From Parkland to Sunrise: A Year of Extraordinary Youth Activism

from the New Yorker:
By Emily Witt

This Valentine’s Day marks a year since seventeen people were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. On February 14th, the Web site and social-media feeds of the March for Our Lives, the youth-led gun-control movement that began in the aftermath of the shooting, will go dark. The founders of the movement will not give interviews or make any public comments.

“It’s about recognizing that we need to take time for ourselves because we’ve been going so strongly for the past year without a breather,” Jaclyn Corin, a senior at Stoneman Douglas and one of the co-founders of the movement, told me in a recent phone call. “We’re giving ourselves that time to be with our friends and our family.”

Last year, on February 15th, I travelled to Parkland to cover the tragedy and was surprised to find myself also documenting the rise of a political movement. Along with the rest of the country, I watched as Sarah Chadwick, Cameron Kasky, Delaney Tarr, David Hogg, and their classmates addressed the media and lawmakers with a controlled fury and eloquence made more potent by their youth. Three days later, I attended a rally organized by the Broward County school board in nearby Fort Lauderdale, where a Parkland senior named Emma González made what seems to be the first speech with national resonance by a member of her generation.

Her concluding refrain, “We Call B.S.,” has been printed on buttons and painted on signs. It’s easy to forget how spontaneous it was, written from a place of raw emotion and delivered with urgency by someone with a preternatural rhetorical talent. It was also informed by being a member of a generation that has had to train for school shootings for years. As González said that day, “The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives.”

From the beginning, what made the March for Our Lives students seem different was the simple fact that they believed that the worsening epidemic of gun violence in this country could actually be fixed. Only days after the shooting, they directly lobbied representatives in the Florida state capital of Tallahassee and in Washington, D.C. On March 14, 2018, to commemorate a month since the event and to advocate for stricter gun laws, they led more than a million students to walk out of schools across the country. On March 24th, hundreds of thousands of people rallied outside the Capitol for the March for Our Lives, the largest youth protest in Washington since the Vietnam War. Another walkout followed, on April 20th, the nineteenth anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado.

The protest phase of the movement mostly ended there, but the young activists continued their work. They organized two bus tours to encourage young people to vote, one in Florida and one that toured nationwide, and registered thousands of young voters over the summer. They held public meetings and formed alliances with other local youth gun-control activists—Good Kids Mad City and the Peace Warriors—and survivors of mass shootings in Santa Fe, Texas; Aurora, Colorado; and the Red Lake Indian Reservation, in Northern Minnesota, among many other places. They showed their commitment not only to ending mass shootings but to educating the public on the ways that guns increase the likelihood of fatality in acts of suicide, domestic violence, and gang strife. During a fall college tour, they continued their voter-registration push, partnering with Rock the Vote and the N.A.A.C.P.

Previously, mass shootings had been met with collective mourning followed by inaction. The students condemned the inertia. They perfected the art of puncturing the N.R.A.’s attacks on proposals like universal background checks and banning assault rifles. They encouraged voters to see gun violence not as some kind of natural disaster but as rooted in policy decisions made by elected officials who should be held responsible. Fixing the problem would require the will of the people with power. The students asked, rightly: Where was the will? Why were adults so inept at protecting their children?

The March for Our Lives students marked the beginning of a year of youth activism, but it would be a mistake to say that they ignited it. Youth activism had been growing for several years: United We Dream, the youth-led immigrant organization that advocated for the dream act and occupied the halls of Congress last spring, was founded in 2008; the anti-racism and anti-police-violence movement Black Lives Matter, which has since grown into the Movement for Black Lives, started in 2013. Young people who worked for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign went on to revive the Democratic Socialists of America as a political force and, in some cases, ran for office themselves. The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate-change-advocacy group that has helped put the proposal for a Green New Deal on the Democratic policy agenda, started in late 2017. And, as the Parkland students discovered when they began their work, there was already a network of youth activists working to end the epidemic of gun violence.

A lot of this work coalesced in the 2018 midterms, which were seen even by nonpartisan organizations like March for Our Lives as an opportunity to question the complacency of Congress, where the reëlection rate has traditionally been about ninety per cent. Young former Bernie Sanders staffers started the political-action committee Brand New Congress with the intention of reviving a primary election cycle that in many districts was merely symbolic. Brand New Congress recruited a dozen candidates. One actually won her election: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By that time, the group had merged with Justice Democrats, a political-action committee that supported the candidacies of Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. All of these groups emphasized youth-voter turnout—and an estimated thirty-one per cent of eligible voters between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine turned out in the 2018 elections. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, out of Tufts University, reported that that number, as low as it is, represented the highest youth turnout in a midterm election since 1982.

The Green New Deal, gun control, and Medicare for All are now seen as central issues in the 2020 Presidential primaries, but March for Our Lives has chosen to advocate for issues rather than individual candidates. Along with groups like Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, March for Our Lives can claim credit for changing laws. In 2018, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, sixty-seven gun-safety bills were signed into law in twenty-six states and Washington, D.C. On February 6th, March for Our Lives founders joined the parents of slain Stoneman Douglas students at the first House hearings on gun violence in eight years.

As the Parkland students and others from their generation have shown, there is much political momentum to be gained simply by describing what is wrong with greater urgency: a broken health-insurance system; several generations who collectively owe more than one and a half trillion dollars in student loans; the existential threats of climate change, gun violence, police violence, stagnant wages, and widening inequality. But, unlike previous generations of youth activists, the ones today are eager to work within the existing political processes. Asked if a year of close scrutiny of electoral politics had left him disillusioned, Matt Deitsch, one of the March for Our Lives co-founders, told me that it had not. “It’s not about being disillusioned, it’s about being upset.” He quoted Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the namesake of his alma mater, who was an advocate for the preservation of the Everglades: “Be a nuisance when it counts.”

Earlier this week, I accompanied a group of Sunrise Movement activists as they visited the Los Angeles office of Dianne Feinstein, a senator from California, hoping to encourage her to support the resolution for a Green New Deal. Like the youth gun-control activists, they describe the issues they face as not abstract but genuine fears.

“People who are in their sixties right now don’t need to worry about these things nearly as much as we do,” a Sunrise volunteer and third-year student at U.C.L.A. named Natalie Rotstein said. “I’m surrounded by friends who don’t want to have kids because they don’t feel like they can in good conscience put children into the imminent apocalypse that looks like our future right now. It’s such an everyday, grinding kind of acceptance that there’s probably going to be an apocalypse within our lifetime, and nobody is really doing anything to stop it, so it’s the young people who feel the need to save our own futures because no one else is doing it.”

The group of twenty or so activists proceeded across Santa Monica Boulevard into the glossy lobby of a building where Feinstein’s office is on an upper floor. Security would not let them upstairs. When two of Feinstein’s staffers descended from an elevator to meet with the activists, they found them sitting in a circle on the floor, listening to a song about the recent California wildfires performed by a seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter and high-school student named Arielle Martinez Cohen. The activists were then relocated to an atrium between the office building and the parking deck. Peter Muller, Feinstein’s deputy state director, received their complaints under the decorative plant walls there. Asked why Feinstein had not yet endorsed the proposal, Muller replied that the senator is a very deliberative person who reviews things very closely. At this the crowd erupted with anxiety: “We don’t have a lot of time!” “There is no time!”

“She’s been my representative my entire life, and these issues have existed since I was born!” a twenty-five-year-old Sunrise volunteer named Ruby Dutcher said. Muller agreed to meet with a smaller group of activists in the office upstairs. In a scene I had watched play out many times in the past year, beginning with the lukewarm reception of lawmakers in Tallahassee to their visitors from Parkland, a staffer promised once again to relay the views of the young people to the person in power, as the young people made clear that the time for deliberation had passed.

Please go to the original article for further documentation via links/illustrations etc.

"Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around.”

from CityLab:

A Grassroots Call to Ban Gerrymandering

Voters Not Politicians gathered an astounding 425,000 signatures in Michigan to secure a spot on the November ballot for a proposed constitutional amendment creating a citizens’ commission for redistricting.

LANSING, Michigan—Katie Fahey walks in to the Grand Traverse Pie Company, blocks from the state capitol, wearing a black T-shirt that announces her cause. “Voters should choose their politicians,” it reads, “not the other way around.”

As Fahey steps to the counter to order lunch, the cashier, a 20-something like her, recognizes the message. Last year, he tells her, he signed the initiative petition circulated by Voters Not Politicians to ban gerrymandering.

“We got almost a half a million people to sign,” enthuses Fahey, who founded the group in 2016 based on her viral Facebook post.

“That’s for the midterms?” asks the cashier’s co-worker.

“Yeah! So, Yes on 2, November 6!” Fahey says. “We just need 2 million voters. It’s fine! We got this.”

Fahey’s bravado is both sincere and ironic. An improv troupe founder and a mile-a-minute talker, the short-statured, dark-haired 29-year-old projects an idealistic energy that helped inspire thousands of volunteers through a massive, low-budget petition drive. She’s also wittily understating her group’s mammoth task ahead—and its high stakes for democracy, in Michigan and beyond.

Voters Not Politicians’ efforts have pushed Michigan, a swing state that swung to Donald Trump in 2016, to the forefront of the national movement to fight gerrymandering, the manipulation of election maps for partisan advantage. Michigan is the largest of four states voting in November on proposed changes to how voting districts are drawn after each census. A win in Michigan, one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation, could be a turning point for the growing effort to end partisan redistricting one state at a time.

It won’t be easy. But Voters Not Politicians’ volunteer army, led by Fahey, has already taken its effort further than the state’s political insiders thought possible.

The crowdsourced campaign held 33 town-hall meetings in 33 days, wrote a ballot proposal to give redistricting powers to a citizens’ commission, and fanned out across Michigan with clipboards and petitions in hand. Last fall, Voters Not Politicians volunteers collected 425,000 petition signatures in four months to secure a spot on Michigan’s ballot—a rare feat, usually accomplished only by hiring paid signature gatherers.

This fall they’re tackling a new set of challenges to redeploy their canvassers to get out the vote, fund-raise for TV ads, explain a complex proposal, channel Democrats’ anger against Michigan’s Republican gerrymander, and convince Republicans to support their proposal as a swamp-draining reform. Despite the group’s pledge not to work for any party’s advantage, conservative opponents have already tried to label the campaign a stalking horse for Democrats’ ambitions. But polls show it’s winning support across the political spectrum.

“Nobody feels like their politicians are listening to them,” Fahey says. “People want to drain the swamp. They want the political revolution … A lot of people understand that politicians [are] going to be politicians, and that them being able to control the outcome of elections doesn’t make sense.”

On election day 2016, Fahey, then 27, left her job at a recycling nonprofit in Lansing and rushed to the airport, thinking she’d witness history. A friend had an extra ticket to Hillary Clinton’s election watch party in New York City, and Fahey, who’d voted for Clinton that morning, thrilled at the invitation to go. “I could watch the first woman president find out she won,” Fahey remembers thinking.

Instead, Fahey got to Midtown Manhattan in time to watch Donald Trump’s upset victory unfold. She was standing among other Clinton supporters at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, still dressed in the red pantsuit she’d worn to work, when a reporter captured her reaction.

“My disappointment makes me not trust the rest of the world,” Fahey told the Associated Press reporter that night. “I don’t even want to go out. I want to wear sweatpants and curl myself up in a corner.”

Afterward, Fahey says, she thought of her Millennial friends, who’d enthused over Bernie Sanders in 2016, and her parents, who’d grown excited about Trump. “I don’t want to wait four years and the next presidential election for them to stay engaged,” she recalls thinking. She dreaded Thanksgiving with her parents, fearing she’d end up in an argument about Trump and Clinton. “At Thanksgiving dinner, I wanted to talk about fixing stuff, and not candidates or political parties,” she recalls.

Fahey had never been involved in a political campaign, though she exhorted her friends to vote and had talked about her support for Clinton in conversation and enthusiastic Facebook posts. But she’d passed on attending Michigan State University to study sustainable business and community leadership at Aquinas College, a Dominican liberal-arts college in Grand Rapids that weaved Catholic social teaching into its curriculum. “If I see something not happening, I’m not afraid to go jump in and fix it,” she says. In the fall of 2016, Fahey was working full-time at the Michigan Recycling Coalition, studying for an M.B.A., and running two comedy troupes and the Grand Rapids Improv Festival. “I’m kind of a doer,” she says.

It’s not always easy to get people riled up about gerrymandering.

Two days after the election, Fahey went on Facebook. “I’d like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan,” she posted. “If you’re interested in doing this as well, please let me know.” She’d learned about gerrymandering in school—in fourth grade, in fifth grade, in 10th grade, in a public-administration class at Aquinas—and it had angered her each time.

“Redistricting,” Fahey says, “is one of the basic building blocks of democracy. It determines how 10 years of elections at a time will end up. And yet we know it’s corrupt and broken, and we don’t do anything about it.”

Her post spread fast. Friends shared it in political Facebook groups. Strangers responded, offering help. Fahey set up a Facebook group of her own, Michiganders for Nonpartisan Redistricting Reform, and asked members to pledge to support a solution that didn’t benefit any individual or party. Organized with Google Sheets, conference calls, and its first in-person meeting in January 2017, the group grew. By February it had chosen a catchier name, Voters Not Politicians. It held 33 town-hall meetings in 33 days, starting in Marquette and Alpena, northern Michigan cities that often get less political attention.

It’s not always easy to get people riled up about gerrymandering, but Michigan proved fertile for a grassroots revolt against it. The state is closely divided politically, yet ever since a Republican-controlled redistricting in 2011, the GOP has enjoyed a 9–5 dominance of the state’s congressional delegation and large majorities in the state legislature. The congressional map in metro Detroit includes some especially freakish shapes: the Eleventh District looks like a sleeping vulture, the Fourteenth a bearded man meditating next to a crocodile’s jaws. Emails sent in 2011 between GOP congressional staffers, consultants, and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, recently disclosed in a lawsuit, make the mapmakers’ partisan bias clear. “We’ve spent a lot of time providing options to ensure we have a solid 9–5 delegation in 2012 and beyond,” a chamber executive wrote.


Between 3,000 and 6,000 people came to Voters Not Politicians’ 33 town halls, Fahey says. They filled out surveys that asked if they wanted politicians to draw district lines, and if not, what process they’d prefer. Framing the question that way steered the group toward creating a citizens’ redistricting commission, as in California and Arizona. Specifics were hammered out in two in-person meetings of about 50 people, with others joining online via Google Docs and Trello. “Anyone who wanted to be at the policy table could be,” Fahey says: “a birthing doula, a lawyer, teachers, a caterer, pastor, veterinarian, an HR lawyer.”

The group took advice from Kathay Feng, the executive director of California Common Cause, who helped create her state’s citizens’ redistricting commission in 2008. It also ran its draft by possible future allies, including the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and the ACLU, to ensure it conformed to their endorsement criteria for redistricting reform.

Its proposal would amend Michigan’s constitution to create a 13-member redistricting commission made up of regular citizens: four Republicans, four Democrats, and five independents or members of minor parties. People would apply to join, and the commissioners would be randomly selected from among the qualified applicants, though legislative leaders would be able to strike a few names from the list. To keep political insiders off the commission, the proposal bans partisan elected officials, candidates for partisan offices, lobbyists, political consultants, members of party governing committees, state employees outside civil service, and their close relatives from serving on the commission.

“I can actually impact the changes I’ve been wanting to see through direct democracy.”

More importantly, Fahey says, the proposal would embed fairness in redistricting into the state constitution. “We directly make gerrymandering illegal,” she says. (“Districts shall not provide a disproportionate advantage to any political party,” the proposal reads. “Districts shall not favor or disfavor an incumbent elected official or a candidate.”)

But as Voters Not Politicians prepared to circulate petitions, it got discouraging advice. Conventional wisdom often claims that initiative petitions can’t get enough signatures to make the ballot with a volunteer petition drive alone—it takes paid signature gatherers. “There were a bunch of groups who were like, ‘You guys are crazy. We don’t want to work with you or endorse you yet, because you can’t do it,’” Fahey says. “I said ‘No! We’ve done the math.’”

The group had 180 days to gather 315,000 signatures in a state of 10 million people. “We had a plan,” the field director Jamie Lyons-Eddy says. “We needed 3,000 people to get 10 to 15 signatures a week.” Between social-media recruits and town-hall attendees who signed up to volunteer, 4,000 people ended up circulating petitions. Lyons-Eddy split the state into 14 regions, with about 10 petition teams in each. Still an online-only group with no physical offices, it crowdsourced ideas on where to get people to sign. Highway rest stops proved especially fruitful. One woman collected 80 signatures while dressed up as the gerrymandered Eleventh District.

Costs were about one-tenth of what the conventional wisdom expected: The biggest expenses were $40,000 to print the petitions and $140,000 to have a consultant verify the petitions, much of it chipped in by the volunteers themselves. The group turned in 425,000 signatures, 70 days early. In July, the proposal survived a challenge at the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled 4–3that it fit in the structure of the state constitution.

Fahey thinks the keys to the group’s success were taking on a systemic reform, inviting people to help write the ballot language, making the group easy to join, and having enthusiastic volunteers, not paid workers, convincing people to sign.

“I can actually impact the changes I’ve been wanting to see through direct democracy,” Fahey says, “not through a politician who’s maybe making a bunch of promises and not delivering.”

Late in august, denise yezbick walks through Detroit’s middle-class Palmer Woods neighborhood, holding an oversize clipboard. An adjunct English professor with gray-blond hair that reaches her shoulders, she’s got a Voters Not Politicians button pinned to her purse strap.

Yezbick knocks at a small Tudor Revival house. Matthew Weiner opens the door, wearing a blue T-shirt, gray shorts, and sandals. She asks if he’s heard of Proposal 2. He’s not sure, so she delivers a two-minute pitch for Voters Not Politicians’ proposal.

“This is your voting district, Fourteen, here,” Yezbick says, holding up the back of her clipboard to show a map of the zig-zagging congressional district. “And the reason it’s this crazy shape—”

“Crazy,” Weiner agrees.

Yezbick is careful to sound nonpartisan. “Both Republicans and Democrats abuse the system,” Yezbick says. “It just so happens we’ve got Republicans in power right now.” But as she says Republicans squeezed as many Democrats as possible into the Fourteenth to make surrounding districts less competitive, she’s got a receptive audience in Weiner, for reasons beyond good-government reform.


“I’m against gerrymandering,” Weiner tells Yezbick, “and I’m a Democrat.” His mother-in-law recently read the book Ratf**ked, which describes how Republicans took control of redistricting in many states by targeting key elections in 2010.


Yezbick gets a similar reaction from Beverly Garner, one street over. Garner, holding her baby granddaughter at the door, says she’s a contributor to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She’s known about gerrymandering for a long time, and remembers when Democrats controlled the Michigan legislature in the 1980s and nudged maps in their direction. “I was very, very aware this time,” Garner says, “because of how it affected our area.”

Engaged Democrats like Weiner and Garner could lift Proposal 2 to victory. Pollsters are forecasting a blue wave in Michigan this year: the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer leads the Republican Bill Schuette by double digits in the governor’s race, and Democrats have a shot at taking at least two GOP congressional seats outside Detroit despite the gnarled maps: the Eighth, which stretches from Lansing to Detroit’s northern suburbs, and the sleeping-vulture Eleventh.

Still, Voters Not Politicians has plenty of work ahead. A recent poll found Proposal 2 leading 38 percent to 31 percent, but had another 31 percent of voters undecided. To ramp up for the general election, Voters Not Politicians recently opened its first offices to distribute lawn signs and literature, and is fund-raising to pay for TV ads. As of summer’s end, it’s raised about $2 million, and Fahey says it’ll need millions more to win. Canvassing is still a big part of the strategy: Volunteers have knocked on 148,000 doors so far to spread the word.

Thanks Eric Matthies

Cards Against Humanity purchases border territory to stop Trump's wall, gets legal advice and builds trebuchet, to make it stick

from Boing Boing:

This year's Cards Against Humanity secret Xmas surprise has begun, and on day one, they've delighted buyers (I'm one!) by sending us a share certificate for an infinitesimal fraction of a stretch of US/Mexican borderlands, along with details of their plans to keep the land secure from Trump's attempts to seize it and build a stupid wall on it.

The first line of defense is a pack of rabid attack lawyers from the firm of Graves, Dougherty, Hearon, & Moody, who've penned a letter vowing to fight any eminent domain seizure with everything they have, running out the clock on the Trump administration before any wall can be built.

The second line of defense is much more direct: Cards Against Humanity have built a 30' trebuchet, a medieval siege engine used to knock down walls since the 12th century, as an object lesson in just how far behind the times Donald Trump's mentality is. The have paid 300 gold to increase its attack damage, so it’s very powerful.

Today's package also included an awesome Dungeons and Dragons style map of the USA and Mexico, a cover letter and some Trumpwall-themed expansion cards for CAH. I can't wait for day two!

CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY STOPS THE WALL

2015 was deadliest year on record for environmental activists

via Boing Boing

UK-based NGO Global Witness reports that at least 185 environmental activists were murdered last year around the globe, and two-thirds of those were in Latin America. According to the report:

On average, more than three people were killed every week in 2015 - more than double the number of journalists killed in the same period. The worst hit countries were Brazil (50 killings), the Philippines (33) and Colombia (26). Mining was the industry most linked to killings of land and environmental defenders with 42 deaths in 2015. Agribusiness, hydroelectric dams and logging were also key drivers of violence. Many of the murders we know about occurred in remote villages or deep within rainforests – it’s likely the true death toll is far higher. For every killing we are able to document, others cannot be verified, or go unreported. And for every life lost, many more are blighted by ongoing violence, threats and discrimination.

• Full report: On Dangerous Ground (pdf Download)

• On Dangerous Ground (via Mongabay)

Junk Thought

Written and narrated by Adbusters editor Micah White, this video was animated and produced by http://thoughtcafe.ca/

Henry the Emotional Environmentalist

found somewhere in the social media sphere...
Love this kid.



FOLLOW HENRY AT: https://www.facebook.com/emotionalenv...

DEAD, DYING, DIED. 😂😂😂 Picked Henry up from school the other day and I had no idea he was this passionate about our planet. Don't litter or he might call you the "S" word!

Feel free to share, Henry the Emotional Environmentalist wants to make sure everyone stops being so dumb to the environment.

Killer Mike Schools Stephen Colbert on Systemic Racism in America & How To End It

Rapper and activist Killer Mike of Run The Jewels stops by The Late Show to talk about racial justice, Bernie Sanders and formal sweats.



from: Ambrosia for Heads

On last night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Killer Mike (born Michael Render) dropped some knowledge on the state of race relations in this country, something he’s been doing for years through his music but which has only recently become something that mainstream media have begun to acknowledge. His visibility has grown exponentially thanks to the tremendous success of Run the Jewels, and his recent stint as guest speaker at an Atlanta, Georgia rally for Bernie Sanders was one of the most memorable Hip-Hop moments of 2015. Although his segment on last night’s show was only a few brief minutes, he managed to inundate audience members and a clearly appreciative Colbert of some very crystallized messages, and he held nothing back when it came to placing blame and calling for action.

After the general pleasantries about wardrobe and family, Colbert asked Render to comment on how the tragedies in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston have changed anything in terms of the movement for racial justice and a national discourse. Before answering, Render pled that “White people who are watching, google Jane Elliott. She has an experiment called the blue eye/brown eye experiment. I encourage you all to just simply watch that, ’cause it’ll actually grow you.” He’s referring to an experiment in racism first conducted by former third-grade teacher Elliott in 1968, on the day following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. According to her website, the exercise “labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.” Clearly, Render came into this interview armed with some serious heat, already schooling millions of Americans before even answering Colbert’s question.

However, Render quickly addresses the question at hand, saying “if White people are just now discovering that it’s bad for Black or working class people in America, they’re a lot more blind than I thought. And they’re a lot more choosing to be ignorant than I thought. The same problems that we’re discussing today we discussed in 1990, 1980, 1970, and 1960. And until we call a spade a spade and we say that this problem is coming from conditions that we’re creating or allowing to happen, as a White group of people who hold a certain amount of power…” Colbert then cuts in asking Render if he believes there is a systemic attempt in the United States to isolate poor and minority citizens and put them into communities that can be controlled. Render’s answer is immediate, as he briskly says “It’s not an attempt at all. It’s successful.” He goes on to support the statement with evidence, citing former Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who notoriously built highways in an effort to segregate his city. And the brain food does not stop there. Check out the rapid-fire education Render brought to the stage last night below.

Related: Killer Mike & Big Boi Are Helping Bring Hip-Hop’s First Amendment Rights to the Supreme Court (Audio)


Thanks Tristan!

Artists Hack 600 Paris Billboards With Climate Messages for COP21

Sorry I didn't post this story when it was actually going on, but still great and worthy of posting now.



from CityLab (The Atlantic)

Two days before the launch of the UN COP21 Climate Conference, 600 posters were installed in outdoor media spaces across Paris. 82 Artists from 19 different countries made artworks to challenge the corporate takeover of COP21 and to reveal the connections between advertising, the promotion of consumerism and climate change.

Travel around Paris this week and you might run into some unusual public ads: an Air France billboard proclaiming, “We’ll keep on bribing politicians and emitting greenhouse gases”; a Volkswagen promotion saying, “We’re sorry that we got caught.”

Is the world’s worst marketing agency on the loose? Actually, the 600-or-so altered ads are the work of street artists working with Brandalism, a shadowy group that since 2012 has replaced European billboards with activist messages and art. Their latest hack from this weekend takes aim at global-warming denial and the corporate forces opposing climate action, right before the Paris climate talks (known as COP21) are scheduled to begin.

From the group’s website:

Following on in the guerilla art traditions of the 20th Century and taking inspiration from Agitprop, Situationist and Street Art movements, the Brandalism project sees artists from around the world collaborate to challenge the authority and legitimacy of commercial images within public space and within our culture.…

All the artwork is unauthorised and unsigned. This is not a project of self-promotion, and none of the artists names… or websites appear on the works: we believe there are already enough private interests taking ownership of our streets.

Here’s a sampling of what’s popped up in the city; for many more images, visit Brandalism’s gallery.

Activism in Crisis

from Linkedin:

I dream of a hybrid movement-party that wins elections in multiple countries.

The Crisis Within Activism is a Crisis Within Democracy

“We are living through a period with the largest protests in human history. But they are not working. And when you reach that point, instead of repeating the traditional protest behaviors, screaming and holding posters, you have to innovate,” says Micah White, cocreator of Occupy Wall Street and former Adbusters editor, in an interview with Brazil's CartaCapital about his book, THE END OF PROTEST.

Micah spoke with CartaCapital during his recent visit to São Paulo for the launch of GUME ("Knife Edge"), a new engagement consultancy.



Micah White: Absolutely. In addition to a crisis in representative democracy, there is a crisis in the model of activism, how people protest. There is a crisis in the power of people to force governments to do what they want. We live in a time when there appears to be no way for ordinary people to influence their governments through protest… This means there is no democracy.

CC: Does this mean that the democratic system does not work anymore?

MW: I do not think in any way that the dream of democracy is dead. The dream of democracy has been going on since the beginning of civilization and humans have always been fighting for democracy. For five thousand years we’ve been overthrowing pharaohs, kings and tyrants in a struggle for democracy. Now we're in one of those moments in history when we have a low point of democracy, but there will be a high point of democracy soon. This requires, however, a kind of innovation within our concepts of activism.

CC: How is it possible to reduce the power of corporations in government?

MW: The only way to remove the power of corporations in our society would be to create a social movement capable of winning elections. As movements and as activists, we have avoided the only solution, which is: we have to build social movements that can also function as political parties. This is a need that we do not want to hear. We think we can just organize large protests and get really angry. Occupy Wall Street was a once in a lifetime event and it did not work because we were chasing a false theory of how social change happens. We believe, or wanted to believe, that a large number of people going to the streets can cause changes in their governments, but when we achieved a historical social movement, we realized this story of change is not true. Now it is clear that the only way to win power is to create a hybrid between a social movement and a political party. Something that does not have leaders, but has spokespeople and an organizational structure that lasts more than six months.

CC: How is it possible to achieve social change through protests?

MW: Today, social movements ask their participants do very basic and small actions: to take to the streets, holding posters and shouting. These are very basic behaviors and no longer have a political effect. Occupy Wall Street and the 15M in Spain, brought more complex behaviors, such as participating in general assemblies or utilizing hand gestures, but these are still very simple behaviors. I think we have to ask more of social movement participants. We must show that social movements require difficult behaviors like, winning elections, drafting legislation, governing our cities ... We need to demand a greater investment than just show up. The Internet allows us to ask for more. Thanks to social networks, it’s time to treat participants as capable of developing sophisticated behaviors and teaching each other how to to spread these actions globally.

CC: Do social networks have a new role in organizing and promoting protests?

MW: Absolutely. I think the role of the Internet is spreading contagious emotions. If we look at the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, it seems that the trigger was a mood that spread all over the world and was basically a sensation of losing one’s fear. People said “I do not care about the risks, this is the time to act” and went to the streets. That's what social networks do: they allow us to transfer that contagious mood of rebellion to the whole world. The other power of the Internet is in allowing us to innovate our tactics in real time. From the moment when a new tactic emerges in one city, it can be deployed in another city. So it was with Occupy Wall Street.

CC: Can the internet become something more than a network in which feelings are spread?

MW: There is a hope that perhaps the Internet allows us an electronic democracy. That's the idea of the 5 Star Movement in Italy. Participants use the internet to decide on legislation and to select candidates for the elections. The idea of the Internet enabling collective decision-making is very interesting, but difficult to achieve.

CC: Some people prefer digital activism to the street. What do you think?

MW: In the early stages, the Internet is very important for social movements. However, over time, the Internet becomes harmful because things start to look better online than in real life. This happened with Occupy. The protest looked better on Facebook than it did in the streets. This is negative because people start to prefer the online experience to the real world. So the Internet is a double-edged sword. The internet is a weapon that is not fully under our control, and it is very difficult to wield effectively.

CC: Do you believe that the advance of neoliberalism has helped reduce the importance of social movements around the world?

MW: Protests are a form of war and war is politics by other means. Protests are ways of influencing the political system by unconventional methods. And the revolution is a change in the legal regime. It is transforming what is legal into something illegal or making what is illegal legal. If social movements are a form of warfare then it is clear that the forces that are in power will use all possible means to destroy social movements. The problem is activists do not see their protests in the context of war. We see them as a big party or something, while the other side realizes the importance of the event. Above all, however, it is crucial not blame others. We must blame ourselves. Social movements do not fail because the police are very strong. Throughout history, people have overthrown governments with a much stronger police, either because they found a way to defeat them in the streets or because they managed to get the police to change sides. So when our protests fail it is because our theory of change was wrong and not because the other side was stronger.

CC: Occupy Wall Street was born in 2011 and influenced many movements around the world. To date, we have several social movements emerging in Europe also influenced by 15M or Occupy. What is the role of the internet?

MW: What happened is that a new tactic emerged and it worked, so it spread worldwide. Occupy Wall Street combined tactics in Egypt with those of Spain and applied them to the United States. The police could not anticipate this new protest strategy and that's why the movement worked. Once the police discovered how to respond to our encampments, they destroyed all the movements worldwide in the same way. Protest is a constant war of new attack strategies and counter-attack. Interestingly, at the moment we are increasing the frequency of protests. This is very good, but on the other hand, we must be skeptical because we are living through a period with the largest protests in human history, but they are not working.

CC: Do you believe that we can be in a historic moment of rupture?

MW: What I imagine is the birth of a social movement that wins elections in a country and then begins to win elections in multiple countries. Then you will see Syriza or the 5 Star Movement in three, seven or ten different countries. Yeah ... I really think it's about this storyline of a global social movement.

CC: You do not think that is too optimistic?

MW: I think we live in a time when activists are so focused on what seems possible that we do not achieve anything. We need to disturb power and not act only in safe ways. That's what Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring did. The best activism is the one that asks participants to do the things they fear.

Micah White's first book—THE END OF PROTEST—will be published by Random House of Canada in 2016.

On the 45th anniversary of the Kent State massacre, a talk with one of the students who got shot

from Dangerous Minds:

The Kent State massacre, 45 years later, remains a red mark on our nation’s history. On a sunny spring day, May 4th, 1970, National Guardsmen attacked—with a 13 second barrage of bullets—a group of unarmed students, gathered for an anti-war protest. Nine were wounded, and four (Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder) were killed. Those four, forever immortalized in Neil Young’s “Ohio,” bear witness to a divisive political landscape that exists as much today as it existed in 1970. The recent events in Ferguson and Baltimore make the remembrance of this national tragedy all the more timely.

Alan Canfora, a young student at Kent State, and a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),  was involved in the Kent protests during the days leading up to the massacre. These protests, sparked by Nixon’s announcement that the Vietnam War was to be expanded into Cambodia, came at a particularly emotional time for Canfora. A few days earlier, he had attended the funeral of his friend, Bill Caldwell, who was killed in Vietnam. As a memorial, Canfora prepared a black flag for the May 4th demonstration, declaring “I purposefully chose black material to match my dark mood of despair and anger following the recent death of my friend.”

A photograph of Canfora waving the black flag before a crouched, aiming regiment, moments before they fired 67 rounds into a group of unarmed demonstrators and bystanders, has become one of the iconic images of that tragic event and of the anti-war movement itself.



Alan Canfora, on the practice football field, 250 feet away from aiming Guardsmen. Ten minutes before the massacre. Photo by John Filo.

Minutes after that photo was snapped, the National Guard fired a volley into the crowd. Canfora, who was shot through the wrist by an M-1 bullet, claims that only eight of the thirteen victims were active in the protest. Five were simply bystanders, including Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder who were killed while walking to class.

Canfora’s website contains a heart-breaking account of the events of May 4th. What is noteworthy, throughout Canfora’s recollection, is the utter disbelief that the Guard would be using “real” bullets on unarmed students:

Just as I reached safety, kneeling behind that beautiful tree during the first seconds of gunfire, I felt a sharp pain in my right wrist when an M-1 bullet passed through my arm. With shock and utter disbelief, I immediately thought to myself: “I’ve been shot! It seems like a nightmare but this is real. I’ve really been shot!” My pain was great during that unique moment of unprecedented anguish but I had another serious concern: the bullets were continuing to rain in my direction for another 11 or 12 seconds.

Among the 76 Ohio National Guard soldiers stretched across the hilltop, only about a dozen members of Troop G—the death squad—stood calmly aiming in a firing line. They killed four Kent State University students and wounded nine others, including me. One wounded victim, Dean Kahler, remains paralyzed as a result.

During the gunfire, I was in great pain and distress but quite aware that I had to remain tucked behind that narrow, young tree which absorbed several bullets intended for me.

I then heard my roommate Tom Grace screaming his severe pain after a bullet passed through his left ankle. While the bullets were still flying, I yelled over to my best friend, Tom Grace, “Stay down! Stay down! It’s only buckshot!”

Canfora, wounded, kneeling behind a tree, an M-1 bullet wound having pierced his right wrist—225 feet downhill from Ohio National Guard shooters. This tree saved Canfora as well as Tom “Aquinas” Miller, who was standing behind the tree. Canfora and Miller are looking right to Tom Grace who was shot through his left foot nearby.

Even as he had reached the hospital for treatment of his wound:

When I got to the hospital, as I walked alone toward the emergency room door, I looked inside the open rear door of a parked ambulance. I saw my friend Jeff Miller lying dead and bloody on a stretcher. I assumed he was only unconscious from a facial flesh wound. I still wrongly-assumed non-lethal shotguns shot us.

During those terrible seconds as I stood alone gazing at my friend’s bloody form, I vainly hoped that plastic surgery would repair Jeff’s face where a gaping 2-inch bloody hole destroyed Jeff’s always-smiling face. I did not know that a powerful M-1 bullet had passed through Jeff’s head and he was killed instantly.

Photo by John Filo

Canfora went on to graduate Kent State with a Bachelor’s Degree in General Studies and a Master’s Degree in Library Science, and has remained a vociferous activist, both as a student organizer, and in the justice movement for the victims of May 4. He took time out of his busy schedule, working on the 45th anniversary commemoration, to talk to Dangerous Minds about the events at Kent State and their repercussions today.

The iconic photograph of you waving the black flag before a National Guard regiment, with weapons raised and pointed at you, has been compared to the image of the so-called “tank man” at Tiananmen Square. Both photographs evoke a David vs Goliath sentiment—standing up to a monstrously armed force of authority. Of course, our cultural narrative programming has us shocked that an unarmed student would be fired upon in the United States—and maybe also shocked that a man standing in front of a tank in Communist China could stop that tank from rolling forward. Do you see similarities in the two images?

Alan Canfora: The “tank man” definitely was risking his life, at a time when many students were actually killed. By standing in front of the tank he showed great courage. It’s similar to my situation in 1970 in that he did risk his life for the cause that he believed in.

So, when that image was taken, at that moment you felt that your life was in danger?

AC: Absolutely. I think any time that there’s someone aiming guns at you with their fingers on the triggers, you definitely think that your life may be in danger. I had to confront the possibility at that moment. I certainly didn’t plan for the moment. I had no idea I would be in that situation until the Guardsmen got down and started aiming at me. It seemed like an absurd situation—I didn’t think that I was doing anything to deserve being shot or to even have guns aimed at me—I was 150 feet away—it was broad daylight—they hadn’t shot anyone while the National Guard was on campus the two previous evenings, even though some students were stabbed by bayonets, and other students were beaten with clubs the night before on May 3rd. I just didn’t think that in broad daylight on a sunny Spring afternoon that they would just start shooting into a crowd of unarmed students.

At that moment I started thinking about why I was there. Only ten days prior, myself and my roommates had attended the funeral of a nineteen-year-old soldier who was killed in Vietnam—his name was Bill Caldwell—so we were at that funeral on April 24th, and we were already very anti-war, and some of us were very experienced with protest actions… and at that funeral we swore a vow that we would take action at the soonest opportunity to send our message to President Nixon that he should stop the war in Vietnam. Too many young people were coming home dead or wounded, and we understood that the war in Vietnam was genocidal—our government was killing two or three million Asians.

Six days after that funeral, Cambodia was invaded by Nixon—the war was expanded into another country. We watched the announcement on television, and we were very angry, and we said tomorrow night we are going into action. From May 1st through 4th, we were some of the leading militants on the streets of Kent. And so when I was out there with them aiming the guns at me, that was the culmination of four days of protests—and I didn’t anticipate that moment, but I had to think to myself “this is why we’re out here—to make the most powerful statement that we can about stopping the war.” So I didn’t back down, I stood my ground there, and I basically tried to communicate with the Guardsmen who were aiming at me from 150 feet away… I remember shouting at them “if you support the war in Vietnam, then why aren’t you IN Vietnam?” I said “my friend was killed there just a few days ago, and we attended his funeral, and that’s why we’re out here—we’re trying to stop the war.”

Their commanding officer ordered them to stand up and then march away—it looked like a retreat—they started going back up this hill, and then when they got to the hilltop, that’s when they got the order to turn and fire.



The Guardsmen depart the practice field in what many thought was a retreat. They soon marched uphill & fired 67 gunshots downhill into a crowd of unarmed students. Canfora was shot when he ran to a tree—225 feet away from the hilltop shooters.

That’s what seems so absurd—there was no imminent threat to them whatsoever.

AC: They were under no significant threat throughout the entire twenty-four minute confrontation—we all knew that they had stabbed people the night before—every step of the [confrontation] is on film and you can see second-by-second that every time they marched toward the students, the students evacuated.

Just as they started to shoot, there was one student standing off to the side raising his middle finger toward the Guard—he was shot twice—once in the stomach, once in the ankle. He was 72 feet away. Another student behind him was 90 feet away, just taking pictures—he got shot in his chest. Down near the bottom of the hill is where I was—225 feet away when I got shot through my right wrist. When I heard the guns firing I thought “they must be firing blanks, there’s no reason to shoot.” But I thought “just in case these are real bullets,” I started to zig and zag as the bullets were flying around me and I jumped behind a tree, and just as I did I felt a bullet go through my right wrist.

Having read your heart-breaking account of those events, what affected me the most was the confusion you felt. The assumption that the Guardsmen would not have bullets in their guns—and then, even when you were aware that you had been shot, you were still assuming that it must have been “buck shot”—I get the sense that the realizations about the use of deadly force in that moment may have been just as traumatic for you as the physical pain of being wounded.

AC: It just didn’t seem like any kind of a shooting situation, in fact, when you consider what had happened already on May 1st in downtown Kent—about 43 windows were smashed out—about 28 of those were in one bank, and other specific corporate targets were hit like the gas company, the electric company, the telephone company, the conservative Republican newspaper—those windows were all smashed out and nobody got shot down there that night—fourteen students were arrested. The next night, the Kent State ROTC building was burned down—the National Guard arrived that evening and they didn’t shoot anybody—so, by May 3rd several students were bayoneted after a peaceful sit-in in the street. Several male and female students were slashed and stabbed by the National Guard, and a bunch of students were beaten with clubs—but no one was shot. [By comparison] the rally on May 4th was anti-climactic. We didn’t have any plan or agenda—it was just a gathering. As soon as one student got up and spoke about a national student’s strike, that’s when the Guardsmen attacked with teargas and then [shortly thereafter] began aiming guns at me and others. To attack our rally on May 4th—we were doing NOTHING wrong—we were just standing there starting to chant anti-war slogans. One kid just started to speak, and that’s when they attacked. Ultimately they shot 67 gunshots into a crowd of unarmed students—and that was the ultimate absurdity.



Canfora, upper right in photo, face covered by scarf, with black flag at hilltop as Ohio National Guard attack and chase students away from Victory Bell and over Blanket Hill. Note KSU student, Allison Krause, under concrete “pagoda” at hilltop. Allison was shot in the chest & killed 20 minutes later.

There’s no logic to it.

AC: It’s so illogical unless you understand that among the 26 Guardsmen who marched out against us, tear-gassing us, chasing us over a hill, there was a small group there called Troop G of the 107th cavalry unit, there were about a dozen of them and several of their officers—they were like the cream of the crop of the hardcore nastiest National Guardsmen on the scene. When those guys knelt and started aiming, those guys were picking out their targets, and who they were aiming at?—there were two black flags that day, I made both of them, and my room-mate was carrying the other one—who’s carrying a black flag? Who’s throwing stones? Who’s giving the finger? Who’s cursing at them? Who’s taunting them? And among the group that they ended up shooting, Jeff Miller was very active—he was killed. Allison Krauss threw a couple of stones—she was killed. I was waving a black flag—I got shot. Joe Louis was giving the finger—he got shot. John Grace was a protester standing next to me when he got shot through his foot. Eight of the thirteen victims were active in the protest. Five were just by-standers.

You had a group of Guardsmen who were on a twenty-four minute hunting expedition, seeking human prey. And once they committed that massacre, they simply turned, regrouped, and marched away. Mission accomplished.

And what did the Guard do after the shooting?

AC: They had three big lies that they tried to perpetrate. The general had two news conferences that afternoon and said, first of all, “the students were shooting at us, there was a sniper, and we returned gunfire.” That was a lie. The second big lie was “the students were about five feet from us, about to overrun us, we thought our lives were in danger, and we thought they were gonna take our guns from us.” Well, the photographs came out the next day, and the closest student was not five feet away, but 72 feet away. The third big lie was they said the students were throwing rocks, bottles, and other objects, and their lives were in danger so they fired in self-defense. That was proven to be false. When the FBI came to town over the next two months, at the end of their investigation, the Department of Justice concluded that the National Guard’s claim of self-defense was, and I quote, “fabricated, subsequent to the events.”

Some people were throwing stones, some people felt so provoked that they picked up whatever was lying on the ground—but there was such a distance between the students and Guardsmen that day, that the stones fell short—there were also photographs showing Guardsmen throwing stones at students—and those fell short too. So both sides stopped that—it was basically a stalemate. And then when the [Guardsmen] were retreating, we felt “the confrontation is over, they’re going away.” And they got to the top of the hill and that’s when there was a verbal command, “Right here. Point. FIRE.”

A student cassette recording made at the scene was found which corroborates this—verified so far by three digital audio analysts.

All of this information and evidence is on my website alancanfora.com and on may4.org.

>This was an intentional massacre based on an order to fire.



Canfora returns a tear-gas cannister toward the attacking Guardsmen.

Discussion of the events at Kent State seems especially timely considering many of the events that have recently occurred in Ferguson and Baltimore. We have seen the National Guard called out, and it seems to have the opposite of the intended effect, making people much more frustrated, angry, and volatile.

AC: I think it does. For example, when we saw those 1200 Guards rolling into Kent on May 2nd, we thought it was provocative to send in armed troops against students who were only assaulting property. And we knew that same thing was happening all across the country. It was like throwing fuel onto the fire. Especially with those “weekend warriors,” as they were known. These were not full-time, professional, law enforcement personnel. They were beating the students, and stabbing the students, and ultimately they shot us. They were poorly trained, they were over-armed, and they had very poor leadership—unlike full-time professional law enforcement personnel. It’s really a recipe for disaster.

I don’t think the National Guard should be called into a civic disturbance. No longer are National Guardsmen sent into a crowd control situation armed with M-1 rifles. Now days they try to emphasize non-lethal weapons, which of course are still actually lethal. But I don’t think you’ll see another situation where they shoot 67 gunshots into a crowd of unarmed protesters. That was such an extreme example of excessive force. It was about a year after Kent State that they started using rubber bullets, plastic pellets, beanbags, and different things like that. I don’t think you’ll see the same kind of carnage on a mass scale—at least I hope not. When you consider the volatility of our country right now, when you have people that are so oppressed because of income inequality and class discrimination—people that are driven further and further down into poverty, that they are so desperate that they go into the streets—I think there’s a danger that this could be happening not just in Baltimore or in Ferguson, but it could start happening across the country simultaneously [and if this occurred] people would realize that our country had descended into a revolutionary situation.

There’s a cultural polarization that takes place that allows for events such as these, and then people are actually surprised when it happens!

AC: Our governor at the time, James Rhodes, was very hostile against civil rights protests in the urban areas, but he was also very hostile to student protests - especially the ones right before the upcoming election - he was already the governor of Ohio but he was seeking to become a US senator - and he was 8% behind in the public opinion polls [due to student protests]. So he was desperate, and he had to act like he was cracking down on the protesters. He came to Kent and gave a news conference on May 3rd, the day before the massacre, and was pounding his fist on the podium with all of the TV cameras pointed at him, and he said “these Kent State students are the worst type of people we harbor in America. They’re worse than the Communists and the Brownshirts.” And he pounded his fists and said “we’re going to eradicate the problem.” He exaggerated the situation in order to appeal to the conservative Republican voters that were going to be voting in that primary election on May 5th. And he basically provoked or incited the National Guard to commit violence that evening when they stabbed students, and also the next day when they shot us.

April 7, 1970, less than a month before the Kent State shootings, Governor Ronald Reagan in California said “these students want disruption - if it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”

There is a real danger when a situation is polarized—and then you put guns into the hands of the people that are the most hateful, and that’s a formula for a disaster. They hated us, they didn’t understand us, they resented us, to the point where they shot us with absolutely no hesitation.



Canfora and roommate confront Ohio National Guard from 250-feet distance on practice football field minutes before Guardsmen march uphill & shoot.

Anyone who experiences a traumatic situation like this deals with effects of it for the rest of their lives. Many members of the radical left or anti-war movement of the Vietnam era have assimilated into mainstream culture. Would you say that being shot in 1970 was a crystallizing moment that kept you dedicated to activism?

AC: No. My father was a union activist in Akron, Ohio, with the UAW; and he was very political, and raised all four of his kids to be very strongly liberal and progressive minded. He led a two month strike against Goodyear in the 1950s. In the ‘60s he was on our hometown City Council as a liberal Democrat—a very progressive guy. So we were already politicized in my family from the time, even back to the 1950s when my dad opposed a “right to work” law—he had us aware of that stuff even when I was nine years old. When I saw the students beaten in the streets at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, I knew that I wanted to become an activist—to try to fight for the same cause. At Kent State, I first joined the College Democrats, and within a month I quit them and joined the SDS, because they were more leftist intellectuals - the leadership of the SDS at Kent was among the most brilliant and militant in the whole country.

Jerry Casale from DEVO  [was in the Kent State SDS, and] was there, and he witnessed the massacre. Two of his good friends, Jeff Miller and Allison Krauss were killed, and that radicalized a whole lot of people who witnessed the event including Jerry Casale who was already a radical. He formulated his theory of de-evolution—that human society was de-evolving, and the Kent State massacre helped him reach that conclusion—that society was not evolving any longer.

Terry Robbins [of the Weathermen], who got blown up in a townhouse, saw me at the SDS events and looked at me and said “you’re an action freak.” For Terry Robbins to call me an “action freak”... I consider that to be quite a compliment.

By 1969 most of the leadership of SDS had gone underground and joined the Weathermen. I did not. I thought that was a tactical mistake. I thought we had to stay above ground and continue to organize and fight against the war, out in the open. There were only a few of us from SDS still there, and we continued to remain anti-war, and when the invasion of Cambodia happened in the Spring of ‘70 we were among the most active students, sparking the protests. I don’t think that being shot made me more of an activist, but it made me more of a proponent for justice against the cover-up of murder.



“They hated us, they didn’t understand us, they resented us, to the point where they shot us with absolutely no hesitation.”

In finishing up our conversation, I mentioned, off-the-cuff, that many people consider Canfora to be an American hero. He was very quick to dismiss such praise, stating, “I’ve never considered myself to be a hero - I consider myself a foot soldier in the anti-war army.”

Canfora will be participating in the 45th annual commemoration at Kent State and is currently in final-edit of his memoir, which should be wrapped up by Summer. His website contains volumes of information on the events at Kent State, and is well worth your time and research.

Bring back the feminists of W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)!

from Dangerous Minds

1969 WITCH protest in front of Chicago Federal Building.

Of all the second wave feminists who exploded into action over the 1960s and 70s, no group seems to have had quite as much fun as WITCH—the fabulous acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Like so many other groups, WITCH was formed from a split, this one from New York Radical Women. Their counterpart, Redstockings, became the more famous “intellectual” feminist group, producing such visionary minds as Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone (who, among many other far out things, argued for the option of robotic wombs to liberate women from childbirth). WITCH on the other hand was the wild and wooly protest group, easily identifiable by their Halloween get-ups.


Protesting beauty pageant circa 1969.

The group specialized in disruption of the sensational bent, shrieking and chanting in black clothing and white face paint, and “throwing hexes” at enemies of the people. Among their many targets were beauty pageants, Wall Street, bridal fairs, Chase Bank, the presidential inauguration, and even sexists in the politically left anti-war movement. Some of the more famous work was actually quite modest in its goals (hey, all politics are local politics), including protesting public transportation fare hikes with this little hex:

Witches round the circle go
to hex the causes of our woe,
We the witches now conspire
To burn CTA in freedoms’ fire.

Bankers gall, politicians guile,
Daley’s jowl, lackey’s smile,
Trustee’s toe, bondholder’s liar
These we cast into our fire.

Meetings held, messages sealed
When the fare hike is revealed
We, the people, are the prey
Of the demon, CTA….

WITCH were one of many radical feminist groups of the second wave (1960s and 70s), and one of many that is sadly understudied and overlooked. Luckily women like director Mary Dore work on projects like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a new documentary that chronicles the feminist lay of the land in the days of the counterculture revolution. It’s baffling to think that explicitly socialist groups like WITCH and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union started out on the same footing as Hillary Clinton boosters like the National Organization for Women, but we all know that even in the feminist movement, the game is rigged towards Wellesley girls.



You can find a screening of She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry here, and I say it should be mandatory viewing for all girls under the age of eightteen. Where else are we going to get the next chapter of WITCH from?

 

Via Mother Jones

University of Oxford college votes for vegan meals to help fight climate change

from Blue&Green Tomorrow:

Wadham College at the University of Oxford has passed a motion to ban meat products and only serve vegan food for five nights a week on campus.

Founded in 1610, Wadham consists of 150 graduates and 450 undergraduates. It was one of the first colleges to admit women and is known for its progressive attitude.

Oxford is made up of more than 30 different colleges, with the Wadham students’ union (SU) meeting every fortnight.

At a recent meeting, James Kenna, a fourth-year engineer, proposed the motion of serving vegetarian food for four nights. Ben Szreter, a second-year history student, then said to really make a change, it should be amended to five days of vegan food, which was passed.

The motion said, “Reducing the consumption of meat is one of many steps needed to reduce the effects of climate change.”

It was agreed in a meeting in March 2014 that Wadham would have meat-free Mondays, with the motion noting, “Excessive meat consumption is harmful to the environment and it could also lead to an increased risk of certain illnesses like bowel cancer.”

However, some are worried this will intimidate prospective students.

“Five days of vegan food may sound intimidating to students across the country, and many Wadham students I’ve spoken to have said that they would have applied to another college if this policy was in place when they were applying”, Szreter told the weekly newspaper the Oxford Student.

The SU food representative will be carrying out the motion and it will be bought to the next food committee meeting.

The University of Oxford is believed to have the largest investments in fossil fuel companies of any UK university and earlier this month it pledged to look into selling the investments with the results due to be released in July.

In Energy Policy, a peer-reviewed journal, a study in 2012 found the production of fresh meat makes a significant contribution to harmful greenhouse gases. The UN has also been quoted as saying the meat industry is a large contributor to environmental problems.

Oliver Percovich of Skateistan at TED in Sydney

I have blogged about Oliver's Skateistan several times over the last several years. click on this LINK to hear an interesting talk from it's founder... I would post the video here but now embedding code has yet been provided for this talk.

Oliver Percovich first skated in an empty pool at the age of six, while growing up in Papua New Guinea. In 1995 he competed in the Mystic Cup, an international skateboarding contest in Prague. Prior to a life-changing move to Kabul, Oliver worked at the Centre for Risk and Community Safety on emergency management projects for various Australian government departments. In 2007 Oliver moved to Afghanistan from Australia when his girlfriend took a job in Kabul. Bored, he would skate the beleaguered city, and became a sort of pied half-piper, attracting street kids who would follow him around and ask for rides. Shortly after, Oliver founded Skateistan, a grassroots 'Sport for Development' project on the streets of Kabul. Today, Skateistan has more than 50 employees worldwide and is an award-winning international organisation with projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa. The organisation is the first international development initiative to combine skateboarding with educational outcomes. Skateistan is non-political, independent, and inclusive of all ethnicities, religions and social backgrounds, offering both skating and general education classes for over 1000 boys and girls each week.

Disgraceland: Steven Van Zandt rips on Paul Simon

from BackStreets via Amber at Dangerous Minds



Little Steven at a press conference where Coretta Scott King accepted the first $50,000 check (on behalf of The Africa Fund) from Artists United Against Apartheid, 1985)

Perhaps one of my least punk predilections is a weakness for Paul Simon, and the album Graceland, specifically. It’s not that I have any compunction about liking “mom rock,” (moms are awesome, and my love for Carole King is also well-documented), but Graceland is steeped in some pretty nasty history. For one, I’m inclined to believe Los Lobos, who appear on the last track, “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints,” when they say Simon should have given them a writing credit. The album made bank, and he certainly could have stood to give them credit and a little compensation.

But the most well-known controversy of Graceland is Simon’s refusal to cooperate with the cultural boycott of Apartheid—most of the album was recorded in South Africa, but Simon apparently considered himself exempt from the politics of the situation, since he had been invited by South African musicians and didn’t play live shows in the country. I’ll be the first to admit that cultural boycotts can be difficult to understand. From an artist’s perspective, no one wants to be told to avoid an audience or a musical collaboration because their governing body is corrupt. But Paul Simon pulled what we refer to in radical political circles as a “total dick move.”

If he was really committed to solidarity with South Africans (which he insists, to this day, that he was), it would have been incredibly easy for him to just ask the African National Congress if it was cool for him to visit, just to make sure that he wasn’t, ya know… undermining the struggle for liberation of a long-suffering people. He was even explicitly advised by Harry Belafonte to do just that, (and when Harry Belafonte gives you civil rights advice, you’d best just listen). Simon decided he was just going to go, and upon his arrival, he was treated to protests, with signs demanding, “Yankee Go Home” and “Go Back Simon.”

And here’s the thing—he still hasn’t fucking apologized. I’m not sure if it’s because the album was incredibly successful or because it broke South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to a larger audience, but he seems to think the legacy of Graceland completely excuses his totally politically unconscionable transgression. In Under African Skies, the 2012 documentary on the album, he’s still a smug dick about it.

And this is why I love Steven Van Zandt. In addition to being a truly brilliant musician, a dedicated and studious curator of rock ‘n’ roll history, and Silvio Dante, Little Steven is down with the people, and a committed activist. In a recent interview with rock critic Dave Marsh on his Sirius/XM radio program Kick Out The Jams with Dave Marsh, he discussed his work with Artists United Against Apartheid. The whole thing was fascinating, but the very best part is Van Zandt hilariously calling out Paul Simon.

Picking up from the point where Little Steven tells the armed resistance movement, the Azanian People’s Organisation, not to just fucking assassinate Paul Simon for his bullshit…

Dave Marsh: I was with you the first time you saw Paul and talked to him about this, at [entertainment attorney] Peter Parcher’s 60th birthday party.

Van Zandt: That’s right, that’s right, that’s right! I’m glad you were a witness, because wait’ll you hear the latest on that. Anyway, I said to them, “Listen, this is not gonna help anybody if you knock off Paul Simon. Trust me on this, alright? Let’s put that aside for the moment. Give me a year or so, you know, six months,” whatever I asked for, “to try and do this a different way. I’m trying to actually unify the music community around this, which may or may not include Paul Simon, but I don’t want it to be a distraction. I just don’t need that distraction right now; I gotta keep my eye on the ball.” And I took him off that assassination list, I took Paul Simon off the U.N. blacklist, trying to...

You mean you convinced them to take him off…

Yeah, because this was a serious thing…

Because this was gonna eat up the attention that the movement itself needed.

Yes, and the European unions were serious about this stuff, man. You were on that [U.N. blacklist], you did not work, okay? Not like America, which was so-so about this stuff, man. Over there, they were serious about this stuff, you know? Anyway, so yeah, this was in spite of Paul Simon approaching me at that party saying, “What are you doing, defending this communist?!”

What he said was, “Ah, the ANC [African National Congress, the organization of which Mandela was President at the time of his arrest and imprisonment], that’s just the Russians.” And he mentioned the group that [murdered black South African activist Steven Biko] had been in, which was not AZAPO…

Was he PAC [Pan-Africanist Congress]?

It doesn’t matter [for this story], but [Paul Simon] said, “That’s just the Chinese communists.”

Yeah, yeah. And he says, “What are you doing defending this guy Mandela?! He’s obviously a communist. My friend Henry Kissinger told me about where all of the money’s coming from,” and all of this. I was, like, all due respect, Paul…

I remember it very vividly, because it was aimed at everybody standing in the general direction.

Yeah, but mostly he was telling me.

Well, yeah, you were the one… Everybody knew who to get mad at first. [laughter]

He knew more than me, he knew more than Mandela, he knew more than the South African people. His famous line, of course, was, “Art transcends politics.” And I said to him, “All due respect, Paulie, but not only does art not transcend politics… art is politics. And I’m telling you right now, you and Henry Kissinger, your buddy, go fuck yourselves.” Or whatever I said. But he had that attitude, and he knowingly and consciously violated the boycott to publicize his record.

Well, to make his record. That’s the violation of the boycott — to make his record.

Yeah, and he actually had the nerve to say, “Well, I paid everybody double-scale.” Remember that one? Oh, that’s nice… no arrogance in that statement, huh? [laughter]

Now, the punchline. Cut to 30 years later, or whatever it is. He asked me to be in his movie [Under African Skies, the documentary on the making of Graceland, included as a DVD in the album’s 25th anniversary boxed edition]. I said, “Alright, I’ll be in your movie, if you don’t edit me. You ready to tell it like it is?”

He says, “Yep.”

“Are you, like, uh, apologizing in this movie?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’m not gonna be a sore winner. I’ll talk to you.”

I did an interview. They show me the footage. Of course, they edited the hell out of it to some little statement where I’m saying something positive about Paul. [laughter] And I see the rest of the footage, where he’s supposedly apologizing, with Dali Tambo [founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of late ANC leaders Adelaide and Oliver Tambo]. He says, “I’m sorry if I made it inconvenient for you.” That was his apology.

In other words, he still thinks he’s right, all these years later!

You’re the only person who’s ever met Paul twice who thinks that’s surprising. [laughter]

I mean, at this point, you still think you were right?! Meanwhile, that big “communist,” as soon as he got out of jail, I see who took the first picture with him. There’s Paul Simon and Mandela, good buddies. I’m watchin’ CNN the other day. Mandela dies, on comes a statement by Bono and the second statement’s by Paul Simon. I’m like oh, just make me throw up. You know, I like the guy in a lot of ways, I do; and I respect his work, of course. He’s a wonderful, wonderful artist, but when it comes to this subject, he just will not admit he was wrong. Y’know, just mea culpa. Come on, you won! He made twenty, thirty million dollars at least, okay? Take the money and apologize, okay? I mean, say “Listen, maybe I was wrong about this a little bit.” No.

Well…unfortunately we live in a country where the money means you don’t have to apologize, and let’s leave that there.

 

Via Backstreets

ACLU's Santa Claus is Coming to Town video

Yes, NSA spying is real. Please take action to end it now: http://bit.ly/nsaiscomingtotown
The Lyrics:
You better watch out,
You better not Skype,
You better log out,
Yeah you better not type,
The NSA is coming to town.

You're making a list,
They're checking it twice;
They're watching almost every electronic device,
The NSA is coming to town.

They see you when you're sleeping
They hear while you're awake
They know who you call and who you write
So encrypt for goodness' sake!

With Congress in the dark and a cloak-and-dagger court
We're lookin' for answers, they're comin' up short
The NSA is coming to town.

They're making a list,
Checking it twice;
They're watching almost every electronic device,
NSA is coming to town
The NSA is coming to town,
The NSA is coming to town.

thanks, Boing Boing