Ron Jacobs : Cops and Contradictions

Demonstrators form a "human oil spill" in Burlington, VT, July 30, 2012. Photo by Sarah Harris / North Country Public Radio. Inset image below: Riot police used rubber bullets, sting ball pellets, and pepper spray against Burlington demonstraters. Image from Occupy Wall Street / Facebook.
In Asheville and Burlington:
Cops and contradictions

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont... However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 27, 2012

BURLINGTON, Vermont -- Leaving Asheville, North Carolina, the place I called home from summer 2005 through summer 2012, always provides me with a mixture of regret and relief. I love the beer, music, scenery and my friends there, but the fact that it is in the U.S. South -- with its generally reactionary politics -- always leaves a bitter taste.

Asheville itself is a city whose relationship to its home state is much like the relationship Austin has to Texas. It is a liberal to progressive enclave in a wasteland of Bible Belt intolerance and anti-worker policies designed to keep the workforce in a state of perpetual desperation. Low wages, no unions and bosses who can fire folks almost at will seem to be the order of the day in states like North Carolina.

The high unemployment rates in the state keep the marginally employed and those just a paycheck away from that status in a situation not much different from the slavery once commonplace there.

A friend of mine plays in a number of symphony orchestras in the region. Every summer she performs in a few pops concerts that serve as fundraisers for these ensembles. The most recent one was in a town about 50 miles east of Asheville. She described the scene to me over beer and pizza.

I pulled into the parking lot after getting lost on the back roads. The lot was filled with BMWs, Mercedes SUVs, Lexuses, and Escalades. Standing around in small groups underneath tents covered in corporate logos and set up to keep the sun away were groups of mostly older people.

The women wore light clothing that they probably paid too much for. The men, almost to a T, were dressed in white polo shirts, deck shoes, and pink Bermuda shorts. Many of the automobiles sported Romney bumper stickers and, as I walked toward the performers’ entrance to the stage area, I couldn’t help noticing the number of audience members sporting Romney campaign buttons.

The show was your standard fare: Sousa and other patriotic nonsense, show tunes and a couple edited versions of popular classical tunes. The patriotic tunes received the most applause, of course. When I got back to my car there was a Romney campaign leaflet stuck under the windshield wiper.

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont (where I currently reside), and the hope of progressive change seems minimal. However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

After I bought my airline tickets to Asheville I found out that the Northeast Governors Association (and Eastern Canadian PMs) would be holding their conference in downtown Burlington the same weekend. Like its larger parent, the U.S. Governor’s Association Conference, the northeastern conference is a weekend of political backslapping, conspiring and feasting with lots of corporate sponsorship.

The context of this year’s conference is the ongoing campaign by the energy corporation HydroQuebec to dam up Quebec’s rivers, destroy the pristine wilderness they flow through, and displace the people and wildlife living there. Another part of the context is the desire of the oil industry to ship oil from the tar sand fields in Canada through the New England states.

To top off their arrogance, Quebec Premier Charest, whose refusal to back off of tuition hikes and other changes to Quebec’s higher education system have sparked a strike and massive protest, was feted.
So, protests were planned.

Since I could not afford to change my travel dates I wished my comrades well. Imagine my surprise upon returning to Burlington and finding out that Burlington police had attacked protesters with rubber and other “non-lethal” weapons for attempting to block roads around the conference site.

Of course, in the wake of the police attack, politicians and police administrators were quick to blame the protesters for their “aggressive” tactics. Response from some segments of the community was swift. University of Vermont literature professor Nancy Welch wrote in a Facebook post regarding the police attack:

What Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling leaves out of his defense of the police assault on protestors outside the Northeast Governors Conference is that the “confrontation” and “conflict” the protestors engaged in was nonviolent.

Just as the men and women who sat in at Greensboro lunch counters and marched on Montgomery in the Civil Rights era had a conflict with Jim Crow and sought to confront it, so do the people who marched Sunday have a conflict with heads of state who push such environmentally and socially devastating projects as Tar Sands and the F-35 bombers while defunding family planning clinics, public services, and state universities.

The protestors’ confrontation took the classic Civil Rights-era forms: lying down in front of the hotel the governors were huddled up in; standing in front of the bus that was to whisk the governors away to dinner. It is sobering that police chose to respond in Bull Connor fashion by unleashing violence. Even more sobering is that our Democratic mayor and governor are championing them.

The fallout continues. The newly elected Democratic mayor of Burlington is now calling for a conversation between the city, the police and citizens. At the same time, some kind of investigation is supposedly being arranged. The likelihood is that little will change and the police will be able to do what they please when situations like that which occurred the weekend of July 29th happen again.

Earlier in this piece I wrote that political environments like that found in North Carolina tend to heighten the contradictions between the rulers and the ruled. So do actions like those undertaken by Burlington police outside the Northeast Governor’s Conference. One can only anticipate with trepidation what contradictions law enforcement in Charlotte, N.C. and Tampa, Florida will heighten when the U.S. Republicans and Democrats hold their conventions in the coming days.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Jay D. Jurie : Keystone XL is a Pipeline to Big Profits

Canadian tar sands crude oil. Image from The Alaska Gas Pipeline.
Keystone XL:
A pipeline to big oil profits

Former NASA scientist Jim Hansen has argued that if tar sands development continues and the pipeline is built, it is essentially 'game over' for climate change.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2011

On July 25, 2010, a pipeline linking Sarnia, Ontario to an oil refinery at Griffith, Indiana, spilled more than 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. According to environmental reporter Kari Lydersen, this spill was ranked by the EPA as the single largest ever in the Midwestern U.S.

Tar sands crude, composed of tar, silica, clay, and other earthen materials, must be diluted with a natural gas-based solvent so it will become sufficiently viscous to flow through a pipe. In this way, natural gas produced by the environmentally-damaging process known as "hydrofracking" may be linked with tar sands development.

As reported by Lydersen, when the Kalamazoo River spill occurred, this "diluted bitumen" or "dilbit" released benzene into the atmosphere, requiring nearby homes to be evacuated, some permanently. Because the "dilbit" resembles a light form of tar more than crude oil, it is nowhere near as responsive to traditional mitigation and restoration measures.

Having missed an EPA deadline, clean-up efforts by pipeline owner Enbridge, Inc., on 200 acres near Marshall continue more than a year after the spill.

This sort of scenario may be in store for a much larger swath of the Central Plains states and Texas if the Keystone Extra Large (XL) 36" diameter pipeline with a capacity of 500,000 gallons per day is approved later this year by President Barack Obama.

Snaking its way from Hardisty, Alberta, through a corner of Saskatchewan Province into Montana, the pipeline would pass through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas before arriving at terminals in Port Arthur, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nebraska's Republican Governor Dave Heineman is among those who have asked President Obama to veto the pipeline, as it would be built over the Ogallala Aquifer, a major plains water source.

Historically known as tar sands, industry now prefers the comparatively sanitized term oil sands. Huge deposits of this naturally-occurring bituminous material are located in the northeastern boreal forest and peat bogs of Canada's Alberta Province. Most are found along the Athabasca River and in the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits. Estimates of the potential oil reserves range from equal to eight times those of Saudi Arabia.

Unlike conventional Saudi-style petroleum that can be pumped to the surface through wells, tar sands must be extracted through strip mining. Since these deposits are found underneath about 54,000 square miles of Alberta, this process potentially exposes a huge amount of land and water to substantial and lasting environmental damage.

As with mountain-top removal, "remediation" in the best post-mining scenario is only an approximation of the original topography and ground cover. Covering some 120 square miles, Syncrude Corp. operates the single largest mine of any sort in the world. This mine and others have already turned sizable chunks of Alberta into toxic, oily moonscapes.

Through the various phases of mining and processing, tar sands production releases considerably more greenhouses gases than does conventional petroleum production. Due to operations presently under way, Canada has already raised its gas emissions substantially, and is consequently out of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, to which it is a signatory.

Under the conservative Stephen Harper government, this may help explain why Canada refused to support an extension of the protocol in June of this year. Petroleum exports are not only important to Canadian corporate interests, but U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows that in terms of either crude or total petroleum, Canada has become the single largest supplier of oil to the U.S., ahead of Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

Demand for tar sands oil is not driven exclusively by market forces, but is actively promoted by those who have a self-interest in keeping western society on the "hard energy path" for as long as it remains profitable. Tar sands producers include Albian Sands, composed of Shell Canada, Chevron, and Marathon Oil, and Suncor, which involves Shell, ConocoPhillips, Petro-Canada, and Husky.

Another major player is Syncrude, Corp., a seven-partner consortium that includes Suncor, Canadian Oil Sands, Ltd., Nippon Oil, Japan's major oil firm, Sinopec, representing Chinese interests, Imperial Oil, which is a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, and Murphy Oil, which is associated with Wal-Mart.

Involvement of Japanese and Chinese interests with tar sands mining may tie directly into the Keystone XL pipeline. Whereas most of the tar sands crude refined in the Midwest is destined for the U.S. market, according to Texans Against Tar Sands, much of the crude flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline will go to foreign-owned refineries on the Gulf Coast for export.

Others involved include the Koch Brothers. Environmental writer David Sassoon has pointed out that Koch Industries, through its subsidiary Flint Hills Resources Canada, Ltd., imports about 250,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day to the Pine Bend Refinery it owns near St. Paul, Minnesota. Pine Bend processes approximately 25% of the tar sands crude the U.S. currently receives from Alberta. According to Sassoon, Koch Industries is poised to become a major beneficiary of the Keystone XL pipeline if it is completed.

ConocoPhillips and TransCanada are partners in the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Estimates for the construction cost of the pipeline range from 7 to 13 billion dollars. Political observer Joe Jordan and others have pointed out the influential role Paul Elliott, TransCanada's main Washington, DC, lobbyist, played in Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid.

In December 2009 Elliott was named as a director of the Canadian American Business Council, which also included ExxonMobil and Shell. On August 26, 2011, under now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department found that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would have a "minimal" environmental impact.

No Tar Sands protest at the White House. Image from Inhabitat.
Former NASA scientist Jim Hansen has argued that if tar sands development continues and the pipeline is built, it is essentially "game over" for climate change and efforts to slow global warming. Reflecting the choice between "hard" vs. "soft" energy paths first described by Amory Lovins in the 1970s, Hansen remarked that "if the United States is buying the dirtiest stuff [tar sands], it also surely will be going after oil in the deepest ocean, the Arctic, and shale deposits; and harvesting coal via mountaintop removal and long-wall mining."

Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would more firmly place the U.S on the "hard" path. Not only would this keep consumers enslaved to Big Oil, but in the long run a dependence on conventional fuels, including tar sands, is unsustainable. Rag Blog contributor Roger Baker has frequently warned of the crisis posed by "peak oil," whereby continued dependence on a dwindling resource is a recipe for economic and environmental disaster. Funding and support would be diminished for the "soft" path of renewable energy, green economy expansion, mass public transportation, and urban redesign.

Most readers of The Rag Blog are doubtless aware of the civil disobedience organized by the environmental group 350.org in front of the White House. At the end of two weeks of protest, 1,252 people had been arrested in opposition to the pipeline and over 600,000 had signed a petition against pipeline construction. It is anticipated there will be further protests as the proposal continues to work its way through the approval process.

Coupled with the insistence that tar sands mining and the pipeline be halted and the "soft" path taken, a campaign for the entire energy sector to be placed under public ownership and democratic control must be launched and aggressively waged.

In the U.S. today there are abundant examples of successful energy production and distribution in the form of "municipal power." These public utilities offer a relevant model for energy policy as a whole, though decentralization and democratic control need to be enhanced.

Our shared resources and the future of the planet are far too vital for the private market to irresponsibly squander for the sake of short-term profits.

This article is dedicated to Ted Gleichman, a friend from Portland, Oregon, among those arrested, and to all the "Keystone 1252."

Sources: "Athabasca Oil Sands" entry, Wikipedia; Enbridge.com; Energy Information Administration, "Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries," U.S. Department of Energy, August 30, 2011; Ted Glick, "The Tar Sands Action (smile)," Portside.com, September 5, 2011; Joe Jordan, "The Pipeline, Hillary Clinton, and Nebraska Politics," Nebraska.watchdog.org, December 15, 2010; David Ljunggren, "Canada Reveals It Expects U.S. Will Back Pipeline," Reuters, September 1, 2011; Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace, NY: Harper Colophon, 1977; Kari Lydersen, "A Year After Pipeline Spill, Tar Sands Oil Still Plagues a Michigan Community," Onearth.org, July 25, 2011; Elizabeth McGowan, "NASA's Hansen Explains Decision to Join Keystone Pipeline Protests," Solveclimatenews.com, August 29, 2011; "Oil Sands" entry, Wikipedia; David Sassoon, "Koch Brothers Positioned to Be Big Winners if Keystone XL Pipeline is Approved, Solveclimatenews.com, February 10, 2011; Suncor.com; Texans Against Tar Sands, Facebook group; 350.org; TransCanada.com; Eve Troeh, "Keystone or Bust," Marketplace, Publicradio.org, July 26, 2011.

[Jay D. Jurie, a veteran of SDS at the University of Colorado at Boulder, now teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Weissman : U.S. and Iran: Nonviolence 101

Was there meddling in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004-2005?
Iran: Nonviolence 101

Washington's promotion of nonviolent resistance in other countries is already casting suspicion on a number of activists and thinkers who, wittingly or not, have allowed themselves to become pawns in open -- and covert -- programs to 'promote democracy.'

By Steve Weissman / June 22, 2009

Peter Ackerman and Ramin Ahmadi called the revolution on January 4, 2006, in an article in the International Herald Tribune with the prophetic title "Iran's Future? Watch the Streets."

"Against all odds, nonviolent tactics such as protests and strikes have gradually become common in Iran's domestic political scene," they wrote. "Student activists have frequently resorted to, and the violent response of the regime and repeated attacks of the paramilitaries have not succeeded in silencing them."

Iran's medical professionals, teachers, workers, bus drivers and women were also using non-violent tactics such as protests, industrial action, and hunger strikes in their fight for equal rights and civil liberties, the authors reported.

These "uncoordinated actions" had created "a grass-roots movement ... waiting to be roused," urged Ackerman and Ahmadi. But, "its cadres so far lack a clear strategic vision and steady leadership."

Where would the Iranians find this vision and leadership?

"Nongovernmental organizations around the world should expand their efforts to assist Iranian civil society, women's groups, unions and journalists," the authors wrote. But, they left out a salient fact. In a chilling mix of Mahatma Gandhi and James Bond, Ackerman and Ahmadi themselves were already working with the United States government to engineer regime change in Iran.

A Wall Street whiz kid who made his fortune in leveraged buy-outs, the billionaire Ackerman was chair of Freedom House, a hotbed of neo-con support for American intervention just about everywhere. In this pursuit, he has promoted the use of nonviolent civil disobedience in American-backed "color revolutions" from Serbia to the Ukraine, Georgia, and Venezuela, where it failed.

Ahmadi teaches medicine at Yale and co-founded the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, using initial grants of $1.6 million in 2004 from the U.S. Department of State, according to The New York Times. Washington reportedly continued its open-handed support in succeeding years, allowing the center to publicize the abuses of the Ayatollahs in English and Farsi.

Ahmadi and the center also ran regular workshops for Iranians on nonviolent civil disobedience. These were in Dubai, across the straits from Iran. Some of the sessions operated under the name Iranian Center for Applied Nonviolence and included a session on popular revolts around the world, especially the "color revolutions."

According to The Times, at least two members of the Serbian youth movement Otpor participated, as did the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which Peter Ackerman founded and chaired. The sessions taught the Iranian participants how to use Hushmail, an encrypted e-mail account, and Martus software to upload information about human rights abuses without leaving any trace on the originating computer.

"We were certain that we would have trouble once we went back to Tehran," said one of the Iranians. "This was like a James Bond camp for revolutionaries."

No one should question the value of nonviolent civil disobedience for those who would bring down an unpopular government. Nor does the American training deny the very real grievances felt by the millions of Iranians who have taken to the streets -- or by the lesser numbers of middle class women who banged pots and pans as part of earlier CIA destabilization programs in Brazil and Chile. Even more important, no one should doubt the courage and commitment of anyone who would stand up against the Ayatollahs and their repressive state power.

But the presence of American involvement adds several dynamics of its own, which Ackerman and Ahmadi failed to explain to their Iranian trainees.

First, the Americans decide where to put their efforts -- and when to stop them. Washington does not fund or provide training and technology for non-violent revolutions against regimes it backs, as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel or Colombia.

Second, the American meddling makes it easier for the Ayatollahs to build support within their own ranks and among a large majority of the population for whatever repressive measures they finally decide to take.

Third, the nonviolent participants know nothing of other moves that the dark side of the American government might be making at the same time, whether staging acts of provocation, or supporting terrorist activities by breakaway groups such as the Baluchi Jundallah. Nor do the vast majority of participants know that American intelligence regularly uses training sessions of all kinds to recruit individual agents.

Fourth, the Iranian activists want to win. At least some in the America government might prefer to provoke a brutal defeat, a Tiananmen Square, to further isolate Iran and bring pressure within the Obama administration for a military response to the Iranian nuclear program.

Fifth, nonviolent tactics and organizational discipline offer ways to win the support of soldiers and police officers, isolate would be provocateurs, and avoid giving the government any easy excuse to bang heads and kill people. The same techniques also give the organizers ways to turn off the protest, as appears to have happened during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

One other dynamic has more lasting effects. During the Cold War, the CIA funded and manipulated a number of liberal and social democratic intellectuals, labor unions, civil society groups and publications. The CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and its vast network were perhaps the best known. When journalists at Ramparts and elsewhere exposed the CIA's hand, many of these individuals and groups became discredited for having allowed Cold Warriors and dirty tricksters to use them.

Washington's promotion of nonviolent resistance in other countries is already casting suspicion on a number of activists and thinkers who, wittingly or not, have allowed themselves to become pawns in open -- and covert -- programs to "promote democracy." Nonviolent activists everywhere need to draw a clear line against cooperating with governments of any stripe in this foreign meddling.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. He is also a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Source / truthout

Also see Iran and the USA: Who's Diddling Democracy? by Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2009.

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Interview with Tim DeChristopher, Utah Oil Lease Spoiler

In its final days, the Bush administration tried to sell drilling rights to Utah’s Red Rock Country. Student Tim DeChristopher purchased a chunk of that land in an act of civil disobedience.
Modern-Day Monkeywrencher
By Martin Stainthorp / April 10, 2009

During the final days of the Bush administration, Tim DeChristopher’s civil disobedience drew attention to a rushed federal auction for Utah drilling rights.

On Dec. 19, Tim DeChristopher, 27, walked into a Bureau of Land Management building in Salt Lake City where an auction was being held. The federal government was selling drilling rights on 164,000 acres of land in Utah’s Red Rock Country. Earlier that month, several environmental groups—including the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the Wilderness Society and Earth Justice—had filed a lawsuit challenging the auction. They objected to the leasing of 110,000 acres of public lands, most of which are adjacent to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and argued that drilling would damage views and increase pollution.

When DeChristopher entered the building, officials mistook him for a bidder and allowed him to enter the auction, where he was given a bidding paddle—number 70. The University of Utah economics student says he stood out in a room filled mostly with veteran oil and gas men, but he started holding up his paddle to bid. By the time officials caught on and stopped the auction, DeChristopher had acquired the rights to 12 parcels of land, totaling 22,000 acres—for $1.79 million that he didn’t have.

He later told authorities he had engaged in civil disobedience to protect the land and was willing to go to prison for his actions. Attracting media attention and support from around the world, DeChristopher raised enough money to offer an initial $45,000 payment for the lands he had acquired, but the Bureau of Land Management refused it.

On Jan. 17, the environmental groups won their lawsuit, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar later invalidated 77 controversial leases from the auction, including all of DeChristopher’s. Despite the victory, he still faces federal criminal charges.

'I see this as the way the environmental movement should be working: with some big groups on the inside... And then people like me, on the outside, pushing the boundaries'

In These Times called DeChristopher in Salt Lake City, where he lives.

Why did you intervene in the auction?

It was a rushed attempt to sell off some of the most precious lands in southern and eastern Utah right before Bush left office. And there were a lot of examples of how rushed it was. One of the most entertaining is that when they first announced what parcels were up for auction, they included land in the city of Moab that had houses on it. They included the land underneath the Moab golf course, which they tried to auction off to drill.

There was a lot of opposition to it, and the environmental impact statement wasn’t adequately done and didn’t factor in a lot of the costs associated with drilling. And the public comment period was rushed and people were obstructed from getting accurate information.

Who were some of the other bidders?

A lot of them were small energy producers who were intending to later flip the parcels, to sell them to the bigger companies. There were a few bigger companies there, like Bill Barrett Corporation. And I was told that one of the companies I was bidding against was Halliburton.

What is your reaction to Secretary Salazar’s decision to invalidate 77 of the leases, including all of yours?

I was encouraged by Salazar’s decision. I saw it as a strong stand by our new administration to protect the land and to protect the climate. The administration not only reinforced the lawsuit, but it also went well beyond the grounds of the lawsuit to challenge those underlying resource management plans.

I see this as the way the environmental movement should be working: with some of the big groups on the inside, like SUWA and NRDC, that are working through their means—whether through lawsuits or whatever is available to them. And then people like me, on the outside, pushing the boundaries and doing the controversial stuff that the big groups can’t do.

Could the lawsuit alone have produced this outcome or was your action necessary?

My action was certainly needed and that’s the feedback I’ve gotten from a lot of people involved in this issue. It brought to light the injustice behind this auction. And it kept it in the media and the public eye for that month or so after the auction before Salazar made his decision.

What’s going to happen to the 77 parcels now?

Now the government goes back and considers whether it’s really a good idea to be auctioning off this land for oil and gas development. It’ll look at the land’s real value and hopefully do an accurate environmental impact statement that weighs the costs of air pollution, the cost of road building, the loss of recreation—all those things it hadn’t considered before.

Do you still expect to be criminally charged?

I would expect that it would still happen. The Salazar decision didn’t erase the case against me even though it did protect the land for now. The one thing that it did is take away the damages from my case, which I think puts me in a better legal position because there’s no way that they can show $1.7 million of damages to anyone. And because the decision is an official ruling stating that this auction was inappropriate and illegal, it strongly supports the idea that what I was standing up against was something unjust.

Have you been surprised by all the support you’ve received?

I’ve been very surprised by that and surprised by how broad that support is. It’s been coming from all over the country and from across the political spectrum. A lot of mainstream folks are supporting this not-so-mainstream action.

From my lawyer, Patrick Shea—the former director of the Bureau of Land Management [under Clinton], who’s now joining my side and supporting what I did—to a lot of professors and folks at the university who are supporting what I did. Last week I went to Utah Valley University, to Orem and Provo, and had two speaking engagements down there. And that’s really the most conservative part of Utah, which is one of the most conservative states in the country. I received a huge amount of support there.

How do you feel about people equating your action with that of Edward Abbey and The Monkey Wrench Gang?

I was a big fan of Edward Abbey, especially when I was younger. And in the last couple months, I’ve met a lot of Edward Abbey’s close friends and some of the people who inspired the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang. What they told me is that my actions are categorically different than monkeywrenching. The monkeywrenching of Abbey’s style was something solitary that one did at night and then snuck away and never talked about again. Whereas what I did was more in line with civil disobedience, of people openly standing in the way of an unjust law or an unjust system and accepting the consequences for it.

In the weeks following the auction, you raised about $100,000, much of which was intended to pay for the lands. Since that option is now off the table, what do you plan to do with the money?

About $40,000 of that money is in the legal fund that we’ll hang on to because it looks like there’s a good chance that this case will go to trial. And we’ll probably need quite a bit more than that.

The rest of the money is in the lease purchase fund. I’m drafting a letter right now that I’m going to send out in the next few days to all the donors, informing them of what the situation is and asking them whether they want the money returned, put toward my legal fund or put toward another similar cause, namely the nonprofit group that I’ve helped launch in the last two months called Peaceful Uprising—a group that seeks to be the direct action side of the environmental movement that has been lacking in recent years.

Our mission is to train and support and defend those who take nonviolent direct action to protect our future from climate change.

In promoting more aggressive, grassroots tactics within the environmental movement, you’ve expressed criticism of some of the mainstream environmental groups for not pushing people to act outside of traditional methods, such as donating money, writing letters and signing petitions.

All of that stuff is necessary and it needs to continue to be an important part of the movement, but it can’t constitute the whole movement, especially an environmental movement where there are entrenched interests on the other side.

The fossil fuels industry, for example, is profiting off the destruction of our future. We’re battling against this huge force that has far more political power than the movement does. That industry gets to write the rules.

If the environmental movement always plays by the rules, there’s no way we can win. There’s no way we can defend our future. And we’re always going to be backpedaling, which is what we’ve seen in the movement for the last 20 years. We’ve basically tried to just put out fires and gone from one fire to another and we’re always losing ground.

So, if the environmental movement is going to make progress, it must shift the center and shift what’s considered reasonable. There needs to be that direct action side of it.

[Martin Stainthorp is an editorial intern at In These Times. A native of Chicago, he graduated from the University of Richmond in 2007.]

Source / In These Times

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Al Gore Calls for Civil Disobedience on Global Warming

Former Vice President Al Gore shared a panel with the singer Bono at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York on Wednesday. Photo / Jason DeCrow / AP.
'Inconvenient Truth' may get even more inconvenient...
By Paul Vitello / September 24, 2008

Al Gore, the former vice president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is nothing if not passionate on the issue of global warming. But his usual fired-up remarks on the subject took a step into the Gandhian realm on Wednesday when he told an audience at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York that the crisis was so severe and intractable that it was time for direct action.

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” he said at the third annual meeting of former President Bill Clinton’s initiative, which arranges partnerships between the very rich and the very needy.

Mr. Gore said the civil disobedience should focus on “stopping the construction of new coal plants,” which he said would add tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere — despite “half a billion dollars’ worth of advertising by the coal and gas industry” claiming otherwise. He added, “Clean coal does not exist.”

The audience at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, which was composed of hundreds of heads of state and chief executives, as well as representatives of philanthropic groups, reacted with scattered applause. There was a lot of shifting in seats.

Mr. Gore did not elaborate on his call for action. And almost as soon as the words “civil disobedience” were out of his mouth, Mr. Clinton, moderating a panel that Mr. Gore shared with the singer Bono, the president of Liberia, the chairman of Coca-Cola and Queen Rania of Jordan, turned to the queen to ask whether Middle Eastern countries might ever become “models of clean energy usage.” The discussion continued in a less-fiery vein from there.

Source / The Caucus / New York Times political blog

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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Small Victories Reap Small Rewards

New York settles suit with antiwar activists for $2M
August 20, 2008

The city has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed antiwar activists were unjustly arrested five years ago, city officials said.

The suit was filed by 52 activists against the Iraq war who were arrested in April 2003 outside the Manhattan offices of a military contractor.

"This settlement was reached without any admission of liability on behalf of the city and the individual defendants," said Susan Halatyn, a spokeswoman for the city's Law Department. "Although defendants believe that they would ultimately have prevailed at a trial, the costs of going forward weighed in favor of a settlement at this time."

The antiwar group demonstrated April 7 in front of the building for the Carlyle Group, an investment house, on Fifth Avenue. During the protest, they were arrested on various violations, including disorderly conduct, city officials said.

According to the city's Law Department, both parties determined that it would be best to settle rather than incur more costs at what was expected to be a lengthy trial.

Each of the 52 plaintiffs will share equally in $950,000, with the remainder of the settlement to cover their lawyers' fees, officials said.

Source / Newsday.com

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And You Will Be Brought to Justice, No Matter How Long It Takes

New Zealand Students Offer New Bounty For Arrest of Condoleezza Rice For War Crimes
by Ray Lilley / July 26, 2008

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A group of New Zealand students offered a higher reward Saturday for the citizen’s arrest of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for war crimes after another group withdrew their own bounty, accusing police of threatening them.

Students at Victoria University in the capital, Wellington, doubled the original reward offer to US$7,400, according to Joel Cosgrove, the student president.

Cosgrove said Rice should be arrested because she is responsible for the deaths of at least 600,000 Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion by U.S.-led coalition troops.

“Condoleezza Rice needs to be tried before the international war crimes tribunal,” Cosgrove told New Zealand’s National Radio.

The new bounty came a day after the Auckland University Students’ Association made a formal complaint to local police seeking Rice’s arrest for “overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation” of Iraq in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Auckland students offered a reward of 5,000 New Zealand dollars (US$3,700), but late Friday withdrew the bounty. Student President David Do said authorities had threatened criminal charges for anyone trying to make a citizen’s arrest.

“It is unfortunate the police have threatened students for essentially a form of peaceful protest and civil disobedience,” Do said.

Superintendent Brett England, the district police commander in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, warned anyone attempting to penetrate the security around Rice would be punished.

“The consequences of such a security threat could be very serious indeed,” England said.

Rice, asked about the demonstration at a news conference Friday, said “student protests are particularly a long-honored tradition in democratic society.”

“I can only say that the United States has done everything that it can to end this war on terror, to live up to our international and national laws and obligations,” Rice said.

About 70 people protested Saturday outside Government House, where Rice was meeting with Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Source / Common Dreams

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Because I Hate Patriotic Bullshit and Because I Love Revolution

Anheuser-Bush, St. Louis, Missouri
Memories of Beer Lovers, Hemp Farmers & Bloody Revolution
by Mike Ely / July 18, 2008

Ok, I admit it. I’m not your usual observer. When I heard that Budweiser had been bought by the Euro-capitalists InBev, I was not concerned.

I don’t care who owns the factories in the U.S. I don’t worry the U.S. heartland is being infiltrated by foreign interests. And certainly, I don’t consider Budweiser a national treasure. The truth is that it’s almost undrinkable.

But my ears perked up when I read how Budweiser’s maker, Anheuser-Bush had roots in St. Louis that went back before the Civil War. Ah, my friends, THERE is a story worth telling. And I’m going to sit back in the damp heat of this Chicago evening, sip on a couple of Fat Tires, and tell it to you, just because I hate patriotic bullshit and because I love revolution.

* * * * * * *

First, there is nothing American about beer making in St. Louis.

St. Louis in the 1850s was a raw river town situated where the Missouri River and the broad Mississippi met. It was a frontier town in many ways and the jumping off point. It was the “end of the line” for civilization. But it was also one of the first American industrial cities, with one of the heaviest concentration of of factory workers in the country. And these workers were not native-born Americans.

A great many of them came straight from Germany — and formed part of a very large German speaking population that then dominated both the urban and rural landscape from St. Louis to Chicago, to Cincinnati and far into the farmlands of Pennsylvania. And these immigrant workers were a very rowdy and radical bunch. Many were veterans of Europe’s great revolutionary battles of 1848 — the first upheavals when working class and communist revolution emerged as a living threat to the world’s ruling classes.

And, at the same time, surrounding this heavily leftwing, working-class, German-speaking city was a countryside filled with some of the most ugly, racist, pro-slavery forces in the U.S. The Missouri River stretched west from St. Louis, and its shores were lined with slave plantations producing raw materials for twine — a product that shipped downriver to bind the cotton bales of the Mississippi Delta.

The slave owners of Missouri were quite militant. They produced the political gangs called “border ruffians” who crossed the western Missouri border into nearby Kansas territory, where they engaged in armed struggle with abolitionists like John Brown over whether Bloody Kansas would be a slave state or free.

So you can imagine that there was a tension growing through the 1850s between the pro-slavery farmers of the Missouri floodplains and the anti-slavery and often communist workers of St. Louis.

There was a parallel, and little known cultural clash going on at the same time: the German workers arrived as beer drinkers and quite a few of them were first class brewers. There were some Irish among the workers, and they too were fans of the Germans’ sudsy “liquid bread.”

Before long St. Louis was peppered with huge German beer halls, where the often lonely immigrants found community and a feeling of home. For reasons I haven’t yet uncovered, the reactionary political forces of Missouri territory were anti-beer. Maybe they didn’t want this foreign culture to take root. Perhaps they had some early religious prohibitionist logic. But in any case, there was an early political clash when a major push was made to ban beer in St. Louis, and (needless to say) the German workers pushed back.

Here is an irony worth thinking about: In the Mississippi river valley, this important historical clash started between beer lovers and hemp growers. And, believe it or not, revolutionary sympathies go with the beer drinkers.

At a time when social organization among immigrants was primitive, the fight over beer helped spur a sense of common identity among the workers, and gave rise to a number of political newspapers. And the movement that emerged from these circles were increasingly active in the fight over slavery. I have on my bookshelf a rare little book that gathers articles and histories from these German immigrant newspapers — and it is clear how they started to articulate deeply revolutionary views that spoke for a highly conscious and engaged working class population.

You may have studied the civil war a little… I know I have always been fascinated by this first, truly revolutionary war on U.S. soil. And one thing to keep in mind was that the so-called “border states” were a key battle ground as the civil war broke out. There was a strip of these states (from Maryland through West Virginia, Kentucky, to Missouri) that had sizable populations of slave owners and slaves but a general political mood that was divided over the issues of secession and war.

And in this fight over the border states, Maryland had a particular importance because it surrounded the Union capital, so that if it joined the slavery confederation, Washington DC would be harder to defend. And the mood was so bad that Abraham Lincoln was almost killed in Baltimore as he traveled from Illinois to DC to assume the presidency. At the other end of the country, St. Louis has a major strategic importance for the war: It was the major anti-slavery center on the Mississippi. (The next river city, Memphis, was a creature of the Mississippi Delta. It was one of the urban nerve centers of the slave empire — filled with slave markets and holding pens.)

And so, as war broke out, all sides prepared to seize St. Louis by force. And if it had fallen to the slavocracy, it would have been quite hard for the Union’s armies to gain a foothold on the Mississippi, and it would have been that much harder to defeat the South.

On the surface, the politics of St. Louis did not look promising. After 1860, the new governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was clearly a pro-slavery diehard, and the bastard was scheming to secede from the Union and pull the state into slavery’s confederacy.

Step by step the tensions mounted, and started to go from political to military preparations. One focus of preparations was the state armory, the largest warehouse of weapons on the frontier. Whoever controlled those guns would be better able to crush their enemies.

Here again beer enters the story. Because the German workers started to prepare for battle. Led by veterans of the 1848 Revolutions, they started to secretly train themselves in discipline and military tactics. Their plan: to rise up against the state government in armed insurrection, to seize the armory, and defeat the governor’s army.

Where did they do their drills? In the cavernous beer halls of St. Louis. At a given time, they would gather. The doors would be sealed and put under vigilant guard. The tables would be cleared away. And cartloads of sawdust would be scattered deep on the beerhall floors.

And with the sawdust muffling the tramp, tramp, tramp of their feet, the workers prepared themselves for war — learning the unit movements so central to the warfare of that day. Outside, on the streets, the many spies of the governor could not hear what was going on within.

United States Volunteers Attacked by the Mob, Corner of Fifth and Walnut Streets, St. Louis, Missouri. — [Sketched by M. Hastings, Esq.]

I won’t go into great detail about the heroic and fascinating ways that violence erupted. Led by fearless army officer Nathaniel Lyons the anti-slavery forces struck, and struck hard. They seized St. Louis and the armory. And they shattered the schemes of the slave owners. They routed the Governor’s troops in the early battles. And they bottled up the slaveowners of the Missouri River — cutting them off from the Confederacy.

What followed was one of the most bitter civil wars I have ever studied: Missouri was criss-crossed by vicious pro-slavery death squads that carried out horrific murders and mutilations. Their raiders came dressed in a cloud of human scalps sewn into their clothes and bridles — as they spread terror among those who opposed the sale of human beings. If you have ever wondered where the frontier killer Jesse James got trained, it was as a triggerman for one of the most notorious death squads of the slavocracy.

Hemp made its appearance here too, right in the midst of the fighting: in several key battles the Confederate forces build protective breast works out of the hemp bales pulled from their slave plantations, piling up the bundled hemp harvest to protect themselves from Union bullets.

Fighting against the slavocrats were a complex array of forces, and at their core were new Union army units led by radical Republican John Charles Fremont, recruited heavily from among the German workers of St. Louis. The first known actions of communists in the U.S. was the revolutionary armed struggle of these largely German-speaking forces, led in part by Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, an energetic communist co-thinker of Karl Marx.

These units militantly emancipated many slaves that fell into their hands. This was in direct contradiction with the policy of President Lincoln who, afraid to offend the leading forces of other border states, insisted in the early days of the civil war that slaves should not be freed, but should be treated as “contraband property.” In this dispute, Fremont was removed from the command of the Missouri armies, and these revolutionary working class forces were dispersed into larger armies in order to better control them.

There are, in my opinion, many lessons and insights within this story. And more in the parts I have left untold.

But I tell this story now just to make a single point:

Anyone who thinks that Budweiser and the beer industry of St. Louis is a story of patriotism, Americanism, of all-American “national treasures,” of a whiteman’s “heartland” of traditional values and conservative xenophobia… Anyone who runs that story just doesn’t know.

The story of beer in St. Louis is a story of communist immigrant workers who didn’t speak English, who hated the mistreatment of kidnapped Africans in the United States, who had little love for America’s institutions, and who were willing to die (and kill!) to end the horrific practices of human slavery.

Deal with it. Pass it on.

Mike Ely is part of the Kasama Project and has helped create the new Revolution in South Asia resource. Mike’s email is m1keely@yahoo.com.

Source / Dissident Voice

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Look Out Denver

"How can we make ourselves less frightening? We aren't this scary image that protesters often get painted as." - Zoe Williams, CodePink. Photo by Joe Amon, The Denver Post.
New generation plans dissent
at Democratic Convention
By Colleen O'Connor / June 22, 2008

A nude-in with bare bodies arranged to spell "PEACE," traffic-stopping bike blockades, music with a message. Civil disobedience, direct confrontation, radical cheerleading.

That funky fusion of protest, performance and pompoms.

The new generation of activists, and the daisy-in-the-rifle protesters who birthed them, is busy with creative ferment, organizing public dissent for the Democratic National Convention here in August. They are motivated by the desire to create social change with people power, not political power, frustrated by a mounting list of problems, from the housing crisis to soaring prices for gas and food.

"There will be a lot of people at this convention who are progressive and who are angry at the Democrats," says Virginia Trabulsi, who has worked for years with the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice.

"They're saying, 'Why have we not impeached Bush? Why is Homeland Security out of control?'"

Tens of thousands of activists are expected, homegrown and imported. Some plan to drive FEMA trailers up from Mississippi for a media-savvy statement about continuing Hurricane Katrina struggles. Others are coming from Seattle, like the Backbone Campaign, which will haul 70-foot-tall political puppets called The Chain Gang: prison-suited images of Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Socialists have formed an alliance with military veterans who are against the Iraq war.

Guerilla gardening

Anarchists will give workshops on guerilla gardening, or political gardening, a style of nonviolent action that takes on issues like land ownership by occupying abandoned lots — sometimes in the dead of night — and transforming them into urban gardens.

And then there are the pacifists, groups like the historic American Friends Service Committee founded by Quakers in 1917, which plans to host an exhibition called "The Costs of War," detailing how the $720 million spent each day on the war could be spent on education and housing.

These different factions speak of just one common goal: stopping the Iraq war immediately.

Beyond that, beliefs differ. So do strategies.

Some protesters espouse the right to active self-defense if they are treated too harshly. On the other side are those who say that violence, verbal or physical, is never an acceptable tool on the path toward peace.

In America, this debate is as old as the war between the North and the South.

"It goes back to the abolitionist movement during the Civil War," says Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"Some were committed to strict nonviolence, and some felt that because the system of slavery, and the military force used to maintain it, was so violent that the only way to break the system of slavery was by using violence."

As Chernus points out in his recent book, "American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea," nonviolence is an integral thread in the fabric of U.S. history.

Significant role

"From the 1820s to the 1950s, scarcely a decade went by that a nonviolent movement did not play some significant role in the practical outcome of political, social and economic events," he says.

From the Civil War to the civil-rights movement, from the labor movement to the environmental movement — and now, in Denver, activists young and old, the progressives and the radicals, will enact the next chapter of the nonviolent movement in America, addressing everything from the Iraq war to global warming.

"If I called my granddad an environmentalist," says Adam Jung, "he'd smack me, but those are his values." Tent State workshops will train activists in nonviolent direct action. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)activists young and old, the progressives and the radicals, will enact the next chapter of the nonviolent movement in America, addressing everything from the Iraq war to global warming.

CodePink, a national anti-war organization, plans a Restore Democracy Parade, an extravaganza of dissent: floats, political theater, musicians, stilt performers, radical cheerleaders, puppets, drummers and bands.

The local spokeswoman for CodePink is Zoe Williams, a 22-year-old platinum blond with spiky hair, rectangular glasses and a penchant for black-and-white polka-dot canvas shoes.

She's part of the new face of activism, a youth-driven alliance that includes Students for Peace and Justice, Students for a Democratic Society, and Tent State

"We were putting in all this work" for the convention, Jojo Pease says, and thought, "What's going to happen afterward?" The answer: a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, reborn two years ago. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post )University. Her goal is to help restore the image of activists everywhere.

"That's something our progressive movement is now seriously considering," she says. "How can we make ourselves less frightening? How can we make ourselves look open?

"One of the big things about the colorful, creative protests is to show that we are a very interesting, artistic, positive group of people. We aren't this scary image that protesters often get painted as."

She works closely with guys like Adam Jung, a farm boy from Missouri who now studies at the University of Denver and spends his free time organizing Tent State University, mobilizing students to confront the Democrats and end the war.

"I'm definitely not right-wing or conservative, but I do identify with rural values," Jung says. "If I called my granddad an environmentalist, he'd smack me, but those are his values."

Grassroots movement

The base camp he envisions for Tent State University will include thousands of tents staked in City Park, with a music festival featuring political hip-hoppers The Coup and Wayne Kramer, who played with his old group the Motor City 5 during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Tent State workshops will train activists in nonviolent direct action,and focus on building a grassroots movement.

And from this idea sprang the newly minted Denver chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.

"We were talking a lot about Tent State, which is not actually an organization but more a technique or strategy," says 25-year-old Jojo Pease. "I was feeling a little disappointed. We were putting in all this work, but I thought, 'What's going to happen afterward?' "

To capture the momentum created at the DNC, they decided to start a Denver chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Back in the 1960s, the SDS was the most influential group of radical student activists in the country. It died out in 1969 but was re-created two years ago and is now one of the fast-growing groups of young activists, with more than 300 chapters on college and high school campuses. The goal is to create a society free from poverty, war, racism and sexism.

"SDS is starting to become cool again," says Jung.

Whether rooted in the '60s or the '00s, activists are driven by the same fuel.

"We are passionate people who really spend way too much time thinking about all the awful stuff in the world that's so urgent," says Sarah Gill, program director for the Denver office of the American Friends Service Committee. "We just want to do the right thing, and it matters if we do it the right way, because people's lives depend on it."

Six months ago, with his eye on the convention, longtime activist Ron Forthofer created a group called The People Call for Change.

Their action plan for the convention calls not for a protest, nor a demonstration, but a series of events to be held in churches and community centers — educational evenings that will dangle a hopeful vision of how a grassroots movement might lead the country in a new direction. Topics include health care, consumerism, the environment and civil liberties.

"The thing that is driving all of us is that we want to reclaim our country, to restore it and make it be a government and a country by and for the people," he says.

"There's a lot of alienation out there today, a feeling that both parties have abandoned their responsibilities to the people."

Source. / Denver Post

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Protesting High Fuel Prices, Samarindan-Style

East Kalimentan is in Indonesia. The report below is exactly as dragono has written it.

Sealed Lips for Fuel Price..
by dragono / June 23, 2008

Seven students of Universitas Mulawarman in Samarinda (capitol of East-Kalimantan), continues the protest upon the raising of fuel price by sealing their lips (sewing it, literally) and avoid to eat and drink for several days ahead..

Unfortunately, they avoided to tell the press, who has professionally permitted them to do that action.. And they also said that this action will be continued until one of them falls down..

They are Edi Susanto, Heri Setiawan, Gito Gamas, Eka Fauzi, Ronny, students of Faculty of Social and Political Science. Next to them there's Ahmad Syafii from Independent Community and Yono, one of high school student.

Until now they've been holding the protest in front of the main gate of Universitas Mulawarman. In a small tent, they've been accompanied by several students that giving oration and spreading the fliers..

Moreover, the protesters said that their parents support and allow them to do this action.

Source / NowPublic

Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog

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Student Throws Blood Money at Congress

Blood Money, David Dutrizac / Visual Studies Programme, Univ of Toronto.
CodePink action during war funding vote
June 20, 2008

During the vote on the House floor for money funds for war, Jason Ortiz, 24-year-old university student with CODEPINK , threw $164 bloodied one-dollar bills on to the House floor, representing the $164 billion for war that the House was allocating to continue the war in Iraq. The money, covered with red paint, symbolized the blood money that will guarantee more deaths of our soldiers and Iraqis in a senseless war that is not supported by the American people.

Before entering the gallery, Jason Ortiz stated, "Enough of my friends have sacrificed their futures so that corrupt politicians can profit from their misery. $165 billion more for war? Somehow, our elected officials can't find money for decent education, or healthcare for children, yet they continue to pump hundreds of billions of our money into their death machine. $165 billion more? That's enough to provide a college education for every single eligible student. Yet they make college unaffordable so they can force good, honest young people into the military, turning potential scholars into killers."

He went on to say, "We elected this Congress with a mandate to end the war, and they have done nothing except increase the funding. I simply cannot sit by and allow them to go unchecked. I have seen too many friends come back from Iraq mentally and physically destroyed. I am taking a stand for them, for the future of my generation, and the next generation. I am proud to do my part to show Congress that we are fed up with their lies and are not going to let them off easy. For all of my friends and family, for all the brave soldiers who have sacrificed their lives, for all the innocent Iraqi victims, I say enough is enough. BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW! FUND HUMAN NEEDS, NOT WAR! NO MORE BLOOD MONEY!"

Jason is currently being held in Capitol Police custody, Alicia Forrest and Desiree Fairooz (contact #s listed above) are available for comment as they were in the gallery at the time of the debate, vote and Jason's subsequent action.

Desiree Fairooz / CodePink

The compromise legislation angered leftist peace activists, who argued that Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 election with a mandate to pull troops out of Iraq.

"We're disgusted that behind closed doors, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress have conspired with the White House to keep this war going well into the next administration," said Medea Benjamin of the anti-war Code Pink group.

"This is a complete betrayal of the American people who voted for a new Congress in 2006," she said.

Source. / AFP / Yahoo! News

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Making an Impact by Stopping the Train

Climate Change Protesters Hijack Coal Train
by Martin Wainwright / June 12, 2008

Climate change campaigners hijacked a train carrying coal to Britain’s biggest power station this morning, swarming on to the roof of its 20 huge trucks.

The 40 protesters stopped the regular delivery service to Drax in Yorkshire disguised as railway workers in yellow warning jackets and waving red flags, having read up on standard railway safety rules.

See the video.
Hear the audio.

The ambush took place at an iron girder bridge over the river Aire between the villages of Gowdall and Hirst Courteney at 8am GMT. One group then used the bridge girders and climbing equipment to scale the 12ft high trucks.They hoisted a huge banner reading “Leave it in the ground” - referring to the coal destined for the power station’s furnaces. The protesters carried food, water and even a portable lavatory with the intention of being able to remain on board for several days.

As the driver of the EWS train radioed for advice, a second group of protesters used shovels which they had also brought with them to start emptying the gravel-like power station coal on to the track. Police arrived half-an-hour later and sealed off the area, after calls from motorists stuck at a level crossing which was closed as a safety precaution.

A lone police constable was initially instructed to stay at the level crossing 500 yards from the train, but he was soon reinforced by other North Yorkshire officers. They sealed off the bridge from both sides, while the driver stayed in his cab.

“We are ready to stay here for as long as Gordon Brown and the government keep burning polluting fuel in these power stations,” said one of the protesters before clipping climbing ropes to the train’s wheels and the bridge girders. Although flimsy, the web would risk damage to the train or bridge if any attempt was made to drive off.

The raiders initially lay concealed on the edge of track as two earlier trains took supplies into Drax, whose eight vast cooling towers are guarded by coils of barbed wire. The power station was the scene of a spectacular but unsuccessful siege two years ago by Climate Camp, the group behind today’s action.

The rooftop group included one woman protester dressed as a canary - the traditional warning of dangerous pollution down a coal mine. She said: “The government and the country needs a warning,” before fixing on an orange cardboard beak to go with her bright yellow feather coat.

Commuters in the early morning rush hour included an engineer at Drax who was cycling to work and had to stop at the Hirst Courteney level crossing. He said: “There are interesting arguments to be had, but at the end of the day, these people use electricity like the rest of us, don’t they.”

The Drax line is likely to be closed until the protesters leave, and safety checks including the removal of the shovelled coal are expected to disrupt supplies to the power station for several days afterwards.

Drax responded to the hijacking by defending their record, setting out details of emission cuts of an estimated 3m tonnes a year at a cost of £180m. The plant, which supplies 7% of Britain’s electricity, is improving burning efficiency, says the company, and increasingly using renewable biofuels.

Melanie Wedgbury, head of external affairs at the plant, said: “We are the largest power station but also the cleanest and most efficient. It’s only because we are the biggest that we produce the most CO2. For every unit of electricity we generate, we generate less CO2 than any other of the coal-fired stations.”

The campaigners promised more protests later this summer, when another power station will face an attempt to close it down, similar to the Drax Climate Camp in 2006. One of the coal-shovellers on top of a freight wagon said: “Last year was Heathrow, this year it’ll be a coal-fired power station because those are the two big things, aviation fuel and burning coal.”

© 2008 The Guardian

Source / The Guardian UK / Common Dreams

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Truckers Blockade Traffic in Europe

Truck drivers parked on a highway leading out of Madrid yesterday, one of a number of roads they blocked. Other roads included some leading into the center of Barcelona and the border with France. Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images.
Two truck drivers die as fuel protests spread across Europe
June 10, 2008

MADRID -- Two lorry drivers were killed on picket lines in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday as strikes by thousands of truckers over soaring fuel prices turned deadly.

Spanish police escorted petrol supply tankers into Barcelona on the second day of the stoppage that has caused food and fuel shortages and huge tailbacks on the Spanish-French border.

French railway workers began their own walkout, increasing the transport chaos.

A Portuguese driver was killed after he was hit by a truck as he manned a barricade filtering traffic near Alcanena, north of Lisbon.

A police spokesman quoted witnesses as saying the 52-year-old man climbed onto the side of a truck in a bid to stop it and fell off under the wheels, Lusa news agency reported.

Later Tuesday, a truck driver in Spain was run over and killed by a van as he manned a picket line outside a wholesale market in the southern city of Granada, police said.

Road haulage representatives suspended strike negotiations with the Spanish government following the incident.

Other trucks in Portugal and Spain have been stoned or had their windows smashed and tyres punctured for working during the national strikes.

A total of 15 people, most of them manning picket lines, were arrested in Spain Tuesday for disturbing public order, assault or threats, Spanish media said.

Tens of thousands of truckers are on strike or joining the protests to demand government help to offset the higher fuel costs.

Authorities in northern Spain ordered emergency measures after many petrol stations in the Catalonia region ran out of fuel.

"Twenty tanker trucks escorted by the regional police left an industrial zone this morning for Barcelona port to help supply and distribute to petrol stations in the region," a regional police spokesman told AFP.

Forty percent of petrol stations in Catalonia have run out of fuel, according to Manuel Amado, president of the Catalonia Federation of Service Stations.

Arrivals of fresh meat, fish and fruit in Madrid have come to a near halt, according to officials at the Mercamadrid market, Spain's biggest wholesale market. They said that fish would be in short supply from Thursday but stocks of other foods should last until the end of the week.

Automakers in Spain said most of the country's automobile plants, including those of Nissan, Mercedes Benz, Seat and Renault, have had to cut or halt production.

Auto plants are particularly vulnerable to a strike by hauliers, which provide them with spare parts.

Truckers stopped lorries from crossing the French-Spanish border and caused major tailbacks around major Spanish cities, including Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

Spanish and French truckers staged pickets on either side of the frontier between the two countries. They blocked a bridge on the border at Bidassoa in the western Basque region and other main crossing points.

On the French side, service areas on motorways were packed with trucks from the border right back to Bordeaux, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) away.

Spain's second largest hauliers' union Fenadismer, which claims to represent 70,000 out of Spain's 380,000 truck drivers, launched an open-ended strike on Monday.

Talks Monday between the hauliers and the government ended in failure, Fenadismer said.

The Portuguese government said it hoped to have an agreement with its truckers by the end of the week.

A separate strike by workers at the French rail company, SNCF, severely hit rail traffic.

About half of intercity and local commuter trains were running along with about three quarters of TGV high speed trains from Paris to southwest France. Some express commuter lines into Paris were badly affected by the strike.

Spanish fisherman were keeping up their strike against fuel prices but most French trawlers have decided to go back to work after several weeks of blocking ports and access to oil refineries.

Source. / AFP

Anger: Transport workers block the toll gate of the A7 Highway in La Roca del Valles, near Barcelona.
Also see 90,000 truckers bring Spain to a standstill. / Daily Mail

Thanks to Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog

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Revolting Repression Runs Rampant with Sheeple

Here is a blatant, repellent example of censorship in the wolf-suit of patriotism. The call to participate in the Ferndale, MI Memorial Day parade called for no political signs. The respondent to this announcement is Peter Werbe, an activist and radio announcer in Michigan, who rejects the original writer's admonition regarding signs and insists that Constitutional rights be exercised without censorship.

Stop the kow-towing to the propaganda. Stop the censorship of the media and the people. Eat the state! Up the revolution!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Re: MEMORIAL DAY IN FERNDALE @ 9:30 a.m. Werbe
Peter Werbe pwerbe@yahoo.com Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:02 PM Reply-To: pwerbe@yahoo.com To: Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Cc: Peter Werbe pwerbe@yahoo.com

Playing into patriotism only strengthens the empire. You're making a colossal political error in encouraging this type of participation. I was in the Ferndale parade along with any number of us three years ago carrying anti-war and anti-Bush signs and we received standing ovations from parade viewers. Now, everyone agrees with us, why shouldn't we have POLITICAL SIGNS? In fact, I'm sending this to all of my friends urging them not to pay any attention to such censorship.

One final thing: Someone carried out Bush's orders, followed them, in destroying Iraq and bears responsibility for millions of dead, wounded, and displaced Iraqi citizens. You're asking us to carry signs "recognizing" the men who carried out these orders. We should be carrying signs recognizing those millions who are the victims of our government, not its perpetrators.

I'm sending this to about 150 people asking them to show up with POLITICAL SIGNS. Speak your mind, people! NO WAR! TROOPS HOME NOW! BUSH LIED; PEOPLE DIED!

Peace,
Peter

--- On Sun, 5/25/08, Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Mel4hwpeace@aol.com wrote:
From: Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Subject: MEMORIAL DAY IN FERNDALE @ 9:30 a.m. To: hwpeace@googlegroups.com, dapjn@yahoogroups.com Date: Sunday, May 25, 2008, 4:31 PM

PARTICIPATE IN FERNDALE'S 90th MEMORAL DAY PARADE 9:30 am MONDAY

The Human Cost of War" - recognizing service men/women from MI who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. 200 posters have been made recognizing military personnel who have been killed. Wear RED WHITE OR BLUE tops, NO POLITICAL SIGNS. For more information call 248-548-3920 or report at 9:30am at Livernois near W. Maplehurst. Parade starts at 10am.

Many thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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They Went to Washington and Caused a Harangue

Guantanamo’s Day In Court
by James Carroll

TOMORROW a number of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay will finally get their day in court - although, alas, not literally. Thirty-five Americans who were arrested at the US Supreme Court last January during a demonstration protesting the illegal detention center will go on trial in Washington. They are charged with “causing a harangue.” Instead of entering their own names, each defendant will enter the name of a prisoner held at Guantanamo. Father Bill Pickard, a Catholic priest from Pennsylvania, will identify himself as Faruq Ali Ahmed. “He cannot do it himself,” Pickard says, “so I am called by my faith, my respect for the rule of law, and my conscience to do it for him.”

The protesters acted on Jan. 11, the sixth anniversary of the establishment of the US detention center at Guantanamo. They were demanding the restoration of habeas corpus - the right of the prisoners to have their day in court. Wearing orange jumpsuits and hoods, the protesters were decrying torture and degradation. The sleeplessness, waterboarding, insults to Islam. Some of the arrested were in the act of unfurling a banner that said with eloquent simplicity, “Close Guantanamo.” They broke the law because, despite widespread repugnance at what the Bush administration is doing in Cuba, the laws and institutions of the United States have so far abetted this criminal indecency.

Twice the US Supreme Court has ruled against Bush on Guantanamo (affirming habeas corpus for detainees in 2004, and ruling against military commissions in 2006), but Congress bailed Bush out with the Military Commissions Act in 2006. Over the years, Guantanamo has been criticized by human rights groups, other governments, the United Nations, associations of lawyers, and members of the military’s own judicial system. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates have both called for the detention center to be shut down. But it does not happen: Today there are nearly 300 prisoners there. Last week, the Justice Department inspector general released a report showing that FBI agents on the scene in Guantanamo have, over years, condemned the interrogation methods as illegal. “We found no evidence,” the report concludes, “that the FBI’s concerns influenced DOD interrogation policies.” No evidence, in sum, that the outrage at Guantanamo is being corrected by business as usual.

That is why, in an image offered by retired admiral John D. Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, the defendants “called artillery in on their own position” by engaging in civil disobedience at the Supreme Court. It was “heroic action,” Hutson said, “taken in a desperate situation for a greater good. That’s essentially what these 35 courageous Americans are doing.”

Can one break the law to uphold the principle of law? That will cease being the question tomorrow when the names of 35 incarcerated men are stated aloud in a courtroom - names that should have been spoken before a judge years ago. When that happens, the questions will become: Why are those men themselves not before a judge in a US court of law? And why are their torturers not charged with crimes? How is it possible that the American judicial system is itself protecting this rank violation of the American judicial system?

Last December, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Boumediene v. Bush, another case concerning the legal rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The ruling is to come, yet another opportunity for decisive intervention. But beyond the arcane, and so far impotent, redress-procedures of government lies the question of the broad US population’s attitude. Is the American commitment to basic rights really so shallow as to allow this travesty to continue? When did torture become acceptable? And once having widely denounced torture, what are citizens to do when it does not stop?

The group that goes on trial tomorrow calls itself “Witness Against Torture.” They are average folks from across the country. They could not stand it anymore. They did the only thing left for them to do. They went to Washington and caused a harangue. They purposely represent individuals held in torture cells. And, perhaps, they represent a lot of their fellow citizens, too. Close Guantanamo.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2008 The Boston Globe

Source / Common Dreams / Boston Globe

The Rag Blog

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