not to. Bury the rag deep in your
face..Well, at least the next election will be invalidated due to repression
of free expression during the campaign.
I've joined with a tour put together by
Witness for Peace - Great Lakes.
Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace and the National Black Environmental
Justice Network wings in from Washington, and Blanca Velazquez Diaz, founder of
the independent labor union center, CAT, comes from Puebla,
Mexico.Later we're joined by Rev. Graylan Hagler, chair of Ministers
for Racial, Social, and Educational Justice (Mrs. EJ).
The University of Dayton, a private Catholic school, gets $50 million in
research contracts from Wright Patterson Air Force base. Blanca zips through the
student store checking sweatshirt labels: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras.
Ever wonder why they call them sweatshirts? Kids are walking around wearing
secret advertisements for the suppression of world labor, protected by the Air
Force.
Blanca tells of maquila workers giving their lives to the machine. Bruised hands
and hearts, chemicals burning skin and breathed in, no masks. Bodies end up like
the jeans, distressed. No freedom to associate (independent unions) despite
Mexican constitution. Two minutes max in the bathroom. Plus sexual harassment.
Codes of conduct my ass. A conservative Christian student comes to our student
host: "I'm confused - I'm thinking liberal. What do I do?" And
another: "I'm in. I want to join United Students Against Sweatshops."
Maytag is moving to Mexico, tossing 7,000 people into the ashcan. The town will
die; this is what we're so patriotic about.
On the South Side of Chicago we present in a large Methodist Church. Damu
connects with organizers from PUSH and other groups, networking nationally and
linking labor issues from the South Side to the Global South.
We present in a church shared by two congregations. Now this is not black and
white situation. OK, it is. Anyway, at least it's an integrated church. It
just has two services.
Blanca details the campaign against the Tannant Apparel groups, making jeans for
your major labels including Federated, a power here in town. Workers'
hands and Puebla's springs are turning blue from the dyes. Maquilas are now
being located in rural zones, where subsistence farmers are driven off the land
by cheap U.S. corn, straight into the conveniently placed sweatshops. The work
is dangerous, and so is forming a union - Fed made no response to demands till
workers came from Puebla to Cincinnati to protest at the gates of power. Think
about these hands and these springs and these rights when you don your
Tommy's, Gap's, Limited's and Levi's. Contact the Maquila
Solidarity Network (http://www.maquilasolidarity.org/).
We tour a largely-demolished neighborhood dotted with Catholic
Workers and co-housers - people who take in Honduran women who walk four days
to enter the U.S. with twins in the belly. Neighborhood youth rehabilitate
sturdy old brick buildings for low-rent housing. A Nixon-era urban mall sits in
decay, with only a thriving old-time soda shop hinting at past vibrant
neighborliness.
Fayetteville, NC
Military families against the war in Iraq helped spearhead a demonstration in
Ft. Benning's back yard. I interviewed the counter-demonstrators , mostly a
motorcycle gang, and quite nice folks if you were white and pro-war. Spirited
drumming and chants from Hip-hop groups. Later at a debriefing in Raleigh the
local Fayetteville organizers discuss their progress from inaction through fear
and on into decisive activity against war. They credit the existing community of
activists with helping them bridge to their future as good citizens. Later at a
debriefing from the debriefing at the Pour House, a local music hall, we note a
bumper sticker prominently displayed on the stage: "Real patriots question our lying government."
The band "Freeloader" hands out a pledge in which they proclaim
themselves "proudly American, deidcated to the principles for which our
federal government stands, freedom through fascism, enlightenment through
zealotry, enrichment through consumption, number one country, under God, with
all the justice money can buy."
Church of the Brethren's annual youth study event focused this year on the
Middle East. Shrub explained it away. Next morning, the 100 Christian
Citizenship Seminar participants went down to the church the next morning to
meet, but were confounded by checkpoints thrown up by their advisers, simulating
the Palestinian experience they were studying this week.Wheels of Justice Bus Tour
Gallup
Small town with large number of Palestinians, including one family running a
Middle Eastern restaurant combined with Native American art sales. Palestinians
with Zuni rings. One woman must run off from our program to attend Stitch 'n
Bitch, a crochet and conversation klatch related to Move On. Our guest speaker,
a 16 year-old Palestinian, explains to a Vietnamese questioner the motives
behind suicide bombings. The Immokalee Workers are in town, traveling another
direction in another bus.
If you can get past the shenanigans of the border ruffians - vigilantes
who relive the old west by harassing Mexicans along the illegal border - you
can repair to the bar where they serve the local "Darky" beer, complete with
a grinning darky caricature on the tap for easy locating on your third brew. We
enter and inform the barkeep why we're leaving. All the regulars have heard it
before and disagree with us, imagine. Their refrain is that this is a great
country where you can have your own opinion. (Not to mention your own ignorance:
one young African American woman - maybe the one in town - avers that the
icon is a tribute to the first black entertainers in America. My studies of
minstrelsy indicate otherwise. And besides, I'm older.) Meanwhile black
soldiers down the road at the intelligence base, Fort Huachuca, are afraid to
use the road, at night, when America is a great place where you can have your
own opinion.
Tucson
Tabling on campus we meet an ex-Marine who says the higher he rose in the
service the more he realized how wrong it was. In the abandoned downtown
an indie bookstore struggles along as cops watch drug deals and city fathers aid
only the developers, not the little gal. Barnes and Noble has a tax amnesty, but
not a store specializing in hidden histories.
We join in the third annual Local to Global Justice Teach-in at Arizona State U.
Our new speakers are Brian Avery of ISM and Dennis Kyne of Gulf War medic corps
and depleted uranium expertise. Following the teach-in we march up the main drag
to inform the hordes of dolled-up diners and daters that homelessness is being
criminalized by a new law against "urban camping." The city is forcing the
poor out to Phoenix, then to the fringes of Phoenix, and from there to further
invisibility. A makeshift shelter is carried, symbolizing the shelters the city
doesn't build because they're fully occupied building jails. Periodically we
stop and violate the law by sitting down. I lean against a no trespassing
sign - on the street. On the street! A speaker can't be heard, so the crowd
repeats his discourse line for line in a sort of liberation street mass. A chant
goes up: "You've got to fight for your right to nap time!" Then, "One,
two, three, sleep!" and we all lie down. One shopowner is distraught by our
presence, since sales are infinitely more important than democracy, let alone
homefulness. One passerby informs us, "Get a job!" I inform him that we had
one, preserving democracy. He informs me, "I'll shove democracy up your
ass!" An informative evening all around.
We find our way through the fog of tourism and crystals to Verde Valley High
School, a collection of teens from around the world who study and frolic amidst
towering red rock cliffs. Not all are trustafarians - there are
scholarships. Very bright, well informed. Liberation educology is rampant. Shrub
joins in the student recital, countering classical piano and school of rock and
folk with anti-rock, anti-folk monotribes.
The ongoing situation at Big Mountain, concerns over plans to cover the San
Francisco Peaks with fake snow, and other regional struggles combine with Native
American rock band Blackfire, dancing by children from the nearby reservation,
and our speakers to show greed war and oppression at home and abroad. A cheery
evening, only because we make common cause and commitment. There is a
long-standing identification between Native Americans and Palestinians, guess
why.
On to Mountain English-Spanish Academy, a charter middle school for immigrant kids,
who are most affected by stories of children dying. They can relate to refugee
status, somehow.
Why shout about
the Middle East in a sportsbar with the all-stars game on one TV and the
Grammy's on the other. Because we can.
Well, and because that's what there
was. Anyway, five harcore/punk/reggae/R&B bands needed a place to shout, and
to donate their time and the door to the Wheels. Shrub is nonplussed
and rants at the youth not to heed the alien orders of Conspiracy of Thought
<www.jointheconsspiracy.com>,
All or Nothing H.C. <www.ontherag.net>,
Adam Lopez & the Bored of Education <www.amador44.com>,
and The Tangled Minds <www.zentone.com>.
But the bands persist in heaping accolades on Wheels o' Justice between their
songs against conformity, commerce, and other suchlike occupations. And all
occupations.
In exclusive San Clemente, home of Dick Nixon, the John Birch Society
approach to civilization persists. The old restrictive covenants preventing sale
of homes to non-whites are to be disregarded due to the arrival of 20th-century
laws late in the game, but you couldn't tell. We're not allowed to park the
bus more than a few hours. Maybe we could put it in the mail? Probably not in
the mall. Not to worry, says my legal staff: refusal of the right to park a
moving billboard for peace in an exclusive neighborhood will surely invalidate
the election.
An Israeli child, watching TV news, asks "Daddy, are we the bad guys?"
Good thing we were welcomed by a professor at SDSU (I never knew SDS would
go so far!) to speak to 30 students, given that the cops, well, copped an
attitude at Ocean Beach. I can understand wanting the beach to be litter-free,
even commerce-free, but their insistence that even downtown you had to have a
permit to give out leaflets led me to ask the philosophical question of where
one should go to have discourse with other citizens about national and world
events. They suggested a private place, like a mall. This struck me as bordering
on the disingenuous, since anyone who follows world events knows you can't
leaflet in a mall. It also raises the larger social question of why political
discourse should be shunted to private spaces. And many related questions. But,
choosing to limit my line of inquiry, I merely asked what we should do if the
private spaces should also declare themselves outside of society, just like the
public ones. Cops being charged, empowered and equipped to render judgment on
such questions, they did not disappoint: "Put it in the mail."
At Cal State San Marcos, a heckler holds aloft a sign reading "If you hate
America, leave," until Fernando Suarez, whose son was killed in Iraq, gets up
to speak against the war. Then he leaves. Good strong minority opposition to war
in this bastion of beast belly. The Progressive Activists Network carries the
ball.
Santa Barbara
On to Vandenberg Air Force Base, charged with direction of war in space. Vets
for Peace will have to plant crosses on the moon.
We travel to one of eight Halliburton installations to try and pry their hands
out of the U.S. Treasury. Lots of coverage from Radio KUZZ, which is owned by
Buck Owens or his ex-wife, maybe. Lots of friendly responses from the allegedly
conservative populace of this oil-based countrypolitan mecca. Lots of peace
signs flashed from cars, though some only half-way there. American Patriots for
Any War Anywhere (OK I made that up) have been driving by peace demos to throw
bottles and shoot pellet guns at the post-Americans struggling to surmount the
media-fenced mental environment here.
Hollister in Black hosts a Friday vigil downtown in this somewhat Republican
town (except for perhaps some of the Latinos who comprise a very small
majority). The Republican kingpin organizes a counter-demonstration across the
street with somewhat clever signs - "God grants forgiveness, U.S. Armed
Forces arrange the meeting;" "Violence does solve problems: they're
dead;" and most educational of all, "Pacifists funded by Worldwide
Communist Party." We are anxiously awaiting our pensions. The faithful
followed Shrub to the San Andreas Brewing Company, dba Earthquake Country Cafe,
where they called in the constabulary to rout our Agent for waving toy guns
around - the 2nd amendment only covers the real deal. Six cops couldn't find one
Shrub, however, as he had done his vanishing act - most likely upwards in a
black helicopter, he being above the law and all. Over at the church, the
bus gang was told the condition of use was no government-bashing. And we were
doing so well with our fair and balanced bashing of all governments! Anyway,
isn't that the job of a citizen in a democracy? I'll have to check the manual
again.
(See article in Hollister Pinnacle)
Vallejo
Bus spoke to 400 folks in the schools. Vallejo beats out Davis in the Real
Democracy Town sweepstakes. Sorry Aggies.
San Francisco
Joint event with the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane and the
Deadly Poets Society reading from the poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. These folks are
wild. Shrub calms them down. At a major movie theater in Oakland, the marquee
reads "Congratulations Halliburton on your great financial victory in
Iraq." Shrub is looking into this.
Somebody - somebody - prevailed on a rabbi who prevailed on Davis
High School to cancel our appearance. But after a press conference, the
superintendent came to visit the bus and indicated that perhaps mistakes were
made and we might be allowed in next month. Sacramento gig was threatened as
well but went off fine. One woman who came to combat what she thought she'd
hear was won over and offered to help get us into Davis and raise some money.
Score 1 for human communication.
Counter-demonstrators at our city hall rally comprised a swath of Zionist
opinion, from those anxious to find common ground to a hostile and aggressive
dude with a cell phone connected to what seemed to be the Bill O'Reilly of
Israel. Good to communicate with those who wanted to. The rally was dedicated to
International Human Rights day. Not sure what the counter-demo was dedicated
to.
Mayor Scott Kennedy declares December 9 "Wheels of Justice Day" -
he has two grown children in the West Bank as we speak to the assembled. Pirate
radio - aren't they all, really, but anyhow - brings Shrub and speakers on right
after Free Speech Radio News, which the respectable stations don't seem to have
the sense or guts to carry. KUSP, however, the community station that suffers
NPR, has recently added Democracy Now!, which is heard up and down the valley.
Selected signs from the weekly vigil along the oceanfront: "Go
Solar, Not Ballistic," "Troops Home, Halliburton Shareholders to
Iraq," "One nation under surveillance - repeal Patriot Act,"
"Now we blow up their houses - that'll win their hearts and minds,"
and "Not Radicals - Care about Earth and Humanity."
As everywhere, potlucks to excess (we love it) and community access TV
shooting at us. Here also romps in the ocean - the one we share with Vietnam and
the Philippines and other such homes for former stateside jobs. With the biggest
Redwoods gone, the mills close and the jobs disappear. Tourism substitutes, and
ex-urbanites arrive in paradise (well, that wind is a bit much). But retirees
and their young friends still attend to social responsibility, hungry for the
info we haven't succeeded in getting on CNN, Faux News, etc.
We hit the high school, city hall and brewery. That should cover it.
People are eating up the eyewitness reports, asking searching questions,
wonderfully lacking in grinding axes.
Several locals who have been in Palestine join with our bus speakers to
update an already active community of solidarity. The destruction by occupation
forces that goes down in Palestine is so stark, so extreme, so off the map of
human rights - yet virtually invisible in this country. Why? After all, it's our
tax dollars that keep these horrors going. One suggestion: hit them where
it hurts - withhold funds from these thugs. Tall order. Peace and Justice Center
thrives with all kinds of organizational support, infoshop, and good spirits.
The bus rolls on - I roll off into the amber waves of Douglas Fir - see
above.
* * * * * * *
According to anti-FTAA activists, the trend in international trade is to
dismantle local economies and cultures, handing control of production,
distribution and thought to international corporations. And the trade delegations of
some Western Hemisphere nations are taking exception to the imposition of such a regime by nation
#1, our own Uncle,
the nation about which Mexicans have lamented their geography in the immortal
"So far from God, so close to the United States." The effort underway in
Miami was to bring the rest of the 34 nations closer, into the all-seeking embrace of
the great white father in Washington. Or Wall Street.
On a balmy November 19 mid-afternoon I was sitting on the corner of NE 2nd and 2nd
NE, minding mostly my own business, enjoying a Mango smoothie near a street
corner blockaded by police officers. I was in Miami to cover the protests
against the misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, which should
properly be called the Free Exploitation of America Regime, or FEAR. I had
arrived in the area a day earlier to cover the feeder march of Root Cause, a
coalition of South Florida workers, primarily immigrants, who among other things are
pursuing a boycott of Taco Bell for not raising wages in three generations. My
reports would help Free Speech Radio News establish whether or not the FTAA was
a legitimate organization or a cabal of scurrilous usurpers of local authority
and culture.
The local community radio station is leaning away from public affairs - "they
don't make any money" - and folks trying to maintain the founding vision of
the station (sound familiar?) are fighting to reclaim their air wave. Stay
tuned. Or tune in again later.
In the black community, efforts continue to institute a civilian police
oversight committee, with the Board of Aldermen split precisely on - are you
sitting down? - racial lines. In bankrupt East St. Louis, a prisoner beaten in
jail won a lawsuit and was awarded city hall. Somehow they seem to have gotten
it back.
The peace movement took 4,000 yard signs door to door. The gay and lesbian
communities have been very active in peace work; a popular G&L cafe is used
as a drop point, meeting point, etc. Meanwhile the ACLU sued, and won,
over the protest pens demonstrators had been forced into when Bush came to
shove. Tom Ridge came to speak and field softball questions, so one clever
truth-seeker passed up a written question about fire trucks, then was asked to
elaborate, and did. But not about fire trucks.
Peace activists count among their number a Holocaust survivor just now making
her first trip to the occupied Palestine territories, where she'll join up with
the International Solidarity Movement. Also some Catholics who were first
politicized when they went to Brazil on business and happened on some slums. Yay
travel, way to broaden. Oh yes, and some Friends. Not to mention Quakers.
Manhattan, Kansas
You can see, here and there, even along the interstate, the prairie grasses that
were once the glory of these plains. All plowed under now, but hereabouts
there's a preservation and research zone that promises to re-open our
understanding of the buffalo-amber waving pre-grain eco-system - just as we
have, some of us, come to understand how bears and wolves and forests and even
Redwood trees might have some meaning to us, or just to the world. Forget dumb
humanity, I sometimes say. Or anyway, those dumb humanoids that plow up
beautiful nature to mass produce anything and everything, Wal-mart style, till
we are what we eat, and it all tastes like parking lot. Enough. I've learned a
brand new nostalgia, or appreciation, for an environment long gone before I ever
came looking for it.
Gotta love that Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice, though. Twice on
Saturday out there goading the Americans, that is, motorists, to make any kind
of statement against lock-step pre-thought lifestyle. Out there by the
university gate and up on the overpass after the Big Game, engaging people in
thinking about the Great Game, and honking about it, and maybe someday they'll
get out of the car and come over and join up and make new friends and alliances
and political parties. Well, you never know.
The Iraq Task Force goes to the mall disguised as a pro-Bush demo,
with signs like "Practice random acts of violence" and "Visualize
World Domination." Meanwhile Friends of Community Radio continues its
battle for - oh,
you know, same as above. Also an internet radio project to increase access
and get folks in the habit of being the media.
At the Minglewood Cafe, ravers mingle with Unitarians and good old fashioned
original near-mint condition hippies. Members of Poets for Peace collide with
business school professors, sometimes in marriage, to broaden the perspectives
and poetics of peace and justice.
The sister of a national guardsman stationed in Iraq speaks at a community
speakout on the Capitol steps, wearing sunglasses to shield her suffering.
Ten-year olds testify that we have no business meddling around the world.
When I came here
17 years ago I was hosted by Central America activists. Today one of them is on
the City Council, which condemned the Patriot Act. Another has been to Nicaragua
six times and continues to support projects there. A regular vigil has elicited
both joining and mooning.
The Syracuse Peace Council has only been active since 1936, so they haven't
achieved peace yet. A while back some peace activists were been kicked out of the
mall for wearing
unapproved t-shirts. The shirts said something about being against war, which
didn't promote shopping or mindlessness, so they were out of place.
Street-corner outreach continues, encouraging drivers to break their silence by
honking for peace. This is the first political step for homo motoris. It leads
directly to marching, yelling, and running for office. The council also works on
uranium weapons and has a man in Baghdad, a member of Voices in the
Wilderness, sending reports. Locals are also
involved with Doctors for Global Health, sending medical workers around the
world and involving folks in cooperative projects. Meanwhile, the main
industries, Carrier (air conditioners) and Nestle, have cut jobs or closed
altogether, so it's looking like, well, like the rest of the country.
Thanks to a broad community campaign, the Syracuse Common Council passed a
strong resolution against the Patriot Act. Sectors from librarians to doctors
are getting involved in saving democracy from what one council member described
as a situation reminiscent of the slide of the Weimar Republic into fascism: not
a sudden coup, but a piecemeal descent into barbarism.
Rock against Racism and others put together a folk-punk-rock for peace day inches from the Hudson River, facing Manhattan's skyline. Fast and loud, that's Shrub.
On April 3rd, 2003 Professor Tony Van Der Meer of the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was assaulted and arrested by campus police for questioning a National Guard Army recruiter for threatening a student who was passing out flyers to honor Dr. King on the 35th anniversary of his assassination.
The assault, battery, and wrongful arrest of Professor Tony Van Der Meer was a key point of conflict between the anti war movement and the United States government repression embodied in the policies of the Department of Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act.
Info:
http://www.justicewithpeace.org/
This small private college in Swannanoa, North Carolina has a mission for social and environmental justice, and is grappling with an exclusive contract with Pepsi that would eliminate alternatives (can we say juice?) and prostitute the college's good name in return for a sports scoreboard and money for post-season games. Students meet to make decisive input, possibly overruling staff members who have turned to Pepsi for funds. At issue here is not the privatization of public spaces so much as the corporatization of civic life. Participation in brand-name wars through the purchase of drinks with prices pumped up to pay for extreme advertising is to some more distasteful than the bottled bad health itself.
The Farm
Outside Summertown, Tennessee, this community is down from some 1200 in 1981 to around 200, but continues to be active with social justice movements. There is an involvement with the needs of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, and the Peace Roots Alliance based here has been putting up "Peace is Patriotic" billboards around the country. The Farm is also a leader in midwifery and teaches innovative building techniques and environmentally friendly technologies of all sorts at its eco-village. And the publishing house has a catalogue of vegetarian cookbooks. There's no Wal-Mart, but then they've been kind of busy.Their global community efforts with Ham Radio, incidentally, preceded the World Wide Web.
Lawrence, Kansas
The City Commission is set to pass a Living Wage ordinance that will require companies that get tax abatements to pay workers more than enough to get them to work standing up the next day, which is described as a Life Support Wage. The Chamber of Commerce has failed to mount a coherent argument against the measure.
Living Wage is pushing ahead here too, with support from Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice. Labor Day picnics around the state are an effort to build up steam in a union-busted region. It's not the South, but union membership is hovering at 10%. What a civilized nation we have! Along these lines, Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute (see Salina, below) has done a study of wages at
Walmart, where one million Americans work. See
http://www.members.cox.net/t.s/walmart.html
Don't let them tell you the difference between Kansas and yogurt is that one has live culture. There's an arts festival here with international acts, and political activism that's threaded with spiritual diversity - not just Unitarians! A recent event featured African American gospel and Tibetan monks chanting and sand-painting. Salina People for Peace works to spread the peace gospel, contending with a regional tendency to condemn all those who don't adhere to one particular brand of evangelical Christianity as being most likely bound for somewhere not heavenly. Onward, soldiers not only Christian! Or not even soldiers!
And in middle school choir news, a Mennonite girl received an F for refusing to sing in a patriotic medley. Out at the Land Institute they're experimenting in wind, solar and horse powered farming - brand new stuff no one's ever thought of before. Oil companies are expressing delight and plan to convert their investments straightaway.
Of course it's a vibrant center for political action, but they do have to contend with the tsunami of people who were spit out by the San Francisco dot-bust, raising rents and lowering consciousness. There's sprawl, y'all, and murderous traffic - they need to get off the road so I can drive on it in peace! Anyhow, KGNU continues to be a leading light of socially responsible radio in the nation, and is looking into buying an AM frequency to increase its paltry reach. And satellite-based Free Speech TV is headquartered here, giving folks all sorts of ideas about taking charge of their own air waves.
The Rocky Mountain Peace Center booked the Nomad Theater, a wonderful playhouse, and brought in the fabulously frantic Nancy Norton, who brought down that classy house. Shrub had to put it back together from scratch, using only a hammer and the files on the audience he brought with him.
In the midst of a conservative area this is a zone of more varied ideas, but that doesn't stop the pro-war demonstrators from countering peace vigils. Activists search for ways to communicate across the lines, or at least to try and give peace a good face in front of the citizens caught in between and forced to weigh the relative merits of peace and war. There are lots of tourists here, and one hates to suffer civic embroilment on vacation - though there might be something to be said for a civic participation theme park as holiday destination. The city council did pass a resolution against the Patriot Act, despite patriots who yelled at an 85 year-old peace demonstrator to get a job.
Following a national pattern, the non-commercial station with the big signal runs NPR so you'll know what the government thinks, and the small student station runs Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News, in case you want know what the outside world is doing.
Salt Lake's got a weird rap, which it maybe once partly deserved, and don't we all. They have a community radio station playing Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. They've had demonstrations by a new group, People in Black;
Code Pink went to greet Dick Cheney with banners hidden under their clothes, and the Greens round out the color scheme running for office while People for Peace and Justice stands against the officers the Greens run against. The color scheme is, like Wagner's music, better than it sounds. At the Fiddler's Elbow I had a Polygamy Porter - motto: "Why have just one?" Salt Lake's movin' right along.
The Marin Peace and Justice Coalition is going great non-guns, working against the
WTO, the Patriot Act, and the occupation of Iraq. But they're not all negative - they're for impeachment. And also Healthy Communities and a Fair Economy. Good luck my friends, I'm right behind you. Some 90 year-olds came to the show, along with some boringly average-aged folks. The opener was yet another Dick Cheney, this time Chris Pray, late of many
old-timey landmark satire groups in Bay Area history.
Always good to visit home. The San Francisco Mime Troupe plays for free in the parks every summer. This year's entry is Veronique of the Mounties, in which the U.S. undertakes to liberate Canada through Operation Frozen Freedom. Ed Holmes reprises his excellent Dick Cheney. My show, a benefit for War Resisters League West, was in a soup kitchen at Martin de Porres House on Potrero Ave. One of the ladlers owned a café I played in in the eighties. He wasn't invented yet when I played in it in the sixties.
Who's proud of what here?
WINS (Whidbey Island No Spray) got the authorities to stop spraying Roundup along the roadsides, saving some kids from learning disabilities. Meanwhile, the Peace and Reconciliation Network educates on the Bill of Rights, not far from Oak Harbor Naval Base, which sends large numbers of soldiers to Iraq. A similar situation is confronted in
where I'm hosted by a peace café co-owned by a woman who was a Marine for eight years, and is now writing her autobiography, "Queer to the Corps." Peace workers are trying to reach people with a military mindframe through discussions of depleted uranium, cuts in veterans' benefits, and other gifts from Democracy, Inc.. Meanwhile, up in
the show would have been held at the high school but the liability insurance would have cost four times the usual because the peace movement is "so high risk." No matter, the Rose Theater is a beautiful old place. Activists are working to stop nuclear waste dumping in ditches that leak into the Columbia River, not to mention the dubious storage at Hanford, WA. Meanwhile, the Juice Bar plays Democracy Now! on TV three times a day! Holy community educational political gathering,
Batwoman!
The Green Party here is working by district and county on local issues as well as grappling with national politics, sorting out how to keep GW from ever getting elected President, ever at all. Vashon Islanders for Peace are involved in various campaigns and working out strategy with their counterparts in the island-peninsula region, which, although rather beautiful, is plagued by 24/7 rain, Africanized mosquitoes, a rare breed of biting cow, interminable ferry waits, and an impenetrable dialect. Therefore no one moves here and few visit, except briefly to boost the local economy. Folks here do know how to party, though - there's nothing like a piano and a pool table, and home-made wine to ruin your pool game and some Dylan tunes.
One of our elder sisters, or let's just say a Raging Granny, thought a police officer was rather too enthusiastic in his treatment of a young protestor at a recent demonstration against a new police organization designed to more thoroughly surveil and derail those of us who want our world back. She asked him three times, politely, why he was doing that thing he was doing, and the officer merely informed her to move it. Finally she slapped him on the face. Later she went to the hearings on the widely-observed officer brutality and said "I hit a cop, and I'll do it again."
Helena, Montana
Members of Helena's Seeking Peace organization joined others from around Montana at a Minuteman missile silo to demonstrate support for four nuns being sentenced in Colorado for breaking and hammering on similar missiles. They monologued with the soldiers about their feelings regarding nuclear weapons. Meanwhile back in Helena the Montana Logging and Ballet Company, a political satire group, are wondering what to do with themselves since getting the boot from NPR, where they were theater in residence. The date of their redundancy (letting go) was January 20, 2000 - yay satirical cleansing o' the airwaves. Go Bush, beat dissent!
The Great Prairie stretched south from mid-Canada. Even the tall grasses are gone now; nothing in nature, it seems, survives the improvements of civilization. How smart, then, are we, to destroy that which gave us birth? I did see some wild horses, and the other kind as well, and observed a failed cross-fence attempt at interhorse.
When Steinbeck came through here in 1960 with his dog Charlie, the Indian-free landscape reminded him of his neighbor, an author who had served in the cavalry that harassed the Nez Percé for a thousand miles as they attempted to escape to Canada with their families. He said it was the saddest duty he had ever performed. Too bad there weren't more folks declining their duty in those days. And these. There are, however, peace groups in North Dakota - don't let them tell you there ain't.
A group of priests, including some from the Peace Studies Department at the University of St. Thomas, have just returned from Iraq. Their feeling is that in their recklessness and incompetence, the United States government may just be throwing out the baby with the Ba'ath. They originally went there in January in an attempt to forestall the invasion. They also continue their involvement with efforts for justice in Colombia, Venezuela and Central America.
Community radio station WORT was the first U.S. station to break the story of the plagiarized dossier cited by Colin Powell in his UN speech. This station is part of a vibrant community that includes many peace groups, bookstore and food co-ops and also a store with a big sign that says "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." That store is of course a bike shop called Revolution Cycles. Meanwhile, the CIA is coming to campus to recruit, and interested folks will meet them to ask questions that have come up about their endeavors in the world community.
Chicago
Chicago newspaper publisher Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign country -- Iraq. The last time this type of case was prosecuted in the area was more than 40 years ago, when federal officials charged a man rumored to be a member of the Communist Party with being a foreign agent of the Soviet Union. Listen to Chris
Geovanis' Free Speech Radio News report from Chicago. at http://www.fsrn.org/news/20030721_news.html
Lots of work is going on against wrongful conviction. John Byrd, one of many convicted on suspect
testimony of jailhouse snitches, was executed this year. Until we are able to see our corrupt system as clearly as others do, this travesty of justice will continue to claim innocent lives. See investigative journalist Bob
Fitrakis' new book, "Free Byrd & Other Cries for Justice." Righteous research is happening in Columbus. See the
Free Press.
National conference of US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
Two days of discussion of campaigns for education and mobilization against the occupation of Palestinian territories, and work on campaigns for divestment, with a focus on the Caterpillar company that supplies specialized bulldozers for demolishing houses and killing Palestinians and Rachel
Corrie. Do we want our taxes and "our" multinationals supporting illegal occupation, dispossession, forced
diaspora? I don't think so! Primo Levi said "Everyone is someone's Jew, and the Palestinians are Israel's Jews." Let's stop this - who's ready? You can tell this campaign is cool because they put together a great evening with comedian Maysoon
Zayid, the "Palestinian Muslim Virgin with Cerebral Palsy from Jersey" - watch for her! - and the Iron Sheik, Palestinian rapper from Berkeley. Shrub provided equal time for the Right Point of View. Lots of orgs are in this org, including many fine folks from United For Peace and Justice, a national coalition. See
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/
- also, http://www.divestmentconference.com/
for a related upcoming student conference.