The 2nd annual March of the Impoverished will take place on Sunday, 12/13/09 at 4:30PM in St. Augustine, FL.
We will start in the Plaza and proceed along the bayfront to Orange to Cordoba and back to the Plaza where dinner will be served. This march is to draw attention to the increasing number of homeless, unemployed and working poor in our community. It is also the celebration of Food Not Bombs’ 6 years of serving meals in St. Augustine. Last year about 200 people from all sectors of our community participated. It was an amazing display of solidarity among our homeless, Food not Bombs, PUSH and members of the public, including agencies and clergy.
Call President Obama TODAY! 202-456-1111
Join or plan a demonstration Tuesday or Wednesday!
President Obama will unveil his new Afghanistan policy tomorrow. But we must not let up! Last week, we flooded the White House with so many calls that the White House Comment Line was continually busy! Now is the time to keep the pressure on and keep the calls coming.
Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Tell President Obama to send NO additional troops to Afghanistan, WITHDRAW the troops already there, begin serious DIPLOMACY with all parties to the conflict, and REDIRECT the money wasted on the Afghanistan war to people’s urgent needs at home.
UFPJ member groups are already planning protests either Tuesday evening or Wednesday at Federal buildings or other public places. Check the listings to find a protest in your area, or organize one if none has been planned and post it here. Be sure to notify the press using this sample press release.
We oppose the war because:
• 298 U.S. soldiers lost their lives so far in 2009. Tens of thousands of returning troops are damaged by physical injury, PTSD, psychological damage, suicides, and domestic violence. There is a backlog of up to 1 year for veterans waiting for VA care.
• The war is unaffordable. The White House says we are paying $1 million a year for each soldier sent to Afghanistan. At that price, the war will soon cost $100 billion a year. Yet Congress is not willing to pay that kind of money for health care, jobs, housing, or environmental protection.
• The war is making conditions worse for the Afghan people. UNICEF reported last week that eight years after the start of U.S. military occupation of that country, Afghanistan is the world’s worst place to be born. Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world — 257 deaths per 1,000 live births – and 70 percent of the population lacks access to clean water. Afghanistan ranked 181st out of 182 countries in the UN’s human development index for 2009. The presence of U.S. troops breeds resistance, conflict, and instability.
• The war is not helping Afghan women, whose conditions are as bad as ever. The government turns a blind eye to rape and violence against women. Civilian casualties, who are primarily women and children, are rising each year as the violence increases.
• In addition to being wrong, the war is also unwinnable. As U.S. troop levels have grown from 15,000 in 2004 to 68,000 now, more and more Afghans have joined the Taliban and resistance groups to defend against foreign invaders. Yet The Nation reported this week that the U.S. military cannot even protect the trucks which bring gasoline and other supplies to outlying U.S. bases, and that contractors are paying protection of $800 to $1500 per truck to the Taliban.
• War funding is feeding corruption, private armies, and the drug trade. The more money the U.S. and NATO pour into Afghanistan, the greater the rake-offs and corruption among U.S. contractors and the U.S.-supported Afghan government. President Karzai’s re-election was confirmed even though his supporters had stuffed boxes with more than one million fake ballots. Five ministers in Karzai’s cabinet have been given immunity from prosecution for corruption.
Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Be out in the streets if the President does order an escalation of troop levels. Let Americans know that we will not be silent and we will keep opposing this needless, senseless war for as long as it takes.
On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.
But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.
Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.
Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.
A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.
What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.
But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.
At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.
Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here,” one American trucking executive told me. “We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.” The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls “the Battlespace”–that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.
The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.
Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas–some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force–to move your trucks through.”
Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: “We’re basically being extorted. Where you don’t pay, you’re going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to.” Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. “Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It’s based on the number of trucks and what you’re carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they’re not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more.”
Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”
Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.
In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai’s cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker’s son, sources say. And so on.
In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official’s plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with his nephew’s corporate enterprise.
But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.
One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. “They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs,” a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. “They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that’s just a joke. I carry an AK–and that’s just to shoot myself if I have to!”
The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, “An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade–you are going to lose!” That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I’ve been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI’s convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.
For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, “What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat.” He’s an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he’s not happy about what’s being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.
“Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He’s a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”
To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. “Two Taliban is enough,” she told me. “One in the front and one in the back.” She shrugged. “You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible.”
Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war–to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.
Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan’s company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel “are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process.” Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan’s secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.
It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition–a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.
So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4×4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah “charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers.”
It’s hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly–security, extortion or a form of “insurance.” Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That’s impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, “He works both sides… whatever is most profitable. He’s the main commander. He’s got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows.”
Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan’s and Ruhullah’s convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan’s services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.
Hamed Wardak wouldn’t return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn’t speak with me either. There’s nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.
It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. “Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?” That’s what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. “That’s a questionable business practice,” he said. “They shouldn’t give it to him. How come that’s not questioned?”
I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed’s father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair “Gucci commander” Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. “I’ve tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life,” the defense minister said. “This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful.”
Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. “I was against it from the beginning, and that’s why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit.”
When I told Wardak that his son’s company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. “This is impossible,” he said. “I do not believe this.”
I believed the general when he said he really didn’t know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.
Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I’m told are “very detailed” reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.
The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.
The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? “The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ‘Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”
As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics.”
In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring.” He added that, despite oversight, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent.”
In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that–as with so much in Afghanistan–the United States doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.
Come join dozens of farmworker families from Immokalee and their allies at three exciting Publix actions in Lake Worth, Ft. Lauderdale and Miami this weekend!
publixAdd your voice to the demand that Publix — Florida’s largest privately held company — do its part to end the “harvest of shame!”
Action details:
Saturday, Nov 7:
1:30pm (Lake Worth): Picket in front of the Publix at 1910 Lake Worth Rd, Lake Worth, FL
4:00pm (Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood): Picket in front of the Publix at 5211 Sheridan St., Hollywood, FL
Sunday, Nov 8:
4:30pm (Miami): Picket in front of the Publix at 9755 NW 41st St., Doral, FL
For all the latest on the Publix campaign, visit the CIW site, http://www.ciw-online.org
Download a manager letter to deliver to your local Publix here: http://interfaithact.org/publix
Download the Publix campaign flyer here: http://www.sfalliance.org/resources/PUBflyer.pdf
Background:
In 1960, Edward R. Murrow’s award-winning documentary, “Harvest of Shame,” shed light on the poverty and deplorable working conditions faced by the nation’s migrant farmworkers. Today – nearly 50 years later – the harvest of shame continues for Florida tomato pickers.
Publix, Florida’s largest privately-owned company with sales of more than $12 billion during the first half of 2009, refuses to enter into an agreement with the CIW to guarantee fair wages and dignified working conditions for the tomato pickers in its supply chain. What’s more, Publix continues to purchase tomatoes from two Immokalee-based tomato farms where the victims in last season’s brutal slavery prosecution worked picking tomatoes.
Publix has two options. It can support social responsibility and take advantage of its buying power to make a positive difference in the lives of farmworkers, as so many retail industry leaders already have, or it can continue to ignore farmworkers’ plight, quietly profiting from Florida’s persistent harvest of shame.
The Novocain has got to wear off for black Americans and progressives. When it does, they will see that President Obama is not their savior.
Back in 1964, Malcolm X wrote that blacks were getting beat up but were suffering in silence, like a patient in the dentist’s jar, even with “blood running all down your jaw.” They didn’t know what was happening to them because of the Novocain the dentist had given them, he said.
Racial solidarity is the Novocain of the moment, a numbing agent for people who are being beaten up by the economy.
And if it weren’t for the Novocain, blacks and progressives would be insisting on much more from Obama: like a government jobs program, like a moratorium on home foreclosures, like an end to the war in Afghanistan, like a crackdown on police brutality, like a defense of our civil liberties.
Here’s just on example of how egregious the Obama administration has been.
In May, Obama’s Justice Department went before the Supreme Court to argue against a 23-year-old precedent that was established in the Michigan v. Jackson case to shore up our Sixth Amendment right to legal representation. The issue before the Court this year was whether a defendant who has already been appointed counsel may be interrogated by police without that counsel present. The Justice Department actually agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia that the Michigan restriction “serves no purpose,” and the Court ruled by a 5-4 decision that such interrogation was not a violation of a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
Or take the economy.
By any economic measure, the black community is in a severe depression. Nearly 25 percent of blacks live in poverty in the United States, compared with 8.6 percent of whites. Yet Obama proposed no targeted youth or adult jobs program as part of the $787 billion stimulus package.
Black politics used to be about more than just one person, whether that be the man on the street or the man in the White House. Blacks should treat Obama as they would any other person in power. It doesn’t help them, or him, to stand down, back up or hush up.
They have to give him some backbone.
But I keep hearing, “He’s doing the best he can under the circumstances” or, “Give the brother a break.” For some, it’s enough that he’s not “just not embarrassing black folk.”
At a conference in Atlanta of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network this summer, John Silvanus Wilson, the executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, urged people to have patience. And he told them, shockingly, to “crush the haters” who would challenge the pace of the administration in addressing black concerns.
But this very silence has allowed Obama to get away with not saying or doing anything that would appear to address black concerns. It also allows him to do things against their interest, like bailing out Wall Street fat cats or making speeches condemning blacks for their “irresponsible” behavior — something that no white politician could get away with it.
Obama has become a poor substitute for real structural progress.
We can’t back down on what we are trying to accomplish — a more civilized, humane and sustainable society. Malcolm X once said if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. And right now, Obama is the latter. When the Novocain wears off, more blacks and progressives will realize this — and demand better.
November 20-22, 2009, Fort Benning, Georgia:
Mass Mobilization to Shut Down the School of the Americas
* The SOA graduate-led military coup in Honduras and the increasing U.S. military involvement in Colombia put a renewed focus on the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) and the policies it represents.
* Thousands from across the Americas will converge on November 20-22 at Fort Benning, GA for a vigil and civil disobedience actions to speak out against the SOA/ WHINSEC and to demand a change in U.S. foreign policy.
* The vigil will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1989 SOA graduate-led Jesuit massacre in San Salvador, and the many other thousands of victims of SOA/ WHINSEC violence.
The military coup led by SOA graduates in Honduras has once again exposed the destabilizing and deadly effects that the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) has on Latin America. Torture survivors and human rights activists from across the Americas, including Bertha Oliva, the founder of the Committee of the Family Members of the Disappeared (COFADEH) from Honduras and human rights defenders from Colombia will travel to Fort Benning, Georgia to participate in the mobilization.
The campaign to close the SOA/ WHINSEC is in a crucial phase right now. Despite promising comments from President Obama during his 2008 election campaign, the SOA/ WHINSEC is still in operation, the U.S. is poring millions into failing “military solutions” to combat the drug problems in Mexico and the Pentagon is moving forward with plans to use seven Colombian military bases in Colombia for offensive U.S. military operations.
“It is up to us to hold those responsible accountable and to push for to closing of the School of the Americas and a change in US foreign policy” said Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch. “Too many have died and continue to suffer at the hands of graduates of this notorious institute.”
In the fall of 2009, opponents of the SOA/ WHINSEC achieved a victory when a joint House and Senate conference committee agreed to include language in the FY 2010 Defense Authorization bill that requires the Pentagon to release names of the graduates of the SOA/ WHINSEC to the public. The Pentagon had classified the names after the continued involvement of SOA/ WHINSEC attendees in human rights abuses became public.
For more information about the November vigil to close the SOA/ WHINSEC, lead-up actions and a complete schedule of events, visit www.SOAW.org
Florida Mass March on Weapons Makers
“End the War Economy” Healthcare, Not Warfare
12pm, Saturday, October 17th a rally will be held at the South East corner of Alafaya Blvd. (SR 434) and University Blvd , the main entrance to the University of Central Florida in Orlando . Following the rally participants will march 1/4 mile south along Alafaya Blvd. to the Central Florida Research Park entrance to demand an end to the war economy.
ORLANDO – In mid-October peace activists will hold two days of protest against corporate war profiteers based at the Central Florida Research Park in Orlando .
On Wednesday, October 14, 2009, a 12pm rally will be held at the free assembly area in front of the Student Union Building on the University of Central Florida campus. This will be a prelude to Saturday’s demonstration.
Starting at 12pm, Saturday, October 17th a rally will be held at the South East corner of Alafaya Blvd. (SR 434) and University Blvd , the main entrance to the University of Central Florida in Orlando . http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Orlando&state=fl&address=Sr+434+And+University+Blvd Following the rally participants will march 1/4 mile south along Alafaya Blvd. to the Central Florida Research Park entrance to demand an end to the war economy.
Parking is available in strip mall lots on the west side of Alafaya Blvd. on both sides of University Blvd. (Beware of lots with parking restrictions and tow warnings.)
The October 17th march is being held in solidarity with anti-war groups around the nation who are participating in a day of protest and action on October 17. During the summer a call for a nationwide day of action was issued by the National Assembly Against the Occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan .
The events are being organized by the Florida Peace Congress (FPC), a group which seeks to empower and unite peace/anti-war groups throughout the state of Florida . To date the Orlando action has been endorsed by more than 20 groups representing Miami , Tampa , St. Augustine , and Jacksonville . (List of endorsers below.)
HEALTHCARE, NOT WARFARE
While more than 18,000 Americans die annually for lack of healthcare services[1] (USA Today, 5/22/02) the United States allots more than $600 billion dollars for military spending each year. In June 2009 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the U.S. accounted for 42-percent of the global arms spending in 2008. The U.S. military budget is more than 7 times that of China .
Orlando’s Research Park is home to four of the top 10 recipients of tax payer dollars via the United States ’ bloated military budget. These corporations and their respective rank and earnings among defense contractors are:
#2 Boeing – $32 billion (2007)
#4 Northrup Grumman – $24 billion (2007)
#5 General Dynamics – $21 billion (2007)
#6 Raytheon – $19 billion (2007)
In total, these four corporations received $96 billion dollars in tax payer dollars in 2007 via the military budget.
Protest participants will call on Florida elected representatives, weapons makers’ employees, and the Florida general public to denounce the U.S. wars in Iraq , Afghanistan , and Pakistan , and militarism in general.
In his April 4, 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” Rev. Martin Luther King said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Organizers contend that the U.S. has a moral obligation to prioritize the funding of human needs over war profiteering.
Organizers also call on President Barack Obama to take note of Rev. King’s realization that “the potential destructiveness of modern weapons of war totally rules out the possibilities of war ever serving again as a negative good.”
For more information contact Jay D. Jurie at 407-323-5247, fogsmokefl@aol.com or Jeff Nall at 321-368-5093, sabletide@yahoo.com
Leaders of 20 of the most powerful governments in the world, representing 19 countries and the European Union, are descending upon Pittsburgh in late September. We, concerned residents participating in the local outreach working group of the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project, are asking for individuals and organizations that are seeking a better world to come and show their opposition to these undemocratic, closed meetings. Our future belongs to us, not to our governments!
We are calling for a diversity of actions throughout the week, and we hope that you can join us, as you are able. Below this update on resources is a detailed day-by-day list of events that we’ve organized. Additionally, there are a number of trainings, workshops and presentations happening over the next two weeks: http://resistg20.org/calendar.
Check out the new convergence space at 4374 Murray Ave. in Greenfield! Open hours this week are Thursday (Sept. 17) noon-8pm, Friday (Sept. 18) noon-8pm, Saturday (Sept. 19) 2pm-10pm, and Sunday (Sept. 20) 10am-8pm. We hope to be open even longer hours during the week of the G-20. Check the website for updates on hours of operation. We are currently in the process of hammering out space guidelines dealing with respectful conduct, law enforcement, media, consent and sexual assault. These will be posted on our site in the next day or two.
Our website also features vivid posters, flyers, promotional videos (including “The Anarchist Simpsons: Stephen Hawking Leads Riots against the G-20”), educational resources, a ride board, info on medics and their call to action, info on the students working group, and even the map of the announced security perimeter around the summit. So take a second to go there (http://resistg20.org) if you haven’t already!
As far as other resources go, the PGRP is happy to provide childcare for visiting dissidents. Local childcare specialists are committed to providing a safe and caring space for children during the convergence. The hours for childcare are 9:00am-9:00pm, on Thursday, September 24 and Friday, September 25. Ages for children are infant-12. More on childcare: http://resistg20.org/childcare
The housing working group has reported that the space we have available for housing during the actions is extremely limited. We have only a very small amount of space left in individual housing. If you are a local and still have some space, please fill out the form on http://resistg20.org/housing. If you are from out of town, note that the last day to apply for individual/ match-maker housing is Sept. 18. After that, we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to find space for everyone who requests it. If you’ve got friends or neighbors in Pittsburgh, now is the time to contact them!
We’ve got comms. Tin Can Comms Collective is a collection of communication rebels seeking to provide useful free tools for activists fighting the State and Capitalism. They are an anarchist group that has come together to help with the communication infrastructure for the Anti-G-20 protests because: People and Information want to be Free! Anyone who wants to be part of providing up-to-date and relevant information to people on the streets can get involved. It’s very easy. All you need is a cell-phone (they strongly suggest a pre-paid that can get text/sms messages) and opposable thumbs. Tin Can will collect information from websites, media, scouts and participants on the street. These communications will be filtered and then sent to those who are subscribed to one of their lists. You will receive texts. Go here for information on how to plug in: http://tincancomms.wordpress.com/
Lastly, the legal update. If you are arrested, witness an arrest, or to report surveillance, harassment, brutality or any other incidents please dial: 412-444-3553. To report a civil liberties violation, please contact the ACLU at 412-562-5015. With any other inquires please e-mail legal@resistg20.org. The PGRP legal team has committed to: running a legal hotline, answering calls from jail and arrest reports, tracking folks through jail and doing their best to communicate with support people on the outside. The team will be in communication with a group of attorneys about any legal emergencies during the summit and will do their best to help arrestees and victims of state repression get in touch with appropriate attorneys for criminal defense and possible civil litigation. The legal team has NOT committed to collecting individual legal information, so please fill out a legal support form and leave it with a friend or somebody in your affinity group! (available at www.g20legal.org) This will be incredibly helpful as they try to track you through the system. They are NOT committing to bailing people out of jail. If you are planning on risking arrest please make plans also to bail yourselves out. And they are NOT committing to securing pro-bono legal defense for all arrestees. They’ll do their best to match you up with appropriate legal help but if you are arrested, do plan on the possibility of relying either on a public defender or paying for legal representation.
THE ACTIONS AND EVENTS
Tuesday, September 22
On Tuesday, September 22, neighborhoods in Pittsburgh will be having community picnics, where long-time residents, short-time residents, and the early-bird protesters can share a meal and talk about the better world that they want to live in. The G-20 tries to present itself as leaders getting together, but whenever they meet it seems to cost millions and involve police hitting people over the head with batons. Let’s show them how a real civil gathering works: good people, good food, good times. Locals in the East End have already confirmed an Anti-G-20 Community Gathering in Friendship Park from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm Besides food, music and conversation, Rustbelt Radio, a project of Pittsburgh Indymedia, will be on hand collecting stories for its G-Infinity Media Project. The live, streaming audio project is a non-corporate, participatory media forum for the voices of the people who will not be in the room during the summit, who are affected by the G-20 economic policies but whose stories go largely untold. http://resistg20.org/tuesday
Wednesday, September 23
Wednesday night, September 23, at 7:00 pm, there will be a spokescouncil meeting for information sharing and coordination at our convergence space, located at 4374 Murray Ave. The spokescouncil is a place for affinity groups to share decisions that they have made and identify things that they need to do and decisions that they need to make.If you are planning on attending, PLEASE READ this page: http://resistg20.org/wednesday on the spokescouncil format.
Thursday, September 24
Thursday, September 24, will feature a People’s Uprising, a mass march to disrupt the G-20 summit. We’ll be starting at Arsenal Park at 2:30 pm in Lawrenceville, a vibrant working class community in the city, and marching to the G-20 summit downtown. Our theme is “Power from Below, Not Impositions from Above.” Our only permit is our feet and voices. The G-20 is in the house, throwing a party. Let’s crash it. Read the whole call to action here: http://resistg20.org/thursday
Friday, September 25
Friday, September 25, we’ll be working to undermine the G-20 summit by attacking their power, making connections to the local manifestations of their neoliberal agenda. The folks that gather in the convention center represent large governments that draw their power from collusion with powerful corporations, governments that draw their wealth from resource extraction and destruction to our world, and governments that maintain their forces through the direct violence of police forces and militaries. Without these structural supports, their power will disintegrate. The G-20 is in a house of cards: let’s shake the table. The action working group of the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project has drawn up a list of 100 potential targets, and many groups will be claiming a destination somewhere in the city. We call for these coordinated actions to end at 11:30 am in which we will demonstrate: we do not need to be together physically to be together in struggle. http://resistg20.org/friday
We encourage people to form affinity groups with those that they know and trust, to have familiar faces to stick with in the streets and people to organize and take action with. An affinity group is when you get together with folks who are on the same page as you about what kind of action you want to do. Maybe they’re your friends from work or school, maybe they’re your marching band mates. What each group’s action will be on Friday is up to that person or affinity group. We ask that each affinity group send one member of that group to our spokescouncil on Wednesday night to share information, coordinate and to pick a focus for Friday, if one is not already chosen.
After the actions end at 11:30 am, there will be an anti-authoritarian contingent in the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee’s state-sanctioned People’s March to the summit site. This contingent will adhere to the Pittsburgh Principles (http://resistg20.org/principles), respecting the tone and tactics of the march organizers.
We are working hard with many groups and individuals in order to ensure there is a solid foundation for all of these actions to be a success. We ask those who are able to contribute more than their bodies – those who are interested in helping to provide legal support, scouting, staffing the convergence center, medical support, food, housing, etc. — to do what they can to help the resistance. If you see a need that you can fill, fill it. If you’re not exactly sure how to do that but want to try, get in touch.
See you in the streets,
Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project
www.resistg20.org
September 23rd,2009
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WASHINGTON – August 21 – 93 scholars and Latin America experts from institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and New York University sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch today urging the organization to highlight various human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime, and to conduct its own investigation. The signers, who include well-known experts on Latin America such as Eric Hershberg, John Womack, Jr., and Greg Grandin, Honduras experts such as Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, and well-known authors including Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Naomi Klein, note that Human Rights Watch could help force the Obama administration to denounce the abuses and put greater pressure on the regime. Highlighting “politically-motivated killings, hundreds of arbitrary detentions, the violent repression of unarmed demonstrators, mass arrests of political opposition, and other violations of basic human rights,” the letter notes that Human Rights Watch has not issued a statement or release on the situation in Honduras since July 8, a little over a week following the June 28 coup d’etat.
The signers write, “…the coup could easily be overturned, if the Obama administration sought to do so, by taking more decisive measures, such as canceling all U.S. visas and freezing U.S. bank accounts of leaders of the coup regime.”
The letter comes just a day after Amnesty International issued a new report on the coup regime’s violations of human rights in cracking down on protests, and as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (part of the Organization of American States) wraps up a fact-finding delegation to Honduras. The author of the Amnesty International report, Esther Major, has stated that the report was released to call on the international community to take action to “prevent a human rights crisis occurring in Honduras.”
The full text of the letter follows:
August 21, 2009
Kenneth Roth Executive Director Human Rights Watch
Dear Mr. Roth,
We are deeply concerned by the absence of statements and reports from your organization over the serious and systematic human rights abuses that have been committed under the Honduran coup regime over the past six weeks. It is disappointing to see that in the weeks since July 8, when Human Rights Watch issued its most recent press release on Honduras [1], that it has not raised the alarm over the extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, and attacks on the press – many of which have been thoroughly documented – that have occurred in Honduras, in most cases by the coup regime against the supporters of the democratic and constitutional government of Manuel Zelaya. We call on your organization to fulfill your important role as a guardian of universal human rights and condemn, strongly and forcefully, the ongoing abuses being committed by the illegal regime in Honduras. We also ask that you conduct your own investigation of these crimes.
While Human Rights Watch [2] was quick to condemn the illegal coup d’etat of June 28 and the human rights violations that occurred over the following week, which helped shine the spotlight of international media on these abuses, the absence of statements from your organization since the week following the coup has contributed to the failure of international media to report on subsequent abuses.
The coup regime’s violent repression in Honduras has not stopped. Well-respected human rights organizations in Honduras, such as the Committee for the Relatives of the Disappeared Detainees (COFADEH), and international human rights monitors have documented a series of politically-motivated killings, hundreds of arbitrary detentions, the violent repression of unarmed demonstrators, mass arrests of political opposition, and other violations of basic human rights under the coup regime. The killing of anti-coup activists has beendocumented in pressreports, bringing to a total of ten people known or suspected to have been killed in connection to their political activities. Press freedom watchdogs such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have issued releases decrying the regime’s attacks and threats against various journalists and the temporary closure and military occupation of news outlets. Various NGO’s have issued alerts regarding the politically motivated threats to individuals, and concern for people detained by the regime, but no such statements have come from Human Rights Watch.
This situation is all the more tragic in that the coup could easily be overturned, if the Obama administration sought to do so, by taking more decisive measures, such as canceling all U.S. visas and freezing U.S. bank accounts of leaders of the coup regime. Yet not only does the administration continue to prop up the regime with aid money through the Millennium Challenge Account and other sources, but the U.S. continues to train Honduran military students at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) – the notorious institution formerly known as the School of the Americas. If the coup were overturned, and the democratically elected government restored, it is clear that the many rampant human rights abuses would immediately cease. If Human Rights Watch would raise its voice, it would be much more difficult for the Obama administration to ignore Honduras’ human rights situation and maintain financial and other support for its illegal regime.
We know that there are, sadly, innumerable urgent human rights crises around the world, all of which require your attention. Addressing the deteriorating situation in Honduras, however, is of paramount importance given its potential to serve as a precedent for other coups and the rise of other dictatorships, not just in Honduras, but throughout the region. History has shown that such coups leave deep scars on societies, and that far too often they have led to the rise of some of history’s most notorious rights abusers, such as in Pinochet’s Chile, Videla’s Argentina, and Cedras’ Haiti, to name but a few. As human rights defenders with extensive experience in dealing with the appalling human consequences of these regimes, Human Rights Watch is clearly well placed to understand the urgency of condemning the Honduran regime’s abuses and to helping ensure the coup is overturned, that democracy is restored, and that political repression and other human rights abuses are stopped. Your colleagues in the Honduran human rights community are counting on you, as are the Honduran people. We hope you will raise your voice on Honduras.
Sincerely,
Leisy Abrego University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow UC Irvine
Paul Almeida Associate Professor, Department of Sociology Texas A&M University
Alejandro Alvarez Béjar Professor, Economic Faculty UNAM-Mexico
Tim Anderson Senior Lecturer in Political Economy University of Sydney Australia
Anthony Arnove Author and Editor Brooklyn, NY
Marc Becker Truman State University Kirksville, MO
Marjorie Becker Associate professor, Department of History University of Southern California
John Beverley Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies University of Pittsburgh
Larry Birns Director, Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington, DC Jefferson Boyer Professor of Anthropology (ethnography of Honduras) Appalachian State University Jules Boykoff Associate Professor of Political Science Pacific University
Edward T. Brett Professor of History La Roche College, Pittsburgh, PA
Renate Bridenthal Professor of History, Emerita Brooklyn College, CUNY
Bob Buzzanco Professor of History University of Houston
Aviva Chomsky Professor of History and Coordinator, Latin American Studies Salem State College
Noam Chomsky Professor of Linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology
James D. Cockcroft SUNY Honorary Editor, Latin American Perspectives
Daniel Aldana Cohen Graduate Student New York University
Mike Davis Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing University of California-Riverside
Pablo Delano Professor of Fine Arts Trinity College , Hartford CT
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Professor Emeritus California State University
Luis Duno-Gottberg Rice University Les W. Field Professor of Anthropology The University of New Mexico
Dana Frank Professor of History University of California, Santa Cruz
Todd Gordon Department of Political Science York University, Toronto Manu Goswami Department of History New York University Jeff Gould Rudy Professor of History Indiana University
Greg Grandin Department of History New York University
Richard Grossman Department of History Northeastern Illinois University
Peter Hallward Professor of Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University, UK.
Nora Hamilton Professor, Political Science University of Southern California
Jim Handy Professor of History University of Saskatchewan
Tom Hayden Writer
Doug Henwood Editor and Publisher Left Business Observer
Eric Hershberg Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada
Kathryn Hicks Assistant Professor of Anthropology The University of Memphis Irene B. Hodgson Professor of Spanish, Director of the Latin American Studies Minor Interim Director of the Academic Service Learning Semesters Xavier University
Forrest Hylton Assistant Professor of Political Science/Int’l. Relations Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
Susanne Jonas Latin America and Latino Studies University of California, Santa Cruz
Rosemary A. Joyce Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences, Professor and Chair of Anthropology University of California , Berkeley
Karen Kampwirth Knox College
Naomi Klein Journalist, syndicated columnist and author
Andrew H. Lee Librarian for History, European Studies, Iberian Studies, & Politics Bobst Library New York University
Catherine LeGrand Associate Professor Dept. of History, McGill University.
Deborah Levenson Associate Professor of History Boston College
Frederick B. Mills Professor of Philosophy Bowie State University
Cynthia E. Milton Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire de l’Amérique latine Canada Research Chair in Latin American History, Professeure agregée/Associate Professor, Département d’histoire Université de Montréal
Lena Mortensen Assistant Professor, Anthropology University of Toronto Scarborough
Carole Nagengast Professor Department of Anthropology University of New Mexico
Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy
Marysa Navarro Charles Collis Professor of History Dartmouth College
Sharon Erickson Nepstad Professor of Sociology University of New Mexico
Mary Nolan Professor, Department of History New York University
Elizabeth Oglesby Assistant Professor School of Geography and Development Center for Latin American Studies University of Arizona
Jocelyn Olcott Department of History Duke University
Christian Parenti Contributing Editor, The Nation Visiting Scholar CUNY Graduate Center Ivette Perfecto Professor University of Michigan Héctor Perla Jr. Assistant Professor Latin American and Latino Studies University of California, Santa Cruz
John Pilger Journalist and documentary filmmaker
Adrienne Pine Assistant Professor of Anthropology American University
Deborah Poole Professor, Anthropology Johns Hopkins University
Suyapa Portillo Pomona College History Dept.
Vijay Prashad George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies Trinity College
Margaret Randall Feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist
Marcus Rediker Professor and Chair in the Department of History University of Pittsburgh
Gerardo Renique Associate Professor, Department of History City College of the City University of New York
Ken Roberts Professor, Department of Government Cornell University
Nancy Romer Professor of Psychology Brooklyn College City University of New York Seth Sandronsky U.S. journalist
Aaron Schneider Assistant Professor Political Science Tulane University
Rebecca Schreiber Associate Professor, American Studies Department University of New Mexico
Ernesto Seman Journalist Richard Stahler-Sholk Professor, Department of Political Science Eastern Michigan University
Julie Stewart Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology Assistant Investigator, Institute of Public and International Affairs University of Utah
Sylvia N. Tesh Lecturer, Latin American Studies University of Arizona.
Miguel Tinker Salas Professor of History Pomona College
Mayo C. Toruño Professor of Economics California State University, San Bernardino
Sheila R. Tully San Francisco State University
John Vandermeer Asa Gray Distinguished University Professor Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Michigan
Jocelyn S. Viterna Assistant Professor Departments of Sociology and Social Studies Harvard University
Steven S. Volk Professor, Department of History Director, Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (CTIE) Oberlin College
Maurice L. Wade Professor of Philosophy, International Studies, and Graduate Public Policy Studies Trinity College
Shannon Drysdale Walsh Fulbright-Hays Fellow Doctoral Candidate Department of Political Science University of Notre Dame
Jeffery R. Webber Assistant Professor, Political Science University of Regina, Canada
Barbara Weinstein Professor, Department of History New York University
Mark Weisbrot Co-Director Center for Economic and Policy Research
Gregory Wilpert Adjunct Professor of Political Science Brooklyn College
Sonja Wolf Institute of Social Research National Autonomous University of Mexico
John Womack, Jr. Professor of History, Emeritus Harvard University
Elisabeth Wood Professor of Political Science Yale University
Richard L. Wood Associate Professor Department of Sociology University of New Mexico
Marilyn B. Young Professor of History New York University
Marc Zimmerman Modern and Classical Languages University of Houston
First: The teabaggers must not win this one. Back in elementary school, most of us learned that when a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he’ll will keep doing more of it. In fact, the longer he goes without comeuppance, the bolder and badder he becomes, and the harder it is to make him stop. Every success teaches him something new about how to use terror for maximum effect and tempts him to push the envelope and see what else he can get away with. Do nothing, and he’ll soon take over the whole playground.
And it happens like this for bullies in groups, too. Living in a fascist regime is just living in a town dominated by the Mob, a street gang, the KKK, or a corrupt sheriff.
It only takes a small handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up their civil rights, abandoning democracy and doing what they’re told, just so they can keep their jobs, windows and families intact.
The main imperative in life becomes staying off the goons’ radar. All the enforcers need to do is make an horrific example out of one or two troublemakers every now and then — and the resulting fear will keep everybody else quietly in line.
Conservatives have tried to subdue other Americans this way for centuries, so there’s nothing new going on here. And this is the way they’ve always done it: they used race (and yes, the birthers and anti-health care rioters are, at root, all about race) and economic calamity to whip up a posse of terrified, well-armed vigilantes, and then turned them loose on society to “enforce order.”
Given their colossal investment in organizing and indoctinating the teabaggers, we’d be stupid to believe that this is all going to go away when Congress returns to Washington in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly empowered mobs are very likely to stick around town and see what else they can do to keep the muck stirred up.
Our choice now is stark: knock them back while they’re still new, small and not yet entrenched; or deal with them later, when they’ve got some real power to fight back with, and the cost to all of us will be so much higher.
Second: Think nationally, fight locally. The conservatives are running this effort as a national campaign — but that’s not where the real fight is. The terror that fuels fascism is always intensely, intimately local in scale.
Fascist goon squads always recruit from the neighborhood — they’re built on people you know. Since that’s where they start, that’s where they have to be stopped.
This is why all the best tactics involve community-level action. The high-level fight in Congress and the media is already under way, and the Democratic leadership is fighting it with unusual elan. But anybody who sits this one out because they assume that the folks in D.C. have it all handled for them shouldn’t be surprised when they start getting “special treatment” from longtime neighbors, or discover that they can’t park their car downtown any more without having it vandalized.
That’s just the next baby step up from where we are now; and in some places, it’s already started to happen. Winning this means getting out there and defending our community’s standards and boundaries now, while they’re still there to be defended.
Third: Brush up on our nonviolent resistance — but leave the heavy lifting and rough enforcement to the cops. It’s true that the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them. But there are ways to stand up to them that don’t involve getting down to the eye-for-an-eye level.
Back home, we had a saying: “Never mudwrestle a pig. You will lose, and the pig enjoys it.”
If we meet thuggery with thuggery, we will lose, because they’re just plain better at it. And make no mistake: they will enjoy it. Right now, the right wing is looking — hard — to make the case that they’re the innocent victim and the left instigated this whole thing. This quote from religious right organizer Gary Bauer is typical of the genre:
My fear, given the stakes and emotions on both sides, is that union thugs, ACORN activists and left-wing anarchists (who ransacked the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul during last year’s Republican National Convention) will turn violent, and innocent people will get hurt. If that happens, the radical left will bear the responsibility for demonizing free speech.
The Nazis used this kind of victim-blaming to tremendous effect as they built up their party.
We must not — must not — give our proto-brownshirts any basis to make the same kind of argument. (Of course, the absence of evidence will only drive them to make up fake victims; but then we get to call them out as whining liars with a big fat persecution complex, which is always a fun way to spend a news cycle or two.)
It’s about the moral high ground, people. Any choices we make must be consistent with our own values, or we betray both ourselves and the country.
Standing up for health care reform is important; but before that, the country needs to see us standing up for civil discourse and the right to democratic free speech. Since we’re defending the rule of law, our best tactic is to use that law.
You have a right to attend a public meeting and speak your mind in a civil, respectful manner. You do not have a right to be disruptive or deprive other people of their right to be heard. And most jurisdictions have laws about disturbing the peace and creating a public nuisance — laws, let’s not forget, that the Bush regime didn’t hesitate to stretch until the elastic gave out against people who merely showed up at meetings with the wrong bumper stickers or T-shirts.
Since we’re not Bush goons, we can’t go around arresting people who haven’t yet broken any laws. But when people — from either side — cross that line, it’s time for the cops and prosecutors to make the point for us: bullying people in a public meeting (or anywhere else) is illegal and will not be tolerated in this county.
Fourth: We need to make absolutely sure that the media get the story right. The teabaggers would run out of power with the flick of a switch if the media would just turn off their cameras. But the cold reality is that this kind of drama is a real ratings-booster.
It would be like telling lions to lay off that elephant carcass. Left alone, the media (local news in particular) will turn these people into cultural heroes. They couldn’t turn their backs on this if the republic depended on it.
Since we can’t beat ‘em, we’ll have to join ‘em. The best cure for bad speech is always more speech. This means bringing cameras and documenting everything, getting it up on YouTube, and blogging it.
It also means coordinating rapid-response letterwriting to the local paper and keeping down-home reporters well-fed every single day with some new theme that reinforces the idea of concerned nonpartisan citizens trying to keep control over their democratic discourse in the face of organized thugs. Since the media are watching, let’s make sure they see it all.
Fifth: Support legislators who don’t show fear. The Democratic Party seems to be playing this just right (so far). The leadership has made it known that these noisy, scary people don’t represent the 73 percent of Americans who support health care reform. The GOP is running the risk of being marginalized as not only the Party of No, but the Party of Moonbat Crazy.
If you’ve never attended a public meeting in your life, August 2009 is the month you need to start. Your congressperson’s Web site probably lists a schedule, or at least a number you can call to inquire.
But that’s just a first step. Do more. Write. Call. Find out where your local congressional office is, and just drop by when you’re in the neighborhood. Tell the staff how you feel — about health care reform, about the teabaggers, about your legislator’s brave stance in the face of this.
If they’re showing stress, encourage them to stand firm. A constituent in the office counts for thousands writing e-mails, so an in-person visit is 15 minutes incredibly well spent.
One visit or call is good. More is better. Put it in your schedule to contact your representatives at least once a week for the duration, and make sure they’re not buckling under the pressure.
Sixth: Shut down the hate talkers. In most parts of the country, the teabaggers are coming straight out of right-wing talk-radio audiences. For hours every day, they’re mainlining raw emotion and toxic misinformation.
They’re going put your kids before “death panels!” They’re going to kill your granny! You’re going to have to call the White House to get a bone set! You’ll be a Real American Hero if you get out there and join the “resistance!”
Cutting off this endless torrent of lies, fearmongering and validation will go a long way toward powering down the whole movement. (Conversely, what happens when these kinds of radio instigators are left to spin it all the way out to the end can be summed up in two words: Radio Rwanda.)
The basic recipe: Record their shows. Take notes of anything they say that is intimidating, threatening, or aimed at inciting violence against a named target. And while you’re at it, note every single advertiser they have.
Then write a polite letter the CEOs of the sponsoring companies. Throw them some choice quotes from these shows and ask them if this is the kind of thing they want their product associated with. (Point out that if their own employees said things like this at work, they’d be fired on the spot.)
Often, the CEO has no clue that any of this is happening and will pull the ads as soon as she finds out what’s being done in her name. This has worked extremely well — and quickly — at both the local and national level.
Finally: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Even if we succeed this time, let’s not kid ourselves that this is over. The conservatives are investing a lot of money and effort to build a mass movement that is explicitly aimed at destroying a Democratic government — and if we learned anything from the Clinton years, it’s that they’re not going to let up for a second as long as the Democrats are in control.
This is our new reality — and it comes straight out of Hitler’s playbook (check out Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf). Their intention is to keep the outrage junkies high by giving them a never-ending supply of new, made-up reasons to act out.
When the birth certificate fracas cools, they’re standing by with “death panels.” When that one’s run its course, there will be something else — over and over, every few weeks, for as long as the Dems rule.
Which means that even if we win this round, we can’t stand down. We’re going to be pushing back against these bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.
There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they’re going to get very good at public intimidation and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule.
That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.