SOLUTIONARYS: Courage is Contagious

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msfreeh
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Korean War Veteran and VFP Member Russ Christensen organizes Maine

May 28, 2013 at 10:05am

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

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http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... eve-ensler" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Robert Shetterly Reviews In the Body of the World: A Memoir by Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World: A Memoir, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2013.

There's a story I like to tell about William Sloane Coffin speaking at the funeral of a ten year old boy in 1984. The boy had drowned on a class trip. My daughter was in his class. The funeral was held in an old, white clapboard church in a rural part of Maine near where I live. Winter was just letting go, patches of old snow here and there, the tips of daffodil sprouts beginning to peek into the still frosty air. Reverend Coffin had also lost a son by drowning. He knew the grief and confusion of the family, the classmates, and the community. I remember only one thing about what he said that day. He looked at all of us with a kind of stern compassion and said, "Improve the quality of your suffering."

What does that mean, improve the quality of your suffering? Isn't suffering a hard thing the quality of which is always negative and lonely? Yes, Coffin would have said, grief and suffering are hard, they are isolating and oppressive, but everyone suffers, and if you take that pain and reach out with it to empathize with another's suffering, you can not only help that other person, but begin to alleviate your own. You can improve its quality. He knew. He had spent a lifetime using his suffering to stand with victims of racism, poverty and war. His words struck me like a thunderbolt, a flash of clarity about how to live a better life.

This week I finished Eve Ensler's new memoir, In the Body of the World. If ever there was a person who has used her suffering to improve the quality of her life and the lives of countless others, it's Eve Ensler. She weaves the various strands of her life into a rope strong enough to pull her out of her own alienation and despair and then use it as a metaphoric lifeline to pull thousands of other suffering woman to safety.

Writing in a style that is terse, funny, and shockingly -- you might say shamelessly -- honest she tells of the physical abuse by her father and the neglect by her mother ("I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence..."), her desperate forays into drugs and promiscuity, her simultaneous collecting of stories from all over the world of women who have suffered abuse, and then her stage IV uterine cancer. Having taken on the overwhelming burden of her own pain and the pain that of others, she is not surprised that cancer attacks her uterus where, she feels, she has harbored all this pain.

Shortly before her diagnosis, Eve had begun working in the Congo where the systematic, horrifying rape and abuse of women and girls (and men) is being used as a tactic in their civil wars to rid large areas of people so that the rare earth and metals in the land could be mined and sold to multi-national corporations for use in our computers and cell phones. The women who survive flee with their families to avoid this terror. Eve has been instrumental in envisioning and constructing the City of Joy, a haven for Congolese women where they can heal, find community, regain joy in living, and be empowered by learning trades and professions to care for themselves. For the seven months that she was hospitalized with multiple operations, pain drugs, chemotherapy, massive infections, often close to death, she talked nearly every day by phone with women in the Congo who were carrying on the work of building the City of Joy. About the women she was working with she says, "Inside these stories of unspeakable violence, inside the women of the Congo, was a determination and a life force I had never witnessed." She was trying to help them while, at the same time, their life force was giving her the will to live. Improve the quality of your suffering.

The pace of the book is intense. After a harrowing 18 months, Eve is cancer free and back in the Congo for the dedication of the City of Joy. Beyond tellingPortrait of Eve Ensler by Robert Shetterly her story she uses her experience and the experience of the women in the Congo as a metaphor of all of us. The final pages are a passionate exhortation to get involved in any of the world's important issues. She makes a plea for us to stop pretending that the status quo which relies on the rape of women and environments for its gadgets and gizmos is sustainable. She pleads for us to stop pretending that the capsized ship of state can be righted, that what we like to think of as normal is anything but a brutal dead end. She says, "There is no more winning and losing. We have already lost. Even the so-called winners feel that way. That is why they can't stop self-destructing. Step off the wheel of winning and losing. Of course there is risk. Of course it is dangerous. I wish I could make this easy for you. Lose everything. That is where it begins ... Let us turn our pain to power, our victimhood to fire, our self-hatred to action, our self-obsession to service..."https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/wopHP ... N-08aiiO7N

The rapacious values that have brought our economies and our environment to the brink of collapse are not the values that will save us. Eve Ensler says, "The only salvation is kindness. The only way out is care." In the Body of the World is a very important book, a prophetic book, written by a woman who has journeyed into hell and come back to tell us all.

Date: June 5, 2013

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

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August 31, 2007
The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy
by Robert Shetterly

Several years ago I gave a talk on Martha's Vineyard about many of the people whose portraits I've painted in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series. I spent some time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I talk about King, I like to focus on his last year --- the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.

It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King's life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech's oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, "... my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, "The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism." This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King's icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems --- to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can't bear to hear the sound of truth's knife scraping on hypocrisy's bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.

Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha's Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper's book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray's lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray's name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. Pepper had confessions from people involved from each of the organizations named. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?

After my talk on Martha's Vineyard a man came up to me and said, "I enjoyed your speech and was with you until you started that conspiracy stuff about MLK, Jr." I said, "That's not conspiracy. What I told you are facts." End of conversation.

I think we're confronted with two conspiracies here: one to commit the crime, the other to ignore it even when the facts are known. ( Two sides of the same coin.) The man who accused me of slipping into the neurotic, aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts was unable to hear the evidence, perhaps because he was so utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don't exist, people who espouse them are dangerous fruitcakes, and if you begin to think like that, your whole house of cards wobbles then topples. Who wants that? Better a standing tower of marked cards, than having to admit the game is rigged and the ground is shaking.

America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we're talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a "conspiracy nut" and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.

In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, "conspiracy nuts" is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains --- a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff --- and no stuff is ever enough.

As Richard Grossman puts it, "Isn't it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time, the robots get together and overpower the people. ... For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts from God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, obedient."

It is obvious to say that we have been engineered into a culture that values competitive consumption and consumers instead of community cooperation and citizenship. Capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, expanding markets, resource depletion, and increasing profits has consumed democracy. Have you ever watched a small snake swallow a large frog? The snake's hinged jaw stretches wider and wider, squeezing the frog millimeter by millimeter into its gullet until finally the snake looks like the Holland Tunnel might if it had devoured the Titanic. Then the acids and enzymes do their corrosive work. The frog becomes the snake. And the snake claims it is the frog. Capitalism has gulped down democracy and claimed it is democracy. When, immediately after 9/11, President Bush advised Americans to demonstrate their love of freedom and their resistance to terrorism by courageously, selflessly, hurrying to the mall to buy something, he was speaking as the snake that identifies itself as a frog. He was asking us to play a little game with our brains' synapses, replace the snake icon with the frog's. Sadly, he may also have been speaking about democracy in the only way that he can understand or recognize it. And, for him, Christianity has been another tidy meal for the snake.

Perhaps this switcheroo is nowhere more obvious than in the military /industrial complex. We are told that the vulnerable frog needs protecting. The threats are grave. So we fork over our money and children's lives for war and weapons. We are told that we are building security and peace. More lives. More weapons. What we aren't told is that the largest US export to the world is weapons. What we aren't told is that enormous fortunes are being made from the arms trade. What we aren't told is that the more precarious and unstable the world is, the better the business for the arms dealers --- that the real promotion is not for security and peace but insecurity and war, that the lives of our children are the necessary collateral damage for this monster. What we aren't told is that the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism. The frog, who is a snake, wrapped in a flag, pleads for patriotism and counts the cash. The snake's forked tongue is a barbeque fork on which we've all been roasted.

I'd call that conspiracy.

The neocons have claimed, with some accuracy, that they can create reality faster than we can react: the deed is done, now deal with it. The troops have invaded, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed signed their contracts, the prisoners are tortured, your email is bugged, the resources for social programs are gone, the laws are changed, the Wal-Mart is built, the sludge dump has already polluted the aquifer, truth is hollowed out ---- catch me if you can! How is that not conspiracy?

The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America. How is that not conspiracy?

Of course, ever since the Constitution was signed and didn't free the slaves or give the vote to women, poor folks, Native Americans and freed blacks so that people with power and money could continue to profit, America has been a conspiracy against itself. It's been cowboy grilling his own heart over a smoke & mirrors campfire, a CEO with inherited wealth and three hundred years of patrician, affirmative action crooning "Only in America."

The reason we can't talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn't the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. We can impeach a few elephants, and we should, but the architecture is in place. And they control it.

When I was in school, I was reminded - repeatedly --- to avoid using an indefinite pronoun without identifying whom it refers to, as in, "They are coming to get us," ... or, "They control everything." Who are They? It's bad practice to think and write like that. Without reference it just sounds like paranoia. But the hell of it is that it's damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity, like cavemen seeing copper ooze out of a rock by a fire, the wondrous possibility and power of what they had found. For instance, the invention of the TV was not a conspiracy. But once the realization of how TV could be used to submerge the public in a lobotomizing swamp of advertising, sound bites, inactivity, community destruction, titillation, false history, empty myth, consumption, and complicity in making fortunes for the sponsors, the program was clear. Conspiracy was the silent partner in the euphemism good business practice. And, once they saw the implications of giving corporations First Amendment rights, they were home free.

Time to re-think conspiracy.

We need to embrace conspiracy in two ways. One, admit that it's real, its quotidian, it's the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it's filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning. Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own. On our side we have the fundamental fact that although the corporate They can alter many of our realities, they can't alter Reality. They can't change the behavior of Nature. They can sell off the rain forest, but they can't leverage the effect of cutting it. They can keep the mileage of cars poor so we'll buy more gas, but they can't alter the amount of oil in the ground or the damage to the atmosphere. They can privatize every human interaction and every natural resource, but they can't privatize the laws of nature. They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.

In the same way, they can conspire to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., but they can't totally eradicate the truth of who did it and why.

Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together. Those are the roots of conspiracy. Breathing together doesn't sound like an activity of the ideologically deracinated whispering seditiously in a dank cellar or a board room, foul breaths denting a weak flame flickering over a candle nub, gunpowder or greed blackened fingers setting a timer, the whites of creased eyes glinting like knives with treason, murder, power, and deceit. Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it. Breathing together, sharing the same air, plotting to make sure that what's mine is yours, conspiring to save their self-respect, their ideals, the future for their children.

I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building

A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.

And the simple truth is either we start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly, or we will have conspired in secret, by default, in our own demise.

We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.

Secret con + spirare is death. Open con + spirare is life.

Conspiracy is dead. Long live conspiracy!

Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

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REPORT FROM DICK GREGORY AND LOUIS WOLF ON THE ONGOING VIGIL AT THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC, SEEKING COMPASSIONATE RELEASE FOR LYNNE STEWART

On Monday, June 17, as activists stood before the BOP headquarters on Monday, a guard emerged to ask why they were there. Upon hearing that Dick Gregory would be present at the vigil the following day, he responded enthusiastically: "My man, Dick Gregory!"

On Tuesday, June 18, shortly after noon, fifteen people with banners and signs assembled outside the doors of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, DC. for the historic vigil, the first in support of a federal prisoner at the Bureau headquarters.

Dick Gregory spoke about the urgent need for FBOP Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. to sign Lynne Stewart's fully vetted Compassionate Release application and to authorize the federal attorney to file the motion for Compassionate Release with Judge John Koetl. Lynne cannot be freed without the completion of these steps. At this moment, the unconscionable holdup rests with the absence of Director Samuels signature as the completed file remains "on his desk."

As Dick Gregory spoke, workers at the Federal Bureau of Prisons gathered at FBOP windows. The ground floor lobby was filled with FBOP employees, listening and watching.

At 1:15 p.m. two Homeland Security cars pulled up. One of the men who exited one of the cars was in full combat dress. They stopped, watched as Dick Gregory spoke, noted the rapt attention Dick Gregory was receiving from both inside the FBOP and outside it, looked at each other and entered the building without speaking.

Askia Muhammad, News Director of WPFW, was there throughout the two hour vigil and recorded all that was said. Free Speech Radio News filmed and recorded. Code Pink and We Will Not Be Silent were present along with David Schwartzman, a noted DC activist.

Fernando Velasquez of Pacifica's KPFA interviewed Dick Gregory and Lou Wolf on the international campaign to free Lynne Stewart and the vigils at the FBOP and the White House. Fernando broadcasts across Latin America.

The vigil at the Bureau of Prisons headquarters continues all week. If you are in Washington, DC, please come at noon tomorrow and Friday to Federal Bureau of Prisons Headquarters, 320 1st St NW, Washington, DC (corner 1st Street and Indiana Avenue, NW) to demand compassionate release for Lynne.

Simultaneously, Lynne Stewart's husband Ralph Poynter and activists continue a vigil at the White House, mobilizing support for Lynne's release.

If you cannot be in DC, telephone BOP Director Samuels at 202-307-3250. Urge him to act now to move forward compassionate release for Lynne Stewart. There is no time to lose.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

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TWO READS



1st read
click link to view her portrait
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... ice-walker" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Alice Walker
Novelist, Essayist, Poet, Activist for Peace, Social justice, Civil rights, Gender Equality and the Environment: b. 1944
"The male leaders of Earth appear to have abandoned their very senses ... They murder humans and other animals forests and rivers and mountains every day they are in office and never seem to notice it. They eat and drink devastation. Women of the world, Women of the world, Is this devastation Us?"




2nd read

see link for full story
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/26/ ... ce-walker/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Alice Walker’s New Book Makes Her the Zionists’ Target
Smearing Alice Walker
by JEFFREY BLANKFORT

In the comments section of a recent online article in the right wing New York Jewish publication, Algemeiner, not to be confused with the Frankfurter Allgemeine but conceivably with Der Sturmer, there was an argument over whether or not the “Mossad should deal with” Alice Walker as punishment for the critical comments directed towards Israel and American Jewish supporters of Israel in her latest book, “The Cushion in the Road” which, we can assume, none of those commenting had read.

All it took to set off the threat and a stream of racist venom against the 69 year African-American author was an inflammatory headline in Algemeiner’s June 19th edition:“ADL Blasts Anti-Israel Author Walker: ‘She is ‘unabashedly infected with Anti-Semitism’” followed by an article in the same vein.

As could be anticipated from the headline, the story featured a statement by Anti-Defamation League director, Abe Foxman:

“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism.

“She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before. Her descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”

According to an ADL press release, Walker’s book “devotes 80 pages to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often making comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, denigrating Judaism and Jews, and suggesting that Israel should cease to exist as a Jewish state.”

To make the point, the ADL includes four examples. Let’s look at one of them:

“Walker analogizes the Palestinians’ situation with the civil rights era and discrimination against Blacks in the American South. She writes: ‘It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multibranched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.’”

In case the inner racists of its readers hadn’t been stirred up enough by Foxman’s rant, the Algemeiner reporter added that “Walker has a history of making extreme anti-Israel statements. In June 2012 she refused to allow an Israeli company to publish a Hebrew edition of her novel, ‘The Color Purple.’ Most recently, Walker wrote a letter calling on the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming July 4th concert appearance in Tel Aviv.”

“In her book,” the article concludes, “Walker accuses Israel of ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ and ‘cruelty and diabolical torture.’” In so doing, it should be noted, she is simply observing the same phenomena that a number of dissident Israelis have previously noted.

The Jewish establishment and the ADL, in particular, have long had a pre-occupation, if not an obsession, with the notion of “Black anti-Semitism.” In 1992, it published a 50 page letter-size “ADL walkerResearch Report,” entitled “The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists” which included just about everyone who had broken the unwritten taboo of speaking and writing about the role of Jews in the African slave trade.

For having the temerity to step outside of the invisible plantation in which a patronizing Jewish establishment has long consigned the black intelligentsia and political class, Walker is being subjected to a level of racist venom that one might expect from a KKK journal.

When one of Algemeiner’s commenters, Eric R., calls for “Mossad to deal with her” and another commenter, Boston University history professor, Richard Landes, replies that “this is a stupid comment and should have been moderated out,” Eric R. writes back to justify his virtual call for her to be eliminated, Mossad style:

“Tell me, Professor Landes, why you are against Israel dealing with her and other Nazis in this manner? Don’t just give me a reflexive ‘How awful! We can’t say that!’ How else are you going to stop such hatred coming from such sick, hate-filled scum like Walker, who is basically inciting people to genocide? Persuade them? This woman is deranged by her hate, and can no longer be reasoned with. People like her who support and incite people to murder Jews are just as bad as the suicide bombers themselves….

“Israel is dealing with two genocidal groups that increasingly dominate the world – Marxists and Islamists. Playing nice will no longer work with such brutal totalitarian ideologies. To survive, Israel will have to play some very brutal hard ball. That is just a fact of life in an increasingly intolerant, anti-Semitic and totalitarian world. Trying to silence me does not change that.”

Landes, donning his professorial robes, writes, in another comment , that “one of the tragedies of the african-american community is its susceptibility to both anti-semitism and the kind of demon-infested conspiracy thinking that informs Walker’s world view and like so many other manifestations of anti-Semitism historically, it not only hurts Jews, in the long run it does even more damage to the cultures of the anti-semites.

“no one but the warmongers win with this kind of thinking… and yet I’m sure Alice thinks of herself as a good person working for peace and justice.”

M Ben Faivol, a regular commenter on Algemeiner and other Jewish online journals, had different advice for Eric, something akin to a Psy-Op attack on Walker.

“The Mossad should not deal with her; for the Mossad to do so would give her new found stamina as well as give her cause even further celebrity status,” he wrote. “If Eric really wants to do something about Ms. Walker, he should take responsibility and recognize that he has power to change the world–her world.

“He should undertake such activities as to become fully versed in her works that are anti-Semitic as well as what else she has done that is Pro-Palestinian. He should then find the areas he sees where confrontations leading to embarrassing her publicly can be addressed. THEN he should find a credible person or organization that has like-minded people who can help him formulate the attacks. At that point, he is ready to gain supporters to help and to then undertake non-violent confrontations. Good Luck. If I can help you, please get my email from Algemeiner.”

That Algemeiner did not remove the Mossad comment (while censoring one of mine) should tell the reader all she or he needs to know about the publication. Among the 68 comments still on the site, there are only two that suggest that Walker may be on to something. As for the rest there are some that are just as ugly whose authors have no compunction about posting their names.

It is also obvious that none of the latter take into consideration that Israel might be a valid object for criticism.

George Yegorov who apparently lives in the Ukraine was among the first:

“Alice Walker isn’t a thinker or a writer,” he writes. “She rode to fame during a time when critics championed ‘ethnic’ writing, no matter how bad it was. And now because of the dim-wittedness of those times, during which all voices were ‘valid’ and ‘equal’, even though it is more than apparent that art distinguishes itself by talent only…If people had just waited for real talent to emerge instead of dressing a wart hog in a ball gown and giving it a rhinestone tiara, we wouldn’t now be stuck with Alice Walker.”

Rochelle Davidson would burn her books: “Everyone who bought this trash talking book should get together and burn them all at once. We can’t allow this hatred talk to stay available to anyone. We should boycott buying or reading it and make sure that she knows WHY. She would be the first one to scream when there are anti-black rantings going on.”

Monique Shanabarger, 75 years old from Morocco and a devoted fan of Daniel Pipes, can not contain herself, nor her racism. Here she is unedited (but broken into paragraphs for easier reading):

“Alice Walker is your typical angry, resentful, envious and enraged black american female,” she writes, “who takes advantage of our freedoms to spew out her hate and jealousy of the success of Israel and the brilliant intellect of the jewish people.In comparaison a great majority of her kind have really never totally gave up the law of the jungle with a hidden sense of inferiority and savage, bacward reasonning no matter how much instruction and emancipation they get in the modern world.

“Well,our left leaning jewish people ought to stop giving an audience and importance to her kind and put them in their place and stop being hypocritical like them.The jews should help and take care of their own poor and Israel and be proud and assertive before there is another holocost.Real charity begins at home,you liberal jews had better ponder on that,wake up and smell the coffee and fast while you can!

“This is coming frome me a 75 years old jewish Moroccan woman whose father had prepared to gun down his ten children,his wife and himself while the german gestapo was knocking at our door the night the Americans landed and invaded north africa in 1942.They saved us in the nick of time.Remember ALL THAT AND WAKE UP!!!!!”

To Monique’s screed, Los Angeles attorney Ilbert Phillips objects, but only slightly:

“Martinique [getting her name wrong]: ‘a great majority of her kind. . . the law of the jungle. . . savage backward reasoning. .. . Ms. Walker is clearly a American is mixed ancestry (both African and European) Your piece sounds as racist as Alice Walker’s drivel. We do not need that kind of language to describe Ms. Walker as the anti-semite she is. She is clearly emotionally disturbed and her ancestry has nothing to do with it.”

A David S Most suspects that “the specific nature of her anti-Semitism indicates some deeper and darker inner hatreds towards Jews than the standard variety. She is probably a follower of Louis Farrakhan who has been preaching this kind of anti-Semitism for years.

“How this woman could become infected with a hate virus so virulent that it lets her write lies, distortions, and outright venom would make a great psycho study. She shares the thinking of such greats as Adolf Hitler and Ken Livingstone, ex-London mayor.”

A Judie Selig writes that: “Alice Walker has shown the world how ignorant and stupid she really has become. She has not been in the limelight for quite awhile and this is giving her 15 minutes of fame that she dearly needs! Her lies about us are disgraceful and we as Jews should take her lack of knowledge as a sign of her losing her place in the world. She is pathetic and needs deep therapy.”

Ruth-Claire Weintraub, a PEP (Progressive Expect for Palestine) social worker from New York, now living in Canada, suggests that:

“This is very sad, that a woman with as much sensitivity and insight about the terrible injustices experienced by people of African descent as Alice Walker, is overwhelmed by such a negative bias towards Israeli Jews. I wonder how such utter poison, such poisonous water, got into her well?”

Walker would no doubt reply that she has been to Occupied Palestine and has seen the situation for herself and probably would recommend that Weintraub and the rest of her Jewish critics do the same.

The last comment posted was mine although it took two days to pass muster with Algemeiner’s moderator :

“I have posted all of these comments on my Facebook page for all of the world to see. I can tell you one thing: they will help the sales of her book.”

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story
http://rt.com/usa/kiriakou-snowden-letter-leak-618/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


CIA whistleblower to Snowden: ‘Do not cooperate with the FBI’
July 03, 2013 16:39


NSA leaker Edward Snowden is the subject of an open letter of support just published from behind bars by John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent currently serving time for sharing state secrets.

In a letter dated June 13 and published Tuesday by Firedoglake, the imprisoned CIA vet salutes Snowden for his recent disclosures of classified documents detailing some of the vast surveillance programs operated by the United States’ National Security Agency.

“Thank you for your revelations of government wrongdoing over the past week,” Kiriakou writes. “You have done the country a great public service.”

“I know that it feels like the weight of the world is on your shoulders right now, but as Americans begin to realize that we are devolving into a police state, with the loss of civil liberties that entails, they will see your actions for what they are: heroic.”

Beginning with the June 6 publication of a dragnet court order demanding the phone data of millions of Americans, The Guardian newspaper has released a collection of leaked documents attributed to Snowden for which the US government has charged him with espionage. He is reportedly now hiding in a Moscow airport and has sought asylum from no fewer than 20 countries to avoid prosecution in the US. Should he be sent home and forced to stand trial, however, Snowden will likely find himself in a peculiar position that the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst can most certainly relate to: Kiriakou is currently serving a 36-month sentence at the Loretto, Pennsylvania federal prison for revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent to reporters.

Before Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one count of passing classified information to the media last year, the government charged him under the Espionage Act of 1917. He has equated the prosecution as retaliation for his own past actions, saying the charge wasn’t the result of outing a secret agent but over exposing truths about the George W. Bush administration’s use of waterboarding as an interrogation tool in the post-9/11 war on terror. As in the case of Snowden, Kiriakou’s supporters have hailed him as a whistleblower. As the government sings a very different song, though, the CIA analyst offers advice to Snowden in what is the second of his “Letters from Loretto” published by Firedoglake since Kiriakou’s two-and-a-half-year sentence began earlier this spring.

“First, find the best national security attorneys money can buy,” writes Kiriakou. “I was blessed to be represented by legal titans and, although I was forced to take a plea in the end, the shortness of my sentence is a testament to their expertise.”

“Second, establish a website that your supporters can follow your case, get your side of the story and, most importantly, make donations to support your defense.”

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.stopfbi.net/2013/6/26/csfr-s ... ent-france" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


CSFR Solidarity with the BDS Movement of France
Published on Wed, 2013-06-26 16:42
CSFR Solidarity with the BDS Movement of France

The Committee to Stop FBI Repression in the US sends solidarity greetings to our brothers and sisters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in France. We stand with you against the outrageous attempts by the French government to slander and criminalize you. The US and French governments and courts cannot hold back the international movement for freedom, justice and equality in Palestine!

We understand what you are up against. In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided our homes, claiming to investigate “material support for terrorism,” which carries a minimum 15-year prison sentence. The FBI took our belongings and ordered 23 antiwar, and Palestine and Colombia solidarity activists, to appear before a grand jury in Chicago. Grand juries are secretive courts, run solely by US prosecutors, with no judge, and no right to a lawyer or to present evidence favorable to you. All 23 refused to appear, risking going to jail. There was a tremendous outpouring of support for us, with protests in 70 cities and solidarity statements from unions, and peace, community, religious and student groups.

Today, the Assistant US Prosecutor Barry Jonas claims the “investigation is ongoing” and refuses to return the belongings of Palestinian-American leader Hatem Abudayyeh of Chicago. Jonas is a pro-Israel ideologue responsible for putting the Holy Land Five, Muslim and Palestinian-American charity leaders, in prison for up to 65 years. We say education, health care, housing and food for Palestinians is a human right! Charity and solidarity is not a crime!

There are now nearly 200 Palestinian-American, Arab-American, and Muslim men in US prisons for similar political cases. The repression is continuous and expanding.

But we have an international movement against war, occupation and repression that is growing more powerful. The US, its NATO allies including France, and Israel, are in decline and growing more isolated in the world. Because they are losing, they are acting more desperate. Their rulings and laws will not hold us back. It only makes us more determined! Because of the BDS movement in the US, people are learning that Israel is a country of repression and super-exploitation like Apartheid South Africa. Opposition to US funding for Israel is growing.

We hope you will accept a token donation of “material support” from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression for your legal defense fund. We stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the BDS movement in France!

Tom Burke, for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression at http://www.StopFBI.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

July 7, 2013
Craig McKee, Secretary 9/11 Monthly Teleconference Call

**********************

Draft minutes of Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Monthly 9/11 Truth Teleconference Call 8 pm (ET); 5pm (PT)

Present on the 6/26/2013 9/11 Teleconference Call were:

Ken Freeland, Facilitator of 9/11 Teleconference Call, Houston 9/11 Truth
Craig McKee, Secretary of 9/11 Teleconference Call, Truth and Shadows
Robin Hordon, Occupy Peace Through 9/11 Truth
Barbara Honegger, independent 9/11 researcher
Don Stahl, St. Louis 9/11 Truth Questions
Steve De’ak, 9/11 Crash Test

Draft minutes from 05/29/13 teleconference were APPROVED

The amended draft agenda was APPROVED

1) Engineering firm sought for crash test

Steve De’ak, creator of the 9/11 Crash Test, seeks to contract with a sympathetic engineer to perform finite element analysis in preparation for the test in which he plans to place a 767 wing on a sled and crash it into a facade comparable to the exterior of the World Trade Center. Anyone who wishes to help or knows someone who might be qualified can call Steve at 503-516-9488.

2) Endorsement of 9/11 conference in Washington D.C.

The 9/11 Truth Teleconference voted unanimously to endorse the planned Washington 9/11 conference called “9/11: Advancing the Truth,” which is scheduled for Sept. 14 and 15. The vote followed an update of the program by Barbara Honegger, who is both a participant and part of the organizing committee for the conference. She said that the information she will be presenting at the conference is also covered in a presentation she gave in Seattle in January 2013 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fvJ8nFa ... e=youtu.be" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;).
The web site for the conference is now live at http://dc911conference.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

3) Update on Rethink911

Ken Freeland offered an update on the publicity campaign Rethink911 (previously called Operation Tip the Planet) and a discussion followed.


4) Future of 9/11 Truth Teleconference

Ken Freeland raised the issue of whether the 9/11 Truth Teleconference should continue operating in light of poor participation levels in recent months. Craig McKee proposed that a letter be written to all those on the Teleconference mailing list encouraging them to participate
and informing them that the group may not continue unless attendance improves. This was approved. It was also agreed that feedback should be solicited in the letter about how people feel about the Teleconference and whether there are things about it that they would like to see change.

Announcements:

Robin Hordon brought up the new documentary film TWA Flight 800 and suggested that it has significant parallels for 9/11.


Call was adjourned at 9:30 p.m. EST/6:30 p.m. PST

You can hear an audio recording of the teleconference (along with archives of earlier calls) in its entirety here: http://houston911truth.net/audio/062613.wav" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The 9/11 Truth Teleconference is held on the last Wednesday of every month. The next 9/11 Teleconference call will be Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 8 pm EST, 8:00 EST/5:00 pm PST.

Please send agenda items for next call to facilitator Ken Freeland (diogenesquest@gmail.com) by July 27. Please use subject line “Agenda item for 911 Truth Teleconference.”

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

This spring I traveled to Beacon New York to videotape and interview musician
Pete Seeger for a documentary I am working on about artist Robert Shetterly
see http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/por ... ete-seeger" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The interview took place in his home that he built during the 1940's sitting high up
a mountain overlooking the Hudson River.His wife Toshi sat next to me as I interviewed
Pete , who was scheduled to turn 94 in a few weeks. When the interview was finished
I leaned down and gave Toshi a hug and kiss on the cheek.
The photo of her and Pete in the following story looked like it could have been taken that day this spring.
see http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/11-1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thursday, July 11, 2013 by Common Dreams
Toshi Seeger, Beloved Activist and Wife of Pete Seeger, Dies at 91
- Jon Queally, staff writer

Toshi Seeger (1922-2013) and her husband Pete. Toshi-Aline Ohta Seeger, the wife of legendary folk musician Pete Seeger, has died at the age of 91, according to Sing Out magazine and others.

According to family friends, Toshi died at the couple's longtime home in New York's Hudson Valley on July 9, just nine days short of what would have been their 70th wedding anniversary.

Known and celebrated as an artist and activist in her own right, Toshi Seeger was often seen as the grounding force throughout her husband's career and over the nearly seven decades of marriage they shared together.

“Theirs was a true partnership,” writes Sing Out's Mark Moss in his remeberance. “Without Toshi’s counsel and support, and always outspoken and direct opinions, it’s clear to anyone who ever met these two remarkable people that, without Toshi, Pete would never have had the foundation and freedom to do the work that made him so legendary."

Describing Toshi as a "consummate dreamer and optimist," Moss also recounts her early life and how she met young Seeger:

Toshi was born in Munich, Germany, to an American mother and a Japanese father. Her parents brought her to the U.S. when she was 6 months old, as soon as it became legal for the two to be married here. They found an apartment in New York City, where her father found work as the building’s caretaker.

Toshi grew up in a family of progressives. She went to the High School of Music and Art, and . After a few years of friendship, meeting Pete at square dances around NYC, Pete and Toshi were married in 1943, just before Pete was about to ship out overseas. She was age 21 at the time. [...]

In 1949, following the war, the two moved to Beacon, NY, where they raised their children Danny, Mika and Tinya. They built a cabin for shelter, and lived in that beautiful woodland mountain ever since.

Young Toshi. (Photo by Gene Deitch)"The thoughts of Clearwater's staff, board, and crew are with Pete and the Seeger family and friends today," read a status update on the Facebook page of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, where Seeger had devoted much of her organizing efforts over the years. "Toshi-Aline Ohta Seeger was a powerful force for good who made many positive contributions to the world, and she will be sorely missed by all who knew her."

In a separate statement, Clearwater's executive director Jeff Rumpf said Toshi's death is a “huge loss for Clearwater and the world.”

“Toshi is a real mother, a mother for social justice, a mother for festivals all over the world and people singing,” he said. “She is a mother that embodies all the spirit your own mother does and spreads it out over the community. We’re really going to miss Toshi.”

And the local Hudson Valley Times-Record reports:

In 1949, Pete and Toshi moved to Beacon, where they raised children Danny, Mika and Tinya in a cabin by the Hudson River. It was there that Pete would chop down the trees for firewood and fitness, and Toshi would help Pete advocate for social justice, free speech and cleaner waters. Their efforts would grow into the first Great Hudson River Revival, the cornerstone event for the nonprofit organization Clearwater. Toshi was for years the artistic programmer of the Revival.

Residents of Beacon were sad to hear of the news of Seeger's passing, noting that she was a major force in what made the city an artistic and creative vessel.

"What Pete means to Beacon and certainly Toshi as well, they're as important to Beacon as the mountain is," said Dan Rigney, president of the Beacon Arts Community Association.

"Our hearts are all breaking tonight for them and we really particularly want Pete to know how much Toshi meant to us, and how much he means to us as well," Rigney added.

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

I have been shooting a documentary about Robert Shetterly since 2006
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... rd-snowden" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thursday, June 13, 2013 by Common Dreams
Edward Snowden: The Asymmetry of Courage
by Robert Shetterly
see link for full story
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/13-6" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
One of the ironies of warfare is that an apparently vastly superior force can be defeated by an apparently much weaker one when the weaker force refuses to meet the more powerful on its own terms, play by its rules, square off army to army, submit to punch and counterpunch. A combination of strategy and tactics designed by the weaker force to enervate the morale, confidence and finances of the powerful may prove decisive --- as it did for the American revolutionaries against the British, North Vietnamese & Viet Cong against the U.S., or the Afghanis against the Soviets. In 1975 Andrew Mack first used the term “asymmetric warfare” to describe this phenomenon in an article called Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars. A materially weaker force with higher motivation --- they may be fighting for their own land --- and greater perseverance may prevail. The weaker force may be beleaguered by the horrible and high tech weaponry of exorbitant power --- stealth bombers, napalm, cluster bombs, cruise missiles and drones, depleted uranium, helicopter gun ships and satellite surveillance --- but it manages to dodge and absorb, go underground, patiently wait to strike an exposed weakness.Rally in support of Edward Snowden in Manhattan's Union Square (Mario Tama / Getty Images )

I was thinking about asymmetry this week as the story of Edward Snowden unfolded. This story, one young man pitted against our national security state, is an extreme asymmetry, but the disparity is not between lesser and greater violent forces. And, for that reason, it could not properly be called a David versus Goliath confrontation. David was small but armed with sling & stone. Edward’s only “weapons” are courage and truth.

In asymmetric warfare, the powerful say, “Come out and fight on our terms! We’ll show you who’s stronger!” The weaker say, “Not on your life! We plan to win, not commit suicide.”

Conversely, in a contest of asymmetric courage, the lone whistleblower says to the powerful institutions, “Come out and fight on my terms --- ethics, courage, truth, law!” And there is deafening silence from the powerful institutions because with all their secret knowledge and secret money, their special forces and spies, their torture and secret prisons, they have not courage. They have not ethics, truth or law. They are muscled up with conformity, with arrogance, with self-congratulatory winks and nods. They have the power to easily crush the person of courage, to discredit him in the media, to arrest and convict him in a kangaroo court, to torture him, disappear him, force feed him. They have secret protocol and secret policy, the power to change the law to legalize atrocity. But they have no courage. They have the pathetic vanity of a steroid-pumped-up robots flexing in front of a mirror. With satisfied smirks they ask rhetorically, “Who’s the strongest in the world?” But they have no courage.

Thomas Jefferson said, "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." He could have been commenting on the situation of Edward Snowden or any one of so many recent whistleblowers. People fear the government when it secretly and lawlessly insinuates itself into the fabric of their lives with the ever present threat that each person could be plucked out of that fabric with no recourse. This is done in the name of security. But a government that spies on its own people actually prefers fear to security. Or, simply, the security of fear. There should be no trade off or balancing act, no compromise, between our freedoms and our security. Our freedoms are our security. Sacrificing our privacy, which is our autonomy as individuals, for the sake of security is like willingly agreeing to be half a slave.

The false dichotomy between security and freedom obscures a more important fact. When we wring our hands and listen to a president pontificate about how to balance this either/or, we are encouraged not to notice that it is our foreign, military and economic policies that are designed to create injustice and insecurity. Imperialism, both soft and hard, fosters anger and insecurity. The obsession with secrecy is absurd. There is no secrecy about this. The only secret worth divining is where the next moral hero will come from to expose the extent of tyranny and inspire more people to act with asymmetric courage. In that action is the hope of democracy. In that “illegal” action is the hope of the rule of law.

Edward Snowden reminds me of Rachel Corrie, who was run over and killed by an armored Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003 as she placed herself --- asymmetrically --- between the bulldozer and a Palestinian home she hoped to protect from destruction. The similarity between Rachel and Edward is in the nature of the stand-off --- isolated courage versus brute power. The difference is that no one knew about Rachel’s courage until it was too late. We all know about Edward, and, perhaps, if we can summon a fraction of his courage, we can protect him and thus change the policy.

In early 2003 shortly after arriving in Palestine, in her first email home, Rachel said, “I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons.” She assumed that all Americans would recognize constant surveillance as a prime indicator of tyranny. Like Rachel, Edward attempts to protect an increasingly fragile structure, our Constitution and the democracy it is meant to house. Edward said, "...they [the NSA] are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them." While our national security state has all the ideological arrogance and democratic sensitivity of a bulldozer operated by a storm trooper, it is susceptible to and befuddled by courage. It blusters, it growls, it threatens and backfires. It uses its x-ray vision to spy out the color of our underwear and the temerity of our intention to resist. But, ultimately, it’s a coward.

Edward Snowden’s courage is like a lever the end of which he shoved under the NSA’s enormous dead weight. Whether the weight moves depends on how many of us grab on. Asymmetry can move mountains.
Robert Shetterly

Robert Shetterly [send him mail] is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine. He is the author of Americans Who Tell the Truth. See his website.

msfreeh
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Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/blo ... rd-snowden" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Meditations While Painting Edward Snowden
Submitted by robert shetterly on 16 July 2013 - 9:54am

“...the national security state and the rule of law are mortal enemies... the national security state’s apparatus needs arbitrary power. Such power has its own code, which is meant to govern or justify the behavior of the initiated -- after the fact. It operates to protect the state apparatus from the citizenry.”

Marcus Raskin








The day after I read & watched the video of Glenn Greenwald's interview with Edward Snowden in a hotel room in Hong Kong, I began to paint Snowden's portrait for the Americans Who Tell the Truth project.

There were few images of Snowden available -- some stills from the video in which the subdued indoor lighting gives his face a bluish cast. And a few snapshots with flash that turn him yellow & obscure detail. His hair seemed different in the two versions, and the video never showed the top of his head. I had to make some assumptions. I began drawing until I thought I had a decent likeness, laid in some medium toned color all over his face, then began painting his eyes. If I can get the eyes right, the painting transforms. It becomes a real presence, looks at me, begins to talk to me about doubt, about vulnerability, about courage, about loneliness, about conscience, about anger. Begins to talk to me about defining moments & no going back. About justice being more important than himself.

* * * * * *

Snowden seemed to me a tiny chunk of the vast, submerged NSA iceberg, a chunk that had chipped itself free & willed itself to drift in the opposite direction. The one lemming that ran the other way.

* * * * * *

The debates about whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero seem wrong to me. He is both. He is traitor to the National Security State, but a hero to the idea of democracy.

He is a hero to the rule of law, but traitor to the rule of legal hypocrisy. Or, put another way, he's a traitor to the selective law of power & privilege. He's a hero to the rule of justice.

I find it curious to hear our media and officials clamor on about the rule of law: Whatever else you may say, he did break the law! Well, of course he did. Haven’t many of our heroes broken the law? What did the law say to Rosa Parks about where she could sit on a bus in Montgomery? What did the law say to Susan B. Anthony about her right as a woman to vote? What did the law say to Harriet Tubman about the legality of slavery? It was not for nothing that Thoreau said, "The law will never make men free. Men have got to make the law free." Isn't that what Edward Snowden is doing -- saving us from unjust law? What is the law but a lump of self-serving clay in the hands of power? How easily the law can be shaped to make preemptive war legal, or torture, or rendition, or murder without due process, or total surveillance. I think the political philosopher Marcus Raskin says it best:

"Democracy and its operative principle, the rule of law, require a ground on which to stand. That ground is the truth. When the government lies, or is structured like our national security state to promote lies and self-deception, then our official structures have broken faith with the essential precondition for constitutional government in democracy. "

Edward Snowden is a traitor to those who say the law is about looking forward not back.

He's a hero to those who say that the law has to look back, requires a ground to stand on, in order to look forward. A law of convenience is no law at all.

Should Snowden have turned himself in? Confronted his accusers in court? I suspect his reason for not doing that was based in strategy rather than personal safety. He saw whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and John Kiriakou and Sibel Edmonds be denied the right to explain in court why they had to act. They are silenced in court. As a free but stateless man, he can continue to expose the duplicity of our surveillance state.

* * * * * *

In the 1950s & 1960s when I was young, a common Cold War refrain was Better Dead than Red! The slogan's aggressive political and moral content was that it was preferable to blow up the entire world with nuclear weapons than succumb to a totalitarian surveillance state.

And here we are today being asked by our president to weigh our freedom against our security, to decide in favor of security and accept the surveillance of all of us.

This surveillance comes not by a hammer or a sickle, but from the paranoia of our own power. Communist moles have not infiltrated the State Department and the Pentagon -- we can do that very well for ourselves, thank you, with the help of corporate true believers. Joe McCarthy was right about the infiltration, but wrong about the perpetrators. So, are we red but not dead? Or, fascist and dead? Should we not resist?

* * * * * *

Secrecy. I’d prefer to be responsible for my own secrets. As well as my endearments, my stupid jokes, my political rants, my plans to meet friends, my birthday greetings, my thank you calls, my favorite lines of poetry, my expletives, my sorrows, my indiscretions, my struggles to understand spirituality, my attempts at solace. They’re mine. They are me. I don’t want some NSA voyeur collecting what’s me and making it his. I empathize with some indigenous people who believe that taking their photo is stealing their soul. A man with a little black box walks away with you inside it. My secrets become his secrets. Who am I then?

* * * * * *

When I paint, I paint mostly with my fingers -- more like sculpting, thinning and shaping color, mixing it, making the paint translucent to allow the color to come from underneath. The process is intimate. My fingers blot a highlight on the iris, smooth the pinkness at the inner edge of a nostril, rub a bluish shadow into the cheek, smudge the eyebrows into the occipital ridge, round a shadow to shape the lower lip. It's all about the intensity of seeing but accomplished as though I am blind and learning the contours of the face with my fingers.

* * * * * *

While I was working on the portrait, the US revoked Snowden's passport. He was in Russia, apparently sequestered in the airport, having one possible refuge after another cave to US pressure. He was now stateless. How strange! The man who believes so deeply in the purported values of his state that he risks everything for those values is then disowned by that state. In effect, by being disowned, he becomes the state. By disowning him, the state disowns its own values. He becomes the remnant of those values in exile. One person becomes bigger -- morally, legally, courageously, spiritually -- than the hypocritical state that denounced him. He's like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver being staked out & tied to the ground by the swarm of ant-like Lilliputians.

* * * * * *

While Snowden was tied down in Russia, I had to leave the portrait to attend a conference in Jordan about civic engagement and democracy in the Middle-East & North Africa. I bought a book there of the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence. In a section describing how it feels to live under Israeli occupation and surveillance, Darwish says, They interpreted your dreams before you had them. Oh, I thought, exactly the goal of the NSA as they decipher metadata and comb emails to predict my actions before I have formulated them myself. An invasion of the privacy of the future as well as the present.

* * * * * *

An Aside: We hear apologists for the NSA say, well, hell, we've got the technology; it's going to be used! As if there is no escaping the destiny of the invention. We also hear: We have the technology for hydraulic fracturing, so it will be used. And: Because the tar sands are there, we will use the oil. So, should I get used to the fact that because I have a big knife in my kitchen, I will have to stab myself in the back? Are we a species with conscious choice, or is our only option an inventive determinism leading to suicide?

* * * * * *

In his essay in the New Yorker about the NSA, Hendrik Hertzberg makes the good point that even if millions of people the world over are not being bugged except in terms of "metadata," maybe the intrusion is not so great for any one person, “But that does not mean no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity."

Hertzberg's sentiments are fine & correct. But I am deeply bothered when anyone presents an argument based on the assumption that a viable "architecture of trust and accountability" is still standing in this country. As surely as the World Trade Towers, that building of civic faith was knocked down a long time ago & it serves none of us any good to act as though its mirage is still standing. To comfort ourselves with the belief that it does exist only plays into the hands of the powerful dissemblers who have taken it down. If you think you can see it, they can still pretend it's there for the good of us all. Of course, we can’t survive as a polity without that architecture of trust and accountability. Which is why, first, we must drain the swamp of special interest money from our politics.

* * * * * *

An aside on "service": While tediously scratching in Snowden's hair and stippling his short mustache and goatee, my mind wanders. I think about the service he has tried to perform for the people of this country through his sacrifice. It's an unpaid and un-honored service. His service has some similarities to the service of our military. Their charge is to protect the Constitution. He took that oath and ordered himself to do that, too. But there are some vast differences. Our servicemen & women were betrayed by their government when they were sent to Iraq and required to risk their lives while killing people who were not a danger -- nor intended to be -- to this country or our Constitution. They are praised highly for their service -- for the obvious reason that the praise obscures the crimes. Snowden is condemned for his service because it exposes crime & hypocrisy.

* * * * * *

A further aside: I travel a lot. Those of you who do, too, know that our domestic airlines offer a thank you to our military service personnel by letting them board planes first, sometimes upgrading them to first class, sometimes asking fellow passengers to applaud their service. This irritates me -- not because these soldiers are not courageous & patriotic, but because it enforces the idea that the cause is just. I would love to hear -- just once! -- a flight attendant ask the passengers to acknowledge the peacemakers on board, to see a social justice activist be offered an upgrade to first class (and refuse it, of course).

* * * * * *

I decided to paint the background of Snowden's portrait a deep brown/black. No other color seemed right.

* * * * * *

Somebody asked me if I was going to paint Snowden’s moles on his left cheek & neck. Of course, I said, my obligation is not to be a cosmetic surgeon. Quite the opposite. Part of my obligation as an artist is to paint whatever I see in people however it varies from the aesthetic ideal -- the lopsided nose, the differently sized eyes, their blue-gray circles, a protruding ear, the thinning hair, crooked teeth. Nor is my task to judge what might be seen as character flaws in my subjects. We all have flaws. We all don’t have courage. Part of my obligation is to make visible the courageous integrity that informs the face, how it radiates as beauty.

* * * * * *

One metric by which to measure Snowden's action: did it take courage or cowardice? The answer to this reminds me of Camilo Mejia, the first US soldier who, for refusing to go back to Iraq spent 9 months in prison. From prison Mejia wrote: "I was a coward, not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being, and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier. What good is freedom if we are not able to live with our own actions? I am confined to a prison, but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity. Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.” He went on to say that he was also a hero -- not because he led men into battle, but because he refused to do it anymore in that immoral war.

Edward Snowden was a traitor to the kind of duty that can make one feel part of something, but simultaneously rob one of humanity. He was a hero for following his conscience which required of him a profound and deeper duty.

In a recent essay in the The New York Times, Roger Berkowitz, writing about Hannah Arendt, wrote,

“Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners... Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that… makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.”

This quote may explain the deafening silence from others in the NSA to Snowden's action. Two of the only NSA employees to support Snowden have been Tom Drake and William Binney, fellow NSA apostates and courageous whistleblowers who tried years ago to make the same warning.

* * * * * *

My last task was to scratch a quote from Snowden into the surface of the portrait. As anyone who has listened to him knows, Snowden is articulate, measured, thoughtful and philosophically accurate about the ideas that support democracy and that impelled him to act. After considering many possible quotes, I chose one of the simplest and most obvious, one which the NSA with all of its super computers, eavesdropping equipment, and secrecy could not begin to understand:

"...the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless…. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." --- Edward Snowden

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

Tell Obama NOT to Nominate NYPD Commissioner Kelly for Homeland Security



NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and the Department of Homeland Security are a match made in heaven -- and that's why we should do everything we can to stop him.

With Secretary Janet Napolitano on her way out, Commissioner Kelly and his racist and unconstitutional law enforcement accolades have made him a Beltway fan favorite to lead the agency. New York Senator Chuck Schumer wasted no time in releasing a statement saying, “there is no doubt Ray Kelly would be a great DHS Secretary, and I have urged the White House to very seriously consider his candidacy.”1 Apparently the White House is doing exactly that.2

This is the man who spied on New York City Muslims after 9/11, institutionalized racial profiling via "Stop and Frisk" and brutalized protesters throughout Occupy Wall Street. Putting him in charge of an agency that itself has an odious legacy of rights abuses would be a monumental mistake.

Please join us in calling on President Obama not to nominate NYPD Commissioner Ray "Stop and Frisk" Kelly for DHS Secretary.

Ray Kelly's tenure as the longest serving commissioner in NYPD history is marred by the institutionalization of unconstitutional law enforcement practices that have turned the city into a police state for the poor, dissenting and people of color. If President Obama was to appoint Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security, that would potentially be interpreted as rewarding Kelly for dramatically scaling up his disdainful practices and giving him the green light to implement them on a federal level.

As Matthew Taylor writes in Vice, "Whether it’s directing the Transportation Security Agency and our airports, managing immigration and border enforcement, or just generally having his way with a multi-billion dollar budget, the opportunities for abuse in a Kelly-run DHS are terrifying to contemplate."3

Finally, a Ray Kelly appointment for DHS could also send a message to municipal police departments nationwide that programs like Stop and Frisk or the mass surveillance of Muslims are acceptable, won't be challenged by the Department of Justice, and might even earn your commissioner a top spot in the president's cabinet. This is a precedent that cannot be allowed to start.

Please join us in calling on President Obama not to nominate NYPD Commissioner Ray "Stop and Frisk" Kelly for DHS Secretary.

In Solidarity,

Brian Sonenstein
Campaign Director,
Firedoglake.com

Sources:
1. Why Ray ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Kelly Possibly Being Nominated to DHS Would Be so Dangerous, Jon Walker, Just Say Now, 7/15/2013.
2. President Obama eyes NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to run the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Straw, New York Daily News, 7/16/2013.
3. Ray Kelly’s Path To Becoming America’s Big Brother, Matthew Taylor, VICE, 7/16/2013.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story
http://harvardhumanrights.wordpress.com ... chologist/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Larry James, Psychologist

On July 7, 2010, the International Human Rights Clinic filed a complaint with the Ohio State Board of Psychology, calling for the investigation and sanction of Ohio-licensee Dr. Larry C. James, former Chief Psychologist of the intelligence command at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Despite the prison’s record of torture during his tenure, Dr. James obtained an Ohio psychology license in 2008 and currently holds the influential post of Dean at Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology in Dayton.

The Clinic, along with Toledo attorney Terry Lodge, filed the 50-page complaint on behalf of four Ohio residents, the Complainants—Michael Reese, a veteran, of Columbus and Cleveland; Trudy Bond, a psychologist, of Toledo; Colin Bossen, a minister, of Cleveland Heights; and Josephine Setzler, a retired professor and mental health advocate, of Fremont.

Dr. Larry James was the top interrogation psychologist in Guantánamo during one of the prison’s worst periods of abuse. The complaint alleges that, for several months in 2003, and from 2007-2008, Dr. James commanded the Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners.

The system of interrogation and detention employed at Guantánamo was specifically designed to exploit prisoners’ psychological vulnerabilities, maximize their feelings of disorientation and helplessness, and put them in a position of absolute dependency upon their interrogators.

During Dr. James’s tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.

The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice, and that Dr. James, in his position of authority, influenced the interrogations and detention conditions of all detainees held during the period of his tenure.

The complaint to the Ohio State Board of Psychology alleged 18 violations of Ohio statutes and Board licensure rules. It alleged that Dr. James, in his senior command position at Guantánamo and/or since his retirement:

exploited detainees by participating in, ordering, supervising, ratifying and/or facilitating their abuse
failed to prevent, stop, report and punish abuse, in violation of his obligation to protect the detainees from harm
assumed conflicting roles of exploiter and protector in relation to all detainees, particularly three minors aged 12-14 years old
intentionally and/or recklessly disclosed confidential and highly sensitive information about his clients
misrepresented to the licensing board and public his conduct, experience, and the results of his psychological services

The complaint was supported by over one thousand of pages of documentation, including reports, records, and hearings from the U.S. Military, Senate, Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, as well as Dr. James’s own public admissions and survivors’ statements.Dr. Bryant Welch, attorney, expert in psychological ethics, and former president of the APA Practice Directorate submitted an official report to the Board stating: “If true, the allegations contained in this complaint represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered.”

Many Ohio residents and groups also submitted letters to the Board, encouraging it to fully investigate Dr. James’s conduct, including veterans, psychologists, ethicists, and leaders of the faith community.

On January 28, 2011, over seven months after receiving the complaint, the Ohio State Board of Psychology dismissed it without justification, stating only that it was “unable to proceed to formal action” on the matter. Prior to its dismissal, the Board refused Complainants’ multiple offers to answer questions of law or fact. It also refused Complainants’ offers to assist in finding witnesses to further corroborate the allegations.

On April 13, 2011, the Complainants filed a writ of mandamus in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, arguing that the Board failed in its duty to investigate the serious and well-documented allegations of misconduct by a state licensee. The Complainants asked the Court to compel the Board to investigate the complaint or provide reasons for its seemingly arbitrary dismissal. The Board has moved to dismiss the case. Complainants are currently awaiting a decision by the Court.

The Board’s actions follow the trend of other state licensing boards across the country that, by refusing to hold health professionals responsible for their role in torture, are resisting their duty to protect the public.

Dr. James continues to hold a license to care for patients in Ohio.

CASE HISTORY:

Ohio State Board of Psychology

Complaint to the Ohio State Psychology Board (July 7, 2010)

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas

Verified Complaint for Writ of Mandamus (April 13, 2011)
Relators’ Memorandum of Law in Support of the Verified Complaint (April 13, 2011)
Respondent’s Motion to Dismiss Complaint in Mandamus (May 18. 2011)
Memorandum Contra of Relators to Respondent’s Motion to Dismiss (July 20, 2011)
Reply Memorandum on the Ohio Psychology Board’s Motion to Stay Discovery (August 17, 2011)
Reply Brief of Ohio State Board of Psychology (August 17, 2011)
Motion of Relators to Request Oral Hearing on Respondent’s Motion to Dismiss and Motion to Stay Discovery (August 22, 2011)
Ohio State Board of Psychology’s Memorandum Contra to Relators’ Request for an Oral Argument (August 29, 2011)
Relators’ Reply Memorandum on Request for Oral Hearing on Respondent’s Motion to Dismiss and Motion to Stay Discovery (September 8, 2011)

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msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

About 5 years ago I had the honor to ride in the back seat of a car while Helen Thomas sat in the front seat. We were picking her up at the Bangor Maine airport and bringing her to the home of Maine artist Robert Shetterly where she was staying for the weekend along with Granny D the woman from NewHampshire who walked across the United States when she was 90 to promote campaign finance reform. Both women were scheduled to speak that weekend at the WERU Summer Fair in Blue Hill. The artist Robert Shetterly has painted both their portraits as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series. To see her portrait http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... len-thomas" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


see link for full story


Pioneering journalist Helen Thomas dies at 92
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Helen Thomas, the irrepressible White House correspondent who used her seat in the front row of history to grill 10 presidents and was not shy about sharing her opinions, died Saturday. She was 92.

Thomas, who died at her apartment in Washington, had been ill for a long time, and in and out of the hospital before coming home Thursday, according to a friend, Muriel Dobbin.

Thomas made her name as a bulldog for United Press International in the great wire-service rivalries of old, and as a pioneer for women in journalism.

She was persistent to the point of badgering. One White House press secretary described her questioning as "torture" — and he was one of her fans.

Her refusal to conceal her strong opinions, even when posing questions to a president, and her public hostility toward Israel, caused discomfort among colleagues.

In 2010, that tendency finally ended a career which had started in 1943 and made her one of the best known journalists in Washington. On a videotape circulated on the Internet, she said Israelis should "get out of Palestine" and "go home" to Germany, Poland or the United States. The remark brought down widespread condemnation and she ended her career.

In January 2011, she became a columnist for a free weekly paper in a Washington suburb, months after the controversy forced her from her previous post.

In her long career, she was indelibly associated with the ritual ending White House news conferences. She was often the one to deliver the closing line: "Thank you, Mister. President" — four polite words that belied a fierce competitive streak.

Her disdain for White House secrecy and dodging spanned five decades, back to President John Kennedy. Her freedom to voice her peppery opinions as a speaker and a Hearst columnist came late in her career.

The Bush administration marginalized her, clearly peeved with a journalist who had challenged President George W. Bush to his face on the Iraq war and declared him the worst president in history.

After she quit UPI in 2000 — by then an outsized figure in a shrunken organization — her influence waned.

Thomas was accustomed to getting under the skin of presidents, if not to the cold shoulder.

"If you want to be loved," she said years earlier, "go into something else."

There was a lighter mood in August 2009, on her 89th birthday, when President Barack Obama popped into in the White House briefing room unannounced. He led the roomful of reporters in singing "Happy Birthday to You" and gave her cupcakes. As it happened, it was the president's birthday too, his 48th.

Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" — the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos — and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.

She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."

The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.

Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.

"People will never know how hard it is to get information," Thomas told an interviewer, "especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls."

Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. It was in high school, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.

After graduating from Detroit's Wayne University (now Wayne State University), Thomas headed straight for the nation's capital. She landed a $17.50-a-week position as a copy girl, with duties that included fetching coffee and doughnuts for editors at the Washington Daily News.

United Press — later United Press International — soon hired her to write local news stories for the radio wire. Her assignments were relegated at first to women's news, society items and celebrity profiles.

Her big break came after the 1960 election that sent Kennedy to the White House, and landed Thomas her first assignment related to the presidency. She was sent to Palm Beach, Fla., to cover the vacation of the president-elect and his family.

JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, complained that he learned of his daughter Luci's engagement from Thomas's story.

Bigger and better assignments would follow for Thomas, among them President Richard M. Nixon's breakthrough trip to China in 1972.

When the Watergate scandal began consuming Nixon's presidency, Martha Mitchell, the notoriously unguarded wife of the attorney general, would call Thomas late at night to unload her frustrations at what she saw as the betrayal of her husband John by the president's men.

It was also during the Nixon administration that the woman who scooped so many others was herself scooped — by the first lady. Pat Nixon was the one who announced to the Washington press corps that Thomas was engaged to Douglas Cornell, chief White House correspondent for UPI's archrival, AP.

They were married in 1971. Cornell died 11 years later.

Thomas stayed with UPI for 57 years, until 2000, when the company was purchased by News World Communications, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church.


Thomas also was critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, asserting that the deaths of innocent people should hang heavily on Bush's conscience.

"We are involved in a war that is becoming more dubious every day," she said in a speech to thousands of students at Brigham Young University in September 2003. "I thought it was wrong to invade a country without any provocation."

Some students walked out of the lecture. She won over others with humorous stories from her "ringside seat" to history.

In March 2005, she confronted Bush with the proposition that "your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis" and every justification for the attack proved false.

"Why did you really want to go to war?" she demanded.

When Bush began explaining his rationale, she interjected: "They didn't do anything to you, or to our country."

"Excuse me for a second," Bush replied. "They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaida. That's where al-Qaida trained."

"I'm talking about Iraq," she said.

Her strong opinions finally ended her career.

After a visit to the White House, David Nesenoff, a rabbi and independent filmmaker, asked Thomas on May 27, 2010, whether she had any comments on Israel. "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied. "Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home." When asked where's home, Thomas replied: "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else."

The resulting controversy brought widespread rejection of her remarks. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called them "offensive and reprehensible." Many Jews were offended by her suggestion that Israelis should "go home" to Germany, Poland and America because Israel was initially settled in 1948 by Jews who had survived or escaped Hitler's attempt to kill all the Jews in Germany and in neighboring conquered countries.

Within days, she retired from her job at Hearst.

Nicholas F. Benton, the owner and editor of the Falls Church News-Press, approached her about writing again. Benton, who had published Thomas' column for years when she was syndicated, said Thomas was initially dubious about continuing to write for the free weekly paper, which at the time had a circulation around 25,000.

"She said, 'You don't want me. I'm poison," he said in a telephone interview Saturday.

He responded that he could handle any criticism, and her column started running in January 2011. She continued to write about national issues, from Social Security to the State of the Union address and the low capital gains tax, which she blamed for creating "a bigger divide between the haves and the have-nots, leaving not much of a middle class in America."

Benton said some of his advertisers got threatening calls, but he said he received more positive letters than negative ones by "quite a wide margin." And Benton said she continued to be "sharp as a tack," sometimes asking if she could get her column in after deadline because she wanted to monitor some late-breaking development. She wrote for the paper for a year, until her health prevented her from continuing.

"She was just the kind of person who really did want to fight to the finish," he said of her return to writing.
- See more at: http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/na ... QAFRB.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

In 1988 after contacting more than a half dozen professors at various colleges in New England I called
Professor Howard Zinn at Boston University and asked him if he would help me organize the 1st
National Conference Investigating Crimes Committed by FBI agents. I had never heard of Howard Zinn
and if I did had forgotten his name ,when someone suggested I call him.
He took my phone call and set up an appointment when I could drive the 165 miles to Boston from Maine
and meet with him. I showed up for the meeting on the appointed day. He asked me what I needed from him.
After I spoke he picked up the phone and within a half hour 3 Boston University students joined our meeting and together
we organized out 1st conference and I would go on to organizing 12 more conferences without his help. The next 11 conferences were held at Bates College.

see link for full story

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/19" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Published on Friday, July 19, 2013 by Zinn Education Project
Indiana’s Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-hunt
by Bill Bigelow

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, one of the country’s most widely read history books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state’s top education officials: “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

But Gov. Daniels, now president of Purdue University, was not content merely to celebrate Howard Zinn’s passing. He demanded that Zinn’s work be hunted down in Indiana schools and suppressed: “The obits and commentaries mentioned his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is the ‘textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”

We know about Gov. Daniels’ email tantrum thanks to the Associated Press, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Scott Jenkins, Daniels’ education advisor, wrote back quickly to tell the governor that A People’s History of the United States was used in a class for prospective teachers on social movements at Indiana University.

Daniels fired back: “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn’t?”

After more back and forth, Daniels approved a statewide “cleanup” of what earns credit for professional development: “Go for it. Disqualify propaganda and highlight (if there is any) the more useful offerings.”

Daniels recently defended his attack on Zinn’s work, telling the Associated Press, “We must not falsely teach American history in our schools.” In a letter posted on his Purdue University webpage, Daniels claimed that, “the question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education at all.” Daniels should go back and read his own emails.

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story, it’s hard to know where to begin.

The first, of course, is Daniels’ gleeful, mean-spirited reporting of Zinn’s death. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Howard Zinn’s career knows that his great passions were racial equality and peace. Finding cause for joy in the death of someone whose life was animated by confidence in people’s fundamental decency is shameful.

As someone who spent almost 30 years as a high school history teacher, I’m amused by the impoverished pedagogical vision embedded in Daniels’ emails and subsequent defense. Daniels wants Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States banned from the curriculum, so that the book is not “force-fed” to students. Governor Daniels evidently assumes that the only way one can teach history is to cram it down students’ throats. To see some alternative ways to engage students, Daniels might have a look at our lessons at the Zinn Education Project, which use Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in role plays, in critical reading activities, to generate imaginative writing, and to search for the “silences” in students’ own textbooks.

Take for example the last textbook I was assigned as a teacher at a public high school in Portland, Oregon, American Odyssey, published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. In the book’s one thousand pages, it includes exactly two paragraphs on the U.S. war with Mexico—the war that led to Mexico “ceding,” in the polite language of school curricula, about half its country to the United States. American Odyssey does not quote a single Mexican, a single soldier, a single abolitionist, a single opponent of the war. Well, in fact, the textbook doesn’t quote anyone. As one of my students pointed out when we read the book’s dull passages in class, “It doesn’t even view it as a war. It’s a situation.”

As the Zinn Education Project reveals regularly in its If We Knew Our History column, the version of U.S. history taught in the textbooks produced by giant corporations is anything but “true.” This scant treatment of such an important event in U.S. and Mexican history is one reason why teachers search out alternatives like A People’s History of the United States, which includes a full chapter on the conflict, focusing especially on President Polk’s hollow justifications for war, the anti-war resistance, and the human impact of the war. Unlike the gray prose of textbooks like American Odyssey, Zinn’s chapter on the U.S. war with Mexico—“We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God”—is filled with quotes from soldiers and poets, surgeons and abolitionists, generals and journalists, clergymen and presidents. Every passage reminds young people that war is much more than a “situation.”

“We must not falsely teach American history in our schools,” said Daniels to the Associated Press, implying that the true history is to be found in the officially adopted textbooks. As the Zinn Education Project reveals regularly in its If We Knew Our History column, the version of U.S. history taught in the textbooks produced by giant corporations is anything but “true.” The corporate textbooks hide the breadth of U.S. military and economic interventions throughout the world; they ignore the roots of today’s environmental crises; they refuse to explore the origins of the vast wealth inequality in the United States; and the textbooks neglect the role of social movements throughout U.S. history, instead focusing on famous individuals; thus, they fail to nurture an activist sensibility—a recognition that if we want the world to be better, then it’s up to us to make it better.

This is a point Howard Zinn emphasized when he spoke to teachers at the 2008 National Council for the Social Studies conference in Houston—some of them from Indiana!—not much more than a year before he died. Zinn said: “We’ve never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes that we’ve had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements.”

Governor Daniels’ advisers evidently found no evidence that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was in use in K-12 schools in Indiana. I guess they didn’t look hard enough. There are more than 300 Indiana teachers registered at the Zinn Education Project to access people’s history curriculum materials to “teach outside the textbook.” And these are only the teachers who have formally registered at the site; many more share people’s history-inspired lessons.

And at the Zinn Education Project we’ve heard all week long from Indiana teachers, professors, and parents who have committed themselves to work against censorship in K-12 schools. Their defiance is reminiscent of Indiana’s Green Feather Movement that challenged the McCarthy-era attempt to ban Robin Hood from the elementary school curriculum in 1954. What began as the anonymous posting of green feathers on bulletin boards by a few students at Indiana University spread to campuses across the country. As Howard Zinn wrote at the end of his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, “If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.clearwater.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Cleawater

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.change.org/petitions/west-co ... r-reactors" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


West Coast Senators: : Investigate the ongoing danger from the Fukushima nuclear reactors

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

FUSION CENTER PROTEST: At 2:30pm on Saturday June 1, #MassOps http://massops.weebly.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; is holding a protest to mark International Privacy Day outside the Boston Regional Intelligence Center at 1 Schroeder Plaza, Roxbury, MA 02120. Fusion centers like this one violate our privacy by intercepting our electronic communications and flagging "suspicious activity". The BRIC is most recently infamous for spying on peaceful dissidents like United for Peace and Justice, and for focusing its attention on disrupting the Occupy movement rather than on Russian intelligence reports about Tamarlen Tsarnaev. RSVP to massops@tormail.org. Digital Fourth's summary of the fusion center issue is here. There will also be a pub crawl at 6:30pm after the protest.


http://www.unitedforpeace.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: SOLUTIONARYS

Post by msfreeh »

Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp
see link for full story

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=36986" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp
Mon Aug 12, 2013 1:51 pm

Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp to Break up Planned Protest

by Adam Federman – August 12, 2013
TransCanada and Department of Homeland Security keep close eye on activists, FOIA documents reveal

After a week of careful planning, environmentalists attending a tar sands resistance action camp in Oklahoma thought they had the element of surprise — but they would soon learn that their moves were being closely watched by law enforcement officials and TransCanada, the very company they were targeting.

tar sands action training camp Photos by Laura Borealis/Tar Sand BlockadeAccording to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, investigators from the Bryan County
Sherriff's Department had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp
that took place from March 18 to March 22 and which brought together local landowners,
Indigenous communities, and environmental groups opposed to the pipeline.
Image
On the morning of March 22 activists had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma as part of the larger protest movement against TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline. But when they showed up in the early morning hours and began unloading equipment from their vehicles they were confronted by police officers. Stefan Warner, an organizer with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, says some of the vehicles en route to the protest site were pulled over even before they had reached Cushing. He estimates that roughly 50 people would have participated— either risking arrest or providing support. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience, weeks in the planning, was called off.

“For a small sleepy Oklahoma town to be saturated with police officers on a pre-dawn weekday leaves only one reasonable conclusion,” says Ron Seifert, an organizer with an affiliated group called Tar Sands Blockade. “They were there on purpose, expecting something to happen.”

Seifert is exactly right. According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, investigators from the Bryan County Sherriff’s Department had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp that took place from March 18 to March 22 and which brought together local landowners, Indigenous communities, and environmental groups opposed to the pipeline.
Image
excerpt from undercover investigation report

An excerpt from an official report on the "Undercover Investigation into the GPTSR Training Camp" indicates that at least two law
enforcement officers from the Bryan County Sherriff’s Department infiltrated the training camp and drafted a detailed report about
the upcoming protest, internal strategy, and the character of the protesters themselves.

At least two law enforcement officers infiltrated the training camp and drafted a detailed report about the upcoming protest, internal strategy, and the character of the protesters themselves. The undercover investigator who wrote the report put the tar sands opponents into five different groups: eco-activists (who “truly wanted to live off the grid”); Occupy members; Native American activists (“who blamed all forms of government for the poor state of being that most American Indians are living in”); Anarchists (“many wore upside down American flags”); and locals from Oklahoma (who “had concerns about the pipeline harming the community”).

The undercover agent’s report was obtained by Douglas Parr, an Oklahoma attorney who represented three activists (all lifelong Oklahomans) who were arrested in mid April for blockading a tar sands pipeline construction site. “During the discovery in the Bryan county cases we received material indicating that there had been infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance camp by police agents,” Parr says. At least one of the undercover investigators attended an “action planning” meeting during which everyone was asked to put their cell phones or other electronic devices into a green bucket for security reasons. The investigator goes on to explain that he was able to obtain sensitive information regarding the location of the upcoming Cushing protest, which would mark the culmination of the week of training. “This investigator was able to obtain an approximate location based off a question that he asked to the person in charge of media,” he wrote. He then wryly notes that, “It did not appear…that our phones had been tampered with.”

(The memo also states that organizers at the meeting went to great lengths not to give police any cause to disrupt the gathering. The investigator writes: “We were repeatedly told this was a substance free camp. No drug or alcohol use would be permitted on the premises and always ask permission before touching anyone. Investigators were told that we did not need to give the police any reason to enter the camp.” They were also given a pamphlet that instructed any agent of TransCanada, the FBI, or other law enforcement agency to immediately notify the event organizers.)

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The infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance action camp and pre-emption of the Cushing protest is part of a larger pattern of government surveillance of tar sands protesters. According to other documents obtained by Earth Island Journal under an Open Records Act request, Department of Homeland Security staff has been keeping close tabs on pipeline opponents — and routinely sharing that information with TransCanada, and vice versa.

In March TransCanada gave a briefing on corporate security to a Criminal Intelligence Analyst with the Oklahoma Information Fusion Center, the state level branch of Homeland Security. The conversation took place just as the action camp was getting underway. The following day, Diane Hogue, the Center’s Intelligence Analyst, asked TransCanada to review and comment on the agency’s classified situational awareness bulletin. Michael Nagina, Corporate Security Advisor for TransCanada, made two small suggestions and wrote, “With the above changes I am comfortable with the content.”

Then, in an email to TransCanada on March 19 (the second day of the action camp) Hogue seems to refer to the undercover investigation taking place. “Our folks in the area say there are between 120-150 participants,” Hogue wrote in an email to Nagina. (The Oklahoma Information Fusion Center declined to comment for this story.)

It is unclear if the information gathered at the training camp was shared directly with TransCanada. However, the company was given access to the Fusion Center’s situational awareness bulletin just a few days before the Cushing action was scheduled to take place.

In an emailed statement, TransCanada spokesperson Shawn Howard did not directly address the Tar Sands Resistance training camp. Howard described law enforcement as being interested in what the company has done to prepare for activities designed to “slow approval or construction” of the pipeline project. “When we are asked to share what we have learned or are prepared for, we are there to share our experience – not direct law enforcement,” he wrote.
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At least one of the investigators seemed to have gained the trust of the direct action activists.

The evidence of heightened cooperation between TransCanada and law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma and Texas comes just over a month after it was revealed that the company had given a PowerPoint presentation on corporate security to the FBI and law enforcement officials in Nebraska. TransCanada also held an “interactive session” with law enforcement in Oklahoma City about the company’s security strategy in early 2012. In their PowerPoint presentation, TransCanada employees suggested that district attorneys should explore “state or federal anti-terrorism laws” in prosecuting activists. They also included profiles of key organizers and a list of activists previously arrested for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in Texas and Oklahoma. In addition to TransCanada’s presentation, a representative of Nebraska’s Homeland Security Fusion Center briefed attendees on an “intelligence sharing role/plan relevant to the pipeline project.” This is likely related to the Homeland Security Information Sharing Network, which provides public and private sector partners as well as law enforcement access to sensitive information.

The earlier cache of documents, first released to the press by Bold Nebraska, an environmental organization opposed to the pipeline, shows that TransCanada has established close ties with state and federal law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route. For example, in an exchange with FBI agents in South Dakota, TransCanada’s Corporate Security Advisor, Michael Nagina, jokes that, “I can be the cure for insomnia so sure hope you can still attend!” Although they were unable to make the Nebraska meeting, one of the agents responded, “Assuming approval of the pipeline, we would like to get together to discuss a timeline for installation through our territory.”

The new documents also provide an interesting glimpse into the revolving door between state law enforcement agencies and the private sector, especially in areas where fracking and pipeline construction have become big business. One of the individuals providing information to the Texas Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division is currently the Security Manager at Anadarko Petroleum, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. In 2011, at a natural gas industry stakeholder relations conference, a spokesperson for Anadarko compared the anti-drilling movement to an “insurgency” and suggested that attendees download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.

protestors occupy tree The infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance action camp and pre-emption of the
Cushing protest is part of a larger pattern of government surveillance of tar sands protesters.
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LC Wilson, the Anadarko Security Manager shown by the documents to be providing information to the Texas Fusion Center, is more than just a friend of law enforcement. From 2009 to 2011 he served as Regional Commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees law enforcement statewide. Wilson began his career with the Department of Public Safety in 1979 and was named a Texas Ranger — an elite law enforcement unit — in 1988, eventually working his way up to Assistant Chief. Such connections would be of great value to a corporation like Anadarko, which has invested heavily in security operations.

In an email to Litto Paul Bacas, a Critical Infrastructure Planner (and former intelligence analyst) with Texas Homeland Security, Wilson, using his Anadarko address, writes, “we find no intel specific for Texas. There is active recruitment for directed action to take place in Oklahoma as per article. I will forward any intel we come across on our end, especially if it concerns Texas.” The article he was referring to was written by a member of Occupy Denver calling on all “occupiers and occupy networks” to attend the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp.

Wilson is not the only former law enforcement official on Anadarko’s security team; Jeffrey Sweetin, the company’s Regional Security Manager, was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration for more than 20 years heading up its Rocky Mountain division. At Anadarko, according to Sweetin’s profile on Linkedin, his responsibilities include “security program development” and “law enforcement liaison.”

Other large oil and gas companies have recruited local law enforcement to fill high-level security positions. In 2010, long-time Bradford County Sheriff Steve Evans resigned to take a position as senior security officer for Chesapeake Energy in Pennsylvania. Evans was one of a handful of gas industry security directors to receive intelligence bulletins compiled by a private security firm and distributed by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security. Bradford County happens to be ground zero for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, with more active wells than any other county in the state. In addition to Evans, several deputies of the Bradford County Sheriff’s office have worked for Chesapeake — through a private contractor, TriCorps Security — as “off-duty” security personnel. TransCanada has also come to rely on off duty police officers to patrol construction sites and protest camps, raising questions about whose interests the sworn officers are serving.

Of course for corporations like TransCanada and Anadarko having law enforcement on their side (or in their pocket) is more than just a good business move. It gives them access to classified information and valuable intelligence — essential weapons in any counterinsurgency campaign.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOWLWe9HEMw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Bedini-Cole Window Motor

generator runs on energy it produces plus has excess energy

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National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily
August 23, 2013


http://www.policemisconduct.net/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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see link for full story
https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Bloggers' Rights


One of EFF's goals is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger to let you know you have rights and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected. To that end we have created the Legal Guide for Bloggers a collection of blogger-specific FAQs addressing everything from fair use to defamation law to workplace whistle-blowing.

In addition EFF continues to battle for bloggers' rights in the courtroom:

Bloggers can be journalists (and journalists can be bloggers).
We're battling for legal and institutional recognition that if you engage in journalism you're a journalist with all of the attendant rights privileges and protections. (See Apple v. Does.)

Bloggers are entitled to free speech.
We're working to shield you from frivolous or abusive threats and lawsuits. Internet bullies shouldn't use copyright libel or other claims to chill your legitimate speech. (See OPG v. Diebold.)

Bloggers have the right to political speech.
We're working with a number of other public-interest organizations to ensure that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn't gag bloggers' election-related speech. We argue that the FEC should adopt a presumption against the regulation of election-related speech by individuals on the Internet and interpret the existing media exemption to apply to online media outlets that provide news reporting and commentary regarding an election -- including blogs. (See our joint comments to the FEC [PDF 332K].)

Bloggers have the right to stay anonymous.
We're continuing our battle to protect and preserve your constitutional right to anonymous speech online including providing a guide to help you with strategies for keeping your identity private when you blog. (See How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).)

Bloggers have freedom from liability for hosting speech the same way other web hosts do.
We're working to strengthen Section 230 liability protections under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) while spreading the word that bloggers are entitled to them. (See Barrett v. Rosenthal.)

If you'd like to spread the word about our work consider adding an EFF Bloggers' Rights Badge to your blog or website.


July 23, 2013
Congress and the Justice Dept's Dangerous Attempts to Define “Journalist” Threaten to Exclude Bloggers

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WATCH: Video Suggests Hurricanes Be Named After Politicians Who Deny Climate Change

By Ryan Koronowski on August 26, 2013


http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/0 ... e-deniers/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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https://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2013" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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see link for full story
http://www.twincities.com/stpaul/ci_239 ... ken-tilsen" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Ken Tilsen, St. Paul civil rights activist and lawyer, dies at 85
09/02/2013

Ken Tilsen, a prominent St. Paul lawyer who agitated for years on behalf of civil rights activists, peaceful protesters and American Indian causes, died Sunday after a long illness. He was 85.

"He was one of the great ones, a real civil rights leader of the 1960s and 1970s," said his friend, Bill Tilton of St. Paul, who hired Tilsen to defend him when he resisted the Vietnam War draft. "When it came to the rights of the little guy, he was the main one."

Tilsen, a longtime resident of St. Paul's Selby-Dale neighborhood, opened his own law firm in 1966 and practiced until 1993, when he joined the Hamline University School of Law as an adjunct professor.

A child of immigrant parents, Tilsen watched his father build housing for low-income families. His family valued "equality, working hard and using your intelligence," according to his son, David Tilsen. His parents' example led Ken Tilsen to take up controversial issues that many others avoided.

Tilsen contributed to the defense of the 200 or so American Indian Movement followers who took over the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to protest the federal government's treatment of American Indians in 1973.

For 25 years, he advocated for Rene Hurtado, a former member of El Salvador's military police who sought political asylum in Minnesota after speaking out against human rights abuses in the Central American nation. He also did extensive work with the Southern Minnesota Landowners' Alliance, a group composed mainly of farmers opposed to the construction of a power line through their properties.

Because of his role as the president of the University of Minnesota's Marxist-Socialist Club from 1948 to 1950, Tilsen was summoned before the House Committee on un-American Activities in 1964. He refused to answer any questions about the group's activities before 1950. This helped cement his reputation as an undaunted defender of his beliefs.

"He wasn't afraid of somebody who disagreed with him," Tilton said. "He was kind and always polite -- but he'd get in front of a lot of federal judges, and when a judge wouldn't do something, he wasn't afraid to issue a writ of mandamus (a request to a higher authority to compel a lower court to do something.)"

Tilsen also represented weapons protesters who claimed they were harassed by the FBI for demonstrating in front of Honeywell sites in the Twin Cities.

"He really believed that lawyers had a choice to do the right thing and not just defend anybody or prosecute anybody," his daughter Judith Tilsen, a Ramsey County district judge, said of the clients her father took on. "He cared deeply about fairness and justice ... it wasn't just his work, it was his
Key Hudson casino opponents sent by the Concerned Citizens of Hudson after their meeting with Gov. Tommy Thompson in July 2000. Ken Tilsen is positioned in the front row, to the far left. (Courtesy photo)
passion.

Tilsen met Rachel Le Sueur, the daughter of prominent feminist and activist Meridel Le Sueur, at a protest against the St. Paul Prom Ballroom's no-blacks policy; the two were married in 1947 and went on to have five children, adopt a sixth and care for many foster children.

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