Activists's topics - tribe.net

FBI to descend on protesters..uh I mean terrorists at DNC.

2008-07-03T15:19:58Z

http://www.politicswest.com/26452/fbi_descend_denver_dem_event

""Hundreds" of FBI agents will be in Denver during the Democratic National Convention, according to James Davis, the FBI special agent in charge of the Denver field division that oversees Colorado and Wyoming.

The FBI is "responsible for gathering intelligence on, primarily terrorist activity, any possible terrorist activity with regard to the convention, and make sure we get that intelligence to our partner agencies so they can be prepared," according to a "Colorado Matters" interview that aired today on Colorado Public Radio. The audio is available here.

Davis also said that, "We don't have any information right now about any credible threat to the convention on a terrorist level."

Host Ryan Warner asked about the number of additional FBI agents that will be in town.

"I don't want to say exactly how many, but I can tell you that it's in the hundreds," replied Davis.

He also said that, "Primarily, the folks we have coming in are here to respond to an incident that rises to our jurisdiction."

WARNER: "What would that be?"

DAVIS: "Like a terrorist attack."

WARNER: "O.K. So it's pro-active in many ways, having that many men and women here?"

DAVIS: "It is. I'm comfortable in saying that I would be very happy if they went home without ever doing anything."

Earlier in the interview, regarding the possibility of disruptive protests at the convention, Davis said the FBI is looking at "tactics and groups similar to what we've seen in conventions in the past and other major meetings" such as "blockage of streets and attempts to disrupt traffic flows, that sort of thing."

Davis would not say whether undercover FBI agents have joined protests groups or attended their meetings.

More generally, Davis acknowledged the possibility the convention could draw criminal activity - and that law enforcement partner agencies were aware of that.

"Criminals are smart enough to recognize that law enforcement is going to be very busy during that time. General crimes, things that occur regularly, are more attractive - I think - to criminals at that time when they know that police are going to be heavily otherwise occupied." "

posted in *Activists* - 2 replies

Declaring Our Independence, Creating the Next Society

2008-07-02T20:34:45Z

In honor of Independence Day, I think it's appropriate to begin a thread focused on the kind of society that we, the people, would like to replace the American Empire after its inevitable collapse. Let's attempt to do our best at keeping the comments constructive, limiting the criticism to the ideas, without moving into ad hominem attacks. What kinds of Revolutionary Ideas do you propose, and can begin to implement, as we turn the corner on the end of an era?

Here, to get us started, is an interesting article I found well worth reading that explores some of the reasons and suggestions for the Next Society:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/activism/creating-the-next-society-your-revolutionary-ideas-needed-now/3988/

>>> It’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that the American Empire, as currently configured and operated, is simply not sustainable. Financial collapse is inevitable (and accelerating, it seems), and even mainstream America can no longer deny the obvious signs that things have gone terribly wrong: Skyrocketing fuel prices, unprecedented inflation in food prices, rampant epidemics of preventable degenerative disease, plummeting real estate prices, an increasingly-worthless national currency, disastrous war failures, rampant dishonesty in Washington, and accelerating climate changes that are causing flooding, crop failures, droughts and worse. It is becoming increasingly difficult for even the Pollyannas of the world to argue that the United States of America has a bright future. <<<

<snip>

>>>>Now, those are just my ideas. You may not agree with them all, and in fact I hope you don’t! What we need are YOUR ideas (and other people’s ideas) to be part of the conversation in creating The Next Society. It will soon be time to put the new ideas on the table, throw out the old ideas, and create a new society. Consider: What hasn’t worked? What has worked? What makes sense today that didn’t make sense in 1776? (Like internet voting, for example, which eliminates the entire need for the U.S. Congress, since the whole idea of “representatives” was based on the need for remote representation of people living in far-off places without connectivity…) Does our tax system currently work? Do you like the IRS? If not, what would work better? (The Flat Tax, perhaps?) Does voting work? Not very well. Instant Runoff Voting works much better. Why not implement that in the Next Society?<<<<

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

What to expect at the DNC...

2008-06-30T12:46:09Z

From:
http://dncdisruption08.org/?page_id=9

While we’ve got 500 (or 5000) of our closest friends in town this August, we’ve
got a ton of things we want to get done.

• shut down, disrupt, or delay the convention
• storm convention events
• dismantle Denver’s capitalism, gentrification, and eco-devastation networks
• feel our movement’s power as a confrontational force
• make direct action a threat again
• bring our international anarchist movement back into the public consciousness
• build momentum for the opposition to the RNC
• ensure that the DNC is a thing of rowdy beauty
• turn the DNC’s festivities into our own
• bring the direct action that meets the needs of local communities
• continue multiracial coalitions with multiracial turnouts
• stop racist development and the targeting of immigrant communities
• further Denver anarchist community’s ties with other local struggles.
• have such a good time and create something so magnificently awesome that
no one will ever want to leave. ever.

COME IF YOU'VE BEEN TO A ZILLION PROTESTS!
something old

Can you hear it? Put your ear to the ground, listen to the rustle of the leaves,
the background noise of your dreams : something different is going down this
summer, and you’re going to want to be in on the fun. We’ve been keeping on
the down low the past few years - healing, community projects, processing the
past, reassessing our strengths. Many of us have been waiting for the moment to
once again rise up and strike at the heart of the machine. We’ve had a chance
to rest, we’ve learned from our mistakes, it’s now or never to get back in the
streets. We’re going to Disrupt the DNC, Crash the RNC, Roadblock I-69,
Treesit the University of California, and then we’re going to bring the whole
fucking thing down.
This summer is ours. We’re going to be big, we’re going to be fierce, and we’re going to win.

AND IF YOU'VE BEEN TO NONE!
something new

Seattle? Quebec? Cancun? You’ve heard the myths. You wish you’d been there.
You’ve never been to a mass action and thinking about it makes you a little scared
and a lot excited. Harness the fear, ride the excitement, and be a part of the next
chapter of the history that’s being written at this very moment. If you don’t know
what if feels like to hold an intersection with a tight group of your friends, while
the capitalists sit stuck in their bus unable to reach their convention center... If
you’ve never experienced a crowd of a hundred new friends swarming a street
and forcing police to retreat.. If you haven’t prepared food for hungry protesters
and then seen the grateful smiles of a thousand satisfied bellies...

Bring your new ideas, bring your enthusiasm, bring it. DNC Denver is the next big thing
and you can be here with us to make it happen.

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Who's going to Denver's DNC?

2008-06-30T08:52:33Z

I'm considering moving up there for a few months.
Here's a list of grassroots activists you may already know about.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_9654625

Protest groups
CodePink

Founded: 2002

Mission: CodePink is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social-justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, prevent new military actions and redirect resources into health care, education and other "life-affirming" activities.

United for Peace and Justice

Founded: 2002

Mission: A coalition of more than 1,400 local and national groups that have joined together to protest the Iraq war and support the fight for global economic justice.

Tent State University

Founded: 2003

Mission: A network of student-led projects intended to create a more- effective democracy, with issues that range from war opposition to high tuition costs.

People Call for Change

Founded: 2008

Mission: This coalition hopes to build a grassroots movement for social change, from monitoring corporate power to promoting health care and civil liberties. Spiritual values underlie their positions on issues, which arise from secular and religious traditions.

Students for Peace and Justice

Founded: 2007

Mission: A local vehicle for student action to end the war and create progressive social change.

American Friends Service Committee

Founded: 1917

Mission: The organization, which espouses nonviolence, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Today, the group takes a strong anti-war position and works on a variety of issues, such as economic justice and immigrants' rights.

Students for Democratic Society

Founded: 2006

Mission: Inspired by the original organization by the same name that dominated the 1960s protest movement, this new version wants to revitalize student activism in the United States, work to stop all wars and create a participatory democracy.

The Backbone Campaign

Founded: 2003

Mission: A grassroots campaign to encourage citizens and elected officials to stand up for progressive values, focusing on issues of democracy, economic justice, ecology and international relations.

posted in *Activists* - 4 replies

Recommendations for Tomorrow's Elections (CA)

2008-06-02T23:29:53Z

Recommendations for Tomorrow's Elections (CA)

Liberation News recommends people get out to vote tomorrow, to vote NO on Proposition 98, and YES on Proposition 99. In addition, a letter from Attorney Kate Wells urging Santa Cruz voters to vote for Steven Wright for judge is also included.

Proposition 98 would amend the State Constitution to prohibit rent control and eliminate renters’ protections against slumlords. It is being sponsored by the California Apartment Owners Association, the California Association of Realtors, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. While the fake progressive city of Santa Cruz has no rent control, the elimination of rent control in other cities due to this proposition would result in people loosing their roofs and becoming homeless. Liberation News joins the California Labor Federation, the American Association of Retired Persons, and the League of Women Voters in saying NO on 98.

Proposition 99 would amend the constitution to bar state and local governments from using eminent domain to seize owner-occupied residences and transfer it to commercial developers and other private parties. Such protection from eminent domain abuse will be a positive step forward, while this would also preserve the process for using eminent domain for beneficial projects like schools and hospitals. Most importantly, this measure would leave rent control in place. Proposition 99 states that if it is approved by more votes than Proposition 98, Proposition 98 will not take effect. Liberation News joins the California Labor Federation, League of California Homeowners, League of Women Voters, and the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the Consumer Federation in urging you to vote YES on 99.

In addition, Kate Wells, an attorney who has gone to bat in support of homeless rights and free speech rights in Santa Cruz, would like Santa Cruz voters to see her following message:

********************
To those concerned:

I urge you all to vote for Steven Wright for Superior Court Judge in tomorrow's election. His opponent, Ari Symons, a life-long Republican who suddenly changed her registration to Democrat at the beginning of her campaign, has been declared unqualified to be a judge by the relevant state judicial commission (she appealed the designation and was again found to be unqualified.) She is also a prosecutor in the D.A.'s office and we already have way too many ex-prosecutors on the bench. Wright was the preferred candidate by 75 % of his fellow attorneys; he was found qualified by the state commission; he is a defense attorney and he is a fair-minded, competent and compassionate person. I have personally known Steve for 25 + years and have the highest regard for him. Please pass this on to all of your local email correspondents. Recently, the so-called "Progressive Coalition of Santa Cruz County" has passed out doorhangers endorsing Symons making it appear that she is the progressive candidate - NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH !

Thanks for passing this message on.
Kate Wells
*******************

Join the Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

This is an article of Liberation News, Subscribe Free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

John Pilger: "From Kennedy to Obama; Liberalism's Last Fling"

2008-05-31T19:50:59Z

ZNet
May, 31 2008

"What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy's. By offering a 'new', young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party -- with the bonus of being a member of the black elite -- he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent." -- John Pilger
-------
From Kennedy To Obama; Liberalism's Last Fling
By John Pilger

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would "return government to the people" and bestow "dignity and justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said," he would say, "'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skillfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy?

"Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How? . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel. Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved the right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will listen to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush's demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain's proposal for an aggressive "league of democracies", led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Like McCain, he would extend the crippling embargo on Cuba.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out. Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel", but in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam". Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon 'the better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening, but it is. I'm falling for John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like "the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. "Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the investigator Pam Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages." A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. "Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign," said Obama in January, "they won't run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president." According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy" of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair's new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

www.johnpilger.com

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

The Big World Gathering - Take Your Power Back

2008-05-29T17:49:55Z

THE BIG WORLD GATHERING
http://www.worldgathering.net

What is The Big World Gathering?
The Big World Gathering is happening now wherever you are by you sharing with others what you really feel and think about life today, and by distributing information you believe is important. At a later stage, perhaps soon to happen, all our individual actions may help lead to something quite surprising; a major world change.

"Awake, awake, the world is young,
For all its weary years of thought.
The starkest fights must still be fought,
The most surprising songs be sung."
~ James E Flecker

Surprising Songs for The Big World Gathering ...
The Big World Gathering Theme Tune 1 ~ (5+ mins):
http://www.worldgathering.net/wwwmp3/wg1.mp3
The Big World Gathering Theme Tune 1 ~ (1+ mins):
http://www.worldgathering.net/wwwmp3/wg2.mp3
Big World Gathering Love Song ~ Time ~ (2+ mins):
http://www.worldgathering.net/wwwmp3/time.mp3
World-Action Big Gathering Theme Tune ~ (1+ mins):
http://www.worldgathering.net/wwwmp3/wa18.mp3

Special Images for The Big World Gathering:
http://www.worldgathering.net/logos.html

Subscribe to the BWG NEWS List at Google:
http://groups.google.com/group/worldgathering

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'THE GATHERING' by Sitting Bull

It is very important that as many people as possible, in different places, should take part in the Gathering. Decide where and when and how to gather. Your participation is needed.

This is the beginning of the break we are all waiting for; for you all on Earth and ourselves out here. This is the beginning of the turn around. We have waited so long for the change. It is time. This is the beginning of the end of the old ways; the turning of the tide.

State what you believe is true. Courage is the ability to go beyond the familiar. Exchange the information and hopes you have. Always in the world, a change starts with a few people. These few speak the feelings and thoughts of a multitude. They speak the heart of humanity's soul.

The people and ETs who will come together shall ring in a return, a turn around. There will come a flow on Earth which will burst the dark energies surrounding you and your planet. That which you believe is true must be stated. The truth is the key.

May strength and vision be yours as you establish the new. Follow your hearts. Let your inner light be your guide. Realise the beauty and greatness you have within yourself and step ahead. This is the time so many have waited so long for. Never doubt it has started.

The young of all nations are looking for a new direction. It is time to light a beacon to show the way for all humanity. Let your feelings, thoughts and beliefs be your guiding light. The power of the moment. The wishes of the people. The good times ahead.

It is time for the gathering.

Tatanka Yotanka - The Sitting Bull
(This message is through a clairvoyant in Holland, Europe, in recent years)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Special Words for The Big World Gathering:
~ The Rainbow Dream Vision of Hope: "This prophecy is a dream and vision that is a potential reality for mankind. It is not an ultimatum. But it is ours to behold and to create if we only dare to create it together." ~
~ A Central American Mayan Elder: "Human beings must come together in support of life. At present, each person and group is going his or her own way. There is hope if people can come together and unite." ~
~ E F Schumacher: "We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we will be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing and we will just be a part of the disease and not a part of the cure." ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'The Gathering' by Matthew

Last night I had a gathering for all my departed friends
I asked Jim Morrison where he'd been
He just laughed and smiled,
Spoke of what he'd seen

He said "I've been to the end of the rainbow"
He said "I've seen supernovae burst"
But before I could ask a question,
He said "Let me finish first"

He said "I have something to tell you",
This really is the MASTER KEY
ONLY! ONLY LOVE!
Will set this planet free

He then spoke ok Atlantis,
And what has come to pass
In an alien war of genocide,
He and his friends escaped the blast

* * *
Now these ones are returning,
They see our hearts are burning
The Universe is yearning,
For us to break on through

Well now you see here is my request,
The letter to your heart
Will you join us now,
Let the healing start

First there came THE question,
Then I found THE door
Now I have come through it,
A stronger man for sure

I will ask you the same question,
I can lead you to this door
If you will walk through it,
You will be Wiser than before

Yes now I have this question to put to you
Are you going to resist,
Will you break on through?
Will you break on through?

I am waiting for you...

The Gathering

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Special Images for The Big World Gathering:
http://www.worldgathering.net/logos.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subscribe to the BWG NEWS List at Google:
http://groups.google.com/group/worldgathering
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big World Gathering is happening now wherever you are by you sharing with others what you really feel and think about life today, and by distributing information you believe is important. At a later stage, perhaps soon to happen, all our individual actions may help lead to something quite surprising; a major world change.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big World Gathering ~ http://www.worldgathering.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

posted in *Activists* - 1 reply

1950: 100,000 Executed by Imperialism's Korean Dictatorship

2008-05-19T17:49:00Z

[The US war of aggression in Korea murdered 5 million Koreans. Part of that murder was the cold blooded executions of over 100,000 leftists and suspected leftists by the South Korean government in 1950. Over 54,000 U.S. soldiers died in the U.S. war to defend that murderous U.S. imposed regime. The following AP article exposes what many on the left have known about for decades, but has been hidden from the general public in the United States by the government and corporate media. -Steven Argue]

AP Probes 'Cold-Blooded Slaughter' in South Korea
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003805038

By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press

Published: May 18, 2008 4:15 PM ET

DAEJEON Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions - intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners - were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were ``the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,'' said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is ``very conservative,'' said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.

Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped ``secret'' and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.

Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.

In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.

Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.

``Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,'' said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.

The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They ``knew nothing about communism.''

The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on ``mass civilian sacrifice,'' led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents - not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.

The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions - at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.

In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them ``illegal acts the then-state authority committed.''

The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.

The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.

In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.

The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a ``re-education'' organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.

North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began - ``bad security risks,'' as a police official described the detainees at the time.

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials - to no obvious effect - but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean ``internal matter,'' even though he controlled South Korea's military.

Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.

The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.

White-clad detainees - bent, submissive, with hands bound - were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.

Trembling policemen - ``they hadn't shot anyone before'' - were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.

Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.

Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.

``Bodies were just piled upon each other,'' said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. ``Arms would come off when they turned them over.'' The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially ``forgotten.''

When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of ``waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil,'' his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as ``fabrication'' by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.

But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified ``secret'' and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide ``thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks'' by the South Koreans.

Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing ``the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon,'' 20 miles south of Seoul.

Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.

That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.

His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.

Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.

Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that ``orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top,'' that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.

But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the ``murderous barbarism'' of North Koreans.

Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.

``My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists,'' said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.

``My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband,'' she said. ``She suffered unspeakable pain.''

Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.

``I cried,'' he said. ``I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'''

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. ``Our investigative power is so meager,'' commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.

His immediate concern is resources. ``The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year,'' he said.

South Korean conservatives complain the ``truth'' campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.

The life of the commission - with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million - is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.

Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 - not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.

By exposing the truth of such episodes, ``we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families,'' the commission says. It also wants to educate people, ``not just in Korea, but throughout the international community,'' to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to ``prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future.''

CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

NYT: Obama admires Bush Sr.: ''no complaints about handling of Desert Storm"

2008-05-17T18:31:39Z

Support for Empire is support for Empire -- any way you cut it. There's a reason Corporate American bankrolled Obama's campaign
...
**************
"I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm."

Source:
- Barack Obama, from David Brooks article, "Obama Admires Bush, NY Times, May 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/opinion/16brooks.html?em&ex=1211169600&en=1577a90ae5048a04&ei=5087%0A

See:
Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming
by STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/10/18478172.php

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Police Break 60 Year Old Homeless Woman's Arm

2008-05-10T18:53:23Z

[Donna Deiss is a politically active homeless woman in Santa Cruz, who was also an advocate for tenants rights before she was unfairly evicted. The homeless in Santa Cruz, as well as activists who criticize the local government, are often victims of police harrassment, false arrests, and police violence. -Steven Argue]

60 Year Old Homeless Woman Says Police Broke Her Arm
by Robert Norse
Saturday May 10th, 2008
Donna Deiss called in last night to report that yesterday around 5 PM, Officer La Moss (Badge #114) assaulted her, broke her arm, and then put her in handcuffs when he attempted to question her at Three Tree Lot near Lighthouse Field. Deiss was taken to the Watsonville hospital, had to wait hours for x-rays, whichconfirmed her arm was broken.
Deiss reported the following to me in a phone message last night and an e-mail this morning:

She was talking with friends yesterday on Westcliffe Drive near her RV. An undercover police officer, whom she later identified as Officer LaMoss, arrived in a black unmarked car and said he wanted to talk to her and others in the group. She read La Moss a statement from the ACLU about the rights of community members vis a vis the police and walked to her RV.

The cop followed her. She got in and tried to close the door. Le Moss, not saying she was under arrest or detained, reached in and grabbed her right arm, pinching the skin as he twisted it behind her back, breaking it. She screamed her arm was broken, but his response was to call for backup. 4 more police cars arrived. She continued screaming for 911 and finally paramedics showed up.

The police said they were impounding her RV, which she lives in.

She was taken to Watsonville hospital, waited hours for x-rays and painpills. She is charged with battery and an additional charge. X-rays confirm her arm was broken. She needs an attorney and community support.

This is an account from Donna Deiss (with someadditions from her friend Shane). Donna has previously been harassed by rangers as part of the 'clear out the hippies' campaign at Three Tree Lot and the other lots around Lighthouse Fields. Recently the City's Parks and Recreation Department had its 'No RVs' signs painted over by state Rangers, for apparently violating state law and policy regarding parking (i.e. RVS are allowed to park).

See related stories: 'Harassment of Homeless in RVs, a Letter from Donna Deiss' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/10/08/18452903.php ,

'Superintendant Hammack Stonewalls on RV Ban in Coastal Parking Lots' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/09/12/18447267.php , and

'Coastal Access Denied to Motorhomes and Trailers in Santa Cruz' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/08/30/18444952.php for related stories.

HOMELESSNESS AND POLITICAL REPRESSION, THE GREEN PARTY FAILS THE TEST IN SANTA CRUZ by Steven Argue
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2001/12/5085.shtml

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Antidepressants are NOT safe or even useful for most depressed people.

2008-05-09T03:15:14Z

If you believe antidepressants are safe or even useful for most depressed people, you need more info. The drug industry has become very rich by lying to us and selling us useless, dangerous drugs.

http://theeffexoractivist.org

http://www.counterpunch.org/cox01272008.html

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045

http://www.ssristories.com/index.php

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/effexor/petition.html

posted in *Activists* - 2 replies

activist art

2008-05-08T19:27:19Z

http://news.webshots.com/album/548559364Kdapmv

Any other activist artists here?

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

On This Anniversary of the Kent State Massacre

2008-05-06T00:46:26Z

On This Anniversary of the Kent State Massacre

By STEVEN ARGUE

Thirty eight years ago, on May 4, 2008, at Ohio’s Kent State University, the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the US war in Vietnam. The students were shot from distances of 275 to 400 feet, giving lie to claims that the students posed a threat to the Guardsmen. Four students were murdered and nine were injured. Nobody ever did time for those murders.

Before May 4, 1970, an anti-war movement had been building in the United States. The American people were increasingly impatient with the war, and an active anti-war movement helped build that kind of consciousness. People wanted an end to the war and Nixon kept promising a “light at the end of the tunnel.” On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. This was the opposite of what people wanted to hear. Protests erupted on campuses that had not had them in the past, like Kent State. For many, the cold blooded murder of students at Kent State and murders of students soon after at Jackson State, were the final straw.

Immediately after the Kent State shootings 8 million students went out on strike, and some Universities, such as Berkley, were taken over by students and faculty as anti-war universities. After May 1970, the majority of those drafted were already opposed to the war before they got to Vietnam. This brought an end to the war. The US government could not win the war because they were facing fierce battles from the Vietnamese and many US soldiers were actively resisting the war. Commanding officers were winding up dead as they tried to force soldiers to kill people in a foreign land for a war they did not believe in. Nixon could not win a war with drafted soldiers who refused to fight, and this was a factor that forced the U.S. government to withdraw from Vietnam.

Three million Vietnamese were murdered as a result of the US occupation of southern Vietnam and massive U.S. bombing of the north. Over 50,000 US soldiers died. It was resistance, both by the Vietnamese people, and the resistance of the anti-war movement in the United States that brought an end to the US occupation of Vietnam. Had the working class of the United States been ready to join that strike of 8 million students in May 1970, we would have potentially had a revolution in the United States, but at that time the working class was not ready.

Today, after the lessons of Vietnam, and after decades of bi-partisan union busting, outsourcing, privatization, and declining living standards for the US working class, the U.S. working class is now stepping out and taking the lead in the struggle against the criminal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. On May 1st, 2008 10,000 U.S. port workers of the ILWU went out on strike against the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, shutting down all 29 ports on the West Coast for eight hours. Within the union, Vietnam Vets were some of the strongest advocates of the strike.

Joining the strike in solidarity with the demand of immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq were the Iraqi port workers at Umm Qasr and Khor Alzubair. They joined U.S. workers in a deeply symbolic one hour strike to end the occupation.

In going out on strike, the union ranks of the ILWU defied the rulings of an arbitrator, who twice ordered them not to strike. They also defied the employers of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) who declared the strike “illegal”. This is the kind of defiance the working class will need to emulate in other industries, both to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to start winning better contracts.

Today, over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion. In addition, the U.S. has installed a religious death squad government where women's rights have eroded, the economy has deteriorated, the environment has been seriously devastated by the radiation of US DU weapons, millions of refugees have fled the country, people are often arrested without cause and tortured, the US bombs civilians from the sky, and basic infrastructure like water and electricity have been destroyed by the US and not rebuilt by the US occupiers.

It is also a war that has cost the U.S. thousands of lives, tens of thousands of casualties, and trillions of dollars in debt. Yet, for a few extremely wealthy Americans it has meant massive profits for military contractors and other businesses with contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, multinational companies like Exxon, BP and Shell are drooling as the U.S. government tries to force an oil law down the throats of the Iraqi people that would turn ownership of Iraqi oil over to these corporations.

Meanwhile, the pro-war Democrat Party voted for the war and keeps voting to fund it. Today, the Democrats are once again pushing for $178 billion in funding for the war. Neither Clinton nor Obama would promise to withdraw all troops from Iraq by 2013 ("The Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC", New York Times 9/26/07). In addition, the two of them have offered differing versions of expanding these wars into Iran and Pakistan.

Whoever wins the upcoming election, it will take increased action by the working class to end these wars. ILWU member Jack Heyman is correct in saying of the May 1st strike against the war, “There's precedent for this action. In the '50s, French dockworkers refused to load war materiel on ships headed for Indochina, and helped to bring that colonial war to an end.” The longshore workers’ May 1st strike does indeed show the way forward. More strikes, and bigger strikes, along with building a workers’ party independent of the Democrats and Republicans, can indeed end these wars.

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
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http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

PLEASE WATCH = "IN LIES WE TRUST" = IT MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE

2008-05-05T09:31:49Z

PLEASE WATCH = "IN LIES WE TRUST" = IT MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE
Join the "TRUTH REVOLUTION"..

http://www.restoretherepublic.com/component/option,com_seyret/task,video\
directlink/Itemid,40/id,559/

TORRENT WITH extras
http://www.mininova.org/tor/1375455

PLEASE READ "A Truth Soldier"
http://danieltowsey.blogspot.com/2008/02/truth-soldier.html

Make copies and share them with people you care about, make some and write
"PORN" and leave copies in malls and other places...

Only the truely informed will have any chance..

Please join "conspiraciesclub' It's loaded with thousands of Articles,links,Videos, Documents and more.. http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/conspiraciesclub/

and for Canadians please go to "canadianconspiraciesclub" to learn about Bill C-51 before it's to late http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/canadianconspiraciesclub/

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

SF May 1st Strike: Cynthia McKinney, Danny Glover and Cindy Sheehan speaking

2008-05-02T22:55:10Z

PORT WORKERS MAY DAY ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Clarence Thomas and Jack Heyman, Co-Chairs
Phone: 510.333.4301 * Fax: 510.215.2800
Email: news@may1.org

MEDIA ALERT

April 23, 2008

The Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee is proud to announce that Cynthia McKinney, former Congresswoman from Georgia; Danny Glover, renowned actor and political activist; and Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star mother whose son Casey was killed in Iraq four years ago, will be among the featured speakers at our "No Peace, No Work" Holiday mobilization in San Francisco on May 1st.

The West Coast longshore workers have voted to stop work to protest against the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee and the other rank-and-file committees in ports up and down the West Coast have received pledges of support from labor councils, local unions and anti-war, anti-racist, immigrant and other social justice organizations across the country and around the globe.

The "March with Longshore Workers" will assemble at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 1st, at the Longshore (ILWU) hall at Mason & Beach, and will march down the Embarcadero for a noon rally at Justin Herman Plaza.

Also see:

ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/nobloodforoil/thread/f02f3fd2-9632-403e-8829-e3817def77c0

This has been distributed by Liberation News, subscribe free:
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posted in *Activists* - 2 replies

Cynthia McKinney Letter to ILWU in Support of Port Actions Against the War

2008-04-29T23:40:10Z

Cynthia McKinney Letter to ILWU in Support of Port Actions Against the War

Power to the Committee to Elect Cynthia McKinney for President
Post Office Box 311759 _ Atlanta, GA 31131-1759
Telephone 510-250-0729
www.RunCynthiaRun.org

April 2, 2008

Dear Brothers and Sisters of the ILWU,

Your powerful Longshore Caucus resolution, "For Workers' Action to Stop the War", and your decision to stop work on the West Coast docks May 1st, inspires all of us who have taken up the struggle to end the disastrous war and occupation of Iraq, foisted on us by the Republican administration, and continually funded without substantial objection by both the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress. Sadly, the Bush-Pelosi war policy is a formula for endless global conflict, deterioration of the rule of law among nations, and growing impoverishment, indebtedness and evisceration of workers' rights and civil liberties here at home.

While many unions pass resolution after resolution while doing little to actually stop the bloodshed, for generations the ILWU has shown that we can resist the war-mongering corporate politicians, and their profiteering attempts to divide the labor movement and weaken our capacity to organize and resist their destructive actions.

Once again, your union is setting a shining example for working people everywhere-as you did in 1978, when you refused to load bombs for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; in 1984, when you refused to move South African cargo to protest the racist apartheid government; in 1996, when you honored the picket line for striking dockworkers in Liverpool, England; in 1999, when you shut down the Pacific Coast to protest the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle; in 2001, when you prepared a Coast-wide work stoppage in defense of five gallant longshoremen in Charleston, South Carolina, who were charged with felonies for walking a picket line; not to mention the numerous times that you have stopped trade on the West Coast waterfront in support of Black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

I want you and your members to know that at least one 2008 Presidential candidate is proud to stand up publicly in full and unqualified support of your resolution to celebrate International Workers Day by protesting the war and occupation where it counts: at the point of production. My campaign, the Power to the People Campaign, will stand with you on May 1st, all along the West Coast, and anyplace where working people take up your call to resist the war. We'll be with you on the picket line.

With gratitude for the courage and principles of the women and men of the West Coast docks, I hereby offer my total support for your action. In the days leading up to May 1st, and beyond, I pledge to make backing up the ILWU a central goal of my campaign. Please contact me to discuss how we can best assist in your heroic effort.

In Solidarity,

Cynthia McKinney
Candidate for President of the United States
Power To The People Coalition

Also see:

ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/nobloodforoil/thread/f02f3fd2-9632-403e-8829-e3817def77c0

This has been distributed by Liberation News, subscribe free:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

Come to the May Day protest in San Francisco
WHEN: 10:30 a.m., May 1, followed by a rally at noon.
WHERE: Longshore Union Hall, corner of Mason and Beach (near Fisherman's Wharf).
WHAT: March to a rally at Justin Herman Plaza along the Embarcadero.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.ilwu.org/ and http://www.transportworkers.org/ or call (415) 776-8100.

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Rev Wright talking about black churches being misunderstood got me thinking

2008-04-28T18:09:48Z

Rev Wright talking about black churches being misunderstood got me
thinking about things. It has me wondering how we can promote
understanding and tolerance of people's religions and ethnicities. I
feel that they only way it can be done is through a
gathering,discussion,education.

I was wondering wouldn't it be a good idea to have some type of
religious convention so that all churches,religious organizations
could participate and interact with one another and discuss
religious,ideological differences and maybe learn that they have some
similarities that give them some common ground.
They could also have some debate about their beliefs,practices too
Also invite the religious leaders and others to set foot in their
congregations and to observe what goes on... learn to understand
different religious believers.
They could hold the religious convention every year.
There can be an annual survey about people's religious
beliefs,practices that also include matters dealing with tolerance.
They could answer questions that include how many of them know people
of different religions,how many people read books about different
religions including the actual books pertaining to religion like the
Bible in regards to Christianity,the Koran in regards to Islam....ask
questions about interfaith friendships/dating/relationships/marriages.
Ask questions about religious bigotry,discrimination whether they
were victims or perpetrators.
During the religious convention, there can be pamphlets about
religious,and so people can read about other's religions...they can do
surverys on them to see what they approve and disapprove of .
In schools, there could be elective classes on religion. I feel that
religion is very important subject to learn in school....because it
seems religion dominates American culture to the point that all
religious beliefs influence our politics. There could be field trips
to religious institutions to actually experience customs,traditions.
I also believe that we shouldn't just study the good stuff....but also
the bad stuff including persecutions and how religions can oppress
people and limit their rights.

Now this same thing can be done in regards to ethnic groups.

Their their differences and their similarities.....learn about the
similarities to find common ground.
There could be a multiethnic,multicultural week.....where people of
all ethnic groups get together, teach about their cultures and way of
life even included various cuisine. There could be
multicultural,multiethnic exhibits. There could be an annual survey
in regards to ethnic relations including questions like how many
people know people of certain ethnic groups, how many people go to
gatherings,functions that involve different ethnic groups, things like
food..
also ask things about interethnic friendships/dating/relationships.
also ask negative stuff about experiences of ethnic
bigotry,discrimination. Ask about fears,resentments in regards to
ethnic groups....I also feel that questions of affirmative
action,reparations can be part of the survey. I also believe that
ethnic stereotypes need to be addressed during the survey to see how
many people believe in them.

These surveys can be done anonymously too.

I feel empathy and tolerance can only be done through actual
experiencing.

I feel that you have to walk a mile in a person's moccasins to
understand them.

That's just my view.

Raymond

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Vermont AFL-CIO endorses May 1 anti-war strike

2008-04-27T18:44:11Z

Labor's First Strike Against the War Gains Momentum

Vermont Union offers strong endorsement of West Coast longshoremen's action.

The Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, representing thousands of workers in countless sectors across Vermont, have unanimously passed an historic resolution expressing their "unequivocal" support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq.

Montpelier, VT -The Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, representing thousands of workers in countless sectors across Vermont, have unanimously passed an historic resolution expressing their "unequivocal" support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq. The strike, being organized by the Longshore Caucus of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), will seek to shutdown all west coast ports for a period of 8 hours on the day of May 1st 2008. The Vermont AFL-CIO is the first state labor federation to publicly back the Longshoremen; other state federations are expected to follow.

The resolution, among other things, calls the war in Iraq "immoral, unwanted, and unnecessary", states that the vast majority of working Vermonters oppose the war, and contends that the war will only be brought to an end by "the direct actions of working people." Many other Vermont labor unions and organizations, including the Vermont Workers' Center, have also made official statements condemning the war.

The resolution also calls on working Vermonters to "discuss the actions of the Longshoremen, to wear anti-war buttons, and to take various actions of their own design and choosing in their workplace on May 1st, 2008."

"Workers in Vermont and all across this nation are against this war. We have already demanded that the government end it, but they have consistently failed to heed our words. Therefore working people are beginning to take concrete steps to make our resistance known. If the war does not immediately end we, the unions and working people of Vermont, will also be compelled to take appropriate action," said David Van Deusen, a District Vice President of the Vermont AFL-CIO.

Traven Leyshon, President of the Washington, Lamoille & Orange County Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, said, "Vermont labor has long called for an end to this war. The untold billions being spent on the war could instead be used to address our domestic needs. It is working people who pay the cost of the war - in some cases with our lives, but always with our sacrifices."

Full text of the resolution after the jump ...

Vermont AFL-CIO Resolution

In Solidarity With Longshoremen's West Coast Strike Against War

April, 2008

Whereas the war in Iraq is immoral, unwanted, and unnecessary,

Whereas this unjust war is opposed by the great majority of Americans & Vermonters, the bulk of organized labor, and by thousands of enlisted military personal,

Whereas this unjust war has already resulted in over 4000 American dead (including a disproportionate number of brave Vermonters), and tens of thousands of service men & woman being wounded,

Whereas this unjust war has further resulted in untold number of Iraqi deaths,

Whereas the Federal Government has not made any constructive moves towards the ending of this war and the full removal of US troops, and instead has taken the course of escalation and indefinite occupation,

Whereas the government of Vermont, and especially Governor Jim Douglas, have failed to find ways to bring Vermont National Guard troops home from Iraq,

Whereas this war will only be brought to an end by the direct actions of working people,

Therefore, Let It Be Resolved that the Vermont AFL-CIO continues to stand in firm opposition to this war, and unequivocally supports the decision of the Longshore Caucus of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) to shutdown the west coast ports for a period of 8 hours on May 1st, 2008, as a means of resistance.

Let It Be Resolved that the Vermont AFL-CIO stands in full solidarity with the New York Metro National Association of Letter Carriers who have resolved to conduct two minute periods of silence on May 1st, 2008, at 1PM, 5PM & 9PM in protest of the war and in support of the Longshoremen.

Let It Be Resolved that the Vermont AFL-CIO encourages all Vermont workers to stand in solidarity with the historic actions being taken by the Longshoremen & other labor unions to end this war.

Let It Be Further Resolved that the Vermont AFL-CIO calls for all Vermont workers to discuss the actions of the Longshoremen, to wear anti-war buttons, and to take various actions of their own design and choosing in their workplace on May 1st, 2008 as a means of resistance against this unjust war.

Also see:
ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/nobloodforoil/thread/f02f3fd2-9632-403e-8829-e3817def77c0

This has been distributed by Liberation News, subscribe free:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Join the Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

Come to the May Day protest in San Francisco
WHEN: 10:30 a.m., May 1, followed by a rally at noon.
WHERE: Longshore Union Hall, corner of Mason and Beach (near Fisherman's Wharf).
WHAT: March to a rally at Justin Herman Plaza along the Embarcadero.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.ilwu.org/ and http://www.transportworkers.org/ or call (415) 776-8100.

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

2008-04-18T20:19:26Z

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

The Democrats and Republicans are the paid agents of the oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on global warming (the single biggest threat to the future of humanity and a healthy planet).

The Cool Earth Party is being established on the principles of revolutionary democratic socialism. We call for an end to the dictatorial power of the wealthy through the nationalization of major industries and for the establishment of a planned economy run to meet human and environmental needs. This socialist society must be established within the framework of full democratic freedoms and multi-party proportional democracy. To be truly Democratic all parties running in elections will be legally guaranteed equal time in the media, big campaign spending will be outlawed, and electronic voting machines (which are presently used to rig American elections) will be eliminated.

Upon taking power the Cool Earth Party will establish a system of socialized medicine for the United States, end all U.S. military occupations of other countries, end U.S. military aid to repressive governments, and nationalize the auto and energy industries to carry out immediate emergency measures to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

Biofuel Caused Hunger Brings Down Haitian Prime Minister

2008-04-17T16:06:39Z

In this Liberation News Mailing:

1. Biofuel Caused Hunger Brings Down Haitian Prime Minister
2. UK Protests call for Biofuel Targets to be Scrapped
3. Other Suggested Reading

********************
Movement to cap food prices brings down Haiti's prime minister
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
By: Silvio Rodrigues
(Reprinted with permission of the Party for Socialism and Liberation)

Food crisis sparks mass demonstrations

Pressured by mass protests and riots against rising food prices, Haitian lawmakers dismissed Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis in hopes of defusing the crisis. Just days before, 16 of 27 Haitian senators signed a letter calling for the resignation of Alexis.

Demonstrations began on April 2 in Les Cayes, but quickly spread to other areas of the country. For several days, Haitians erected barricades of burning tires and old cars in the streets.

On April 8, thousands of Haitians marched to the presidential palace to protest the sharp increase in food staples and to demand the resignation of the President René Préval. (Utah Independent, April 8)

Demonstrators rammed the palace gates with a rolling dumpster in an attempt to storm the building. U.N. occupation forces in jeeps and assault vehicles responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Soon, the U.N. troops were overwhelmed by the size and fury of the crowds, who turned their anger against the surrounding stores. (Times Republic, April 8)

Opposition lawmakers spearheaded the vote against Alexis, a close ally of Préval, in hopes of mitigating popular anger and capitalizing on the crisis. Youri Latortue, nephew of former prime minister Gerárd Latortue, played a key role in the opposition campaign. Gerárd Latortue became prime minister following the 2004 coup against Aristide, working hand in hand with Washington and its imperialist allies. (Reuters, April 10)

Whether the opposition’s move will be effective remains to be seen. About 25 demonstrators gathered to chant "Aristide or death" outside the parliament following the vote. ""Alexis left? What's the difference?" asked a Haitian chicken vendor. (International Herald Tribune, April 12)

Alexis’ dismissal will do little to fill the stomachs of hungry Haitians. The poorest Haitians live on less than $2 a month. The country suffers from scarce arable land and imports most of its food, including more than 80 percent of its rice. (CTV News, April 12)

Cookies made from dirt, salt and shortening are a staple of the Haitian diet, costing only around 5 cents as of January. Doctors say that relying on the cookies for sustenance can be dangerous; for Haitians, they alleviate the pain caused by hunger. (National Geographic, Jan. 30)

The rising price of foodstuffs is a global phenomenon—protests have erupted in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Burkina Faso and elsewhere.

The crisis springs from the inherent anarchy of capitalist production. Producers make economic decisions that affect the lives of billions with only their own short-term gains in mind. Among other factors, the growing demand for ethanol has shifted agricultural production away from food crops.

Because capitalists must constantly seek the most profitable alternatives in order not to be driven out of business by their competitors, they are unable to avoid such crises—or to offer a way out of them, for that matter. Subsidies or international "aid" are at times provided to temper popular unrest when it threatens imperialist interests.

It is hard to say whether such "relief" would appease the ire of Haitians at the present juncture. For the impoverished masses, the food crisis was the catalyst for an explosive outburst of deep-rooted hatred for the occupation. The February 2004 coup that toppled Aristide left an indelible mark in the consciousness of a people already well-familiar with imperialist intervention.

René Préval was elected to the presidency in 2006, supported by poor Haitians largely because of his past association with former president Aristide. At the time, two years had passed since the coup and Haiti was already under U.N. occupation. Some sectors of progressive and liberal opinion believed that the 2006 "democratic" elections indicated that things were getting better.

The imperialist occupation under the U.N. flag has continued throughout Préval’s presidency. One only remains in power under occupation by adhering to the framework stipulated by the occupiers. The Préval government has not—and cannot—end the imperialist occupation.

With neither the government nor the opposition offering a way out, poor and working Haitians are growing increasingly reliant on the most powerful force for change—themselves.

***************
UK Protests call for Biofuel Targets to be Scrapped

16 April 2008 joint press release by Biofuelwatch and Global Forest Coalition

London-There were demonstrations in London yesterday and groups across the UK also protested against the introduction of mandatory biofuel blending.

Outside Downing Street speakers from Friends of the Earth, Global Forest Coalition, GM Freeze, campaign against Climate Change and Biofuelwatch condemned the government's decision to go ahead with its biofuel policy against overwhelming evidence of catastrophic impacts on climate, communities, biodiversity and food security.

Other protests were held outside the constituency offices of Ruth Kelley, Secretary of State for Transport, and Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment. More protests took place at BP and Tesco fuel stations. BP and Tesco are two of the companies with significant investment in biofuels (also called agrofuels) from large-scale monocultures. They have been strongly lobbying for mandatory biofuel blending.

"The UK has chosen to ignore a vast mountain of evidence that biofuels are contributing to hunger, climate change, deforestation and human rights abuses," said Dr. Rachel Smolker, main author of "The Real Cost of Agrofuels." She continued, "Perhaps they are counting on new technologies using cellulose from wood and grasses, but these won't sidestep the problems either. Whatever feedstocks are used will result in further expansion of industrial monocultures, possibly including genetically engineered trees. The bottom line is that there is a limited amount of land available, a large population to feed and a desperate need to preserve remaining biodiverse ecosystems. Instead of focusing on improving efficiency and reducing consumption, the UK is mandating further destruction."

Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch adds, "Protests against the agrofuel industry and this government's biofuel policies will not end. The government is talking about vague 'sustainability standards', whilst agrofuels are causing ever greater harm to the climate, to forests and other ecosystems, to communities in the global South, to biodiversity worldwide, and to food sovereignty and food security. We need a moratorium on all agrofuel incentives and targets to prevent those catastrophic impacts."

On 8 April, twenty-nine UK and international groups wrote to the UK government, calling for an agrofuel moratorium and demanding a suspension of the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation, and opposition to new EU biofuel targets - both the proposed 10% biofuel target in the Renewable Energy Directive, and the inclusion of biofuels in the draft new Fuel Quality Directive. Around 200 organisations from North and South have signed a call for an EU moratorium on agrofuels from large-scale monocultures, and there are separate calls for a U.S. agrofuel moratorium and for an African agrofuel moratorium, as well as growing number of declarations from the Southern groups that are deeply concerned about the impacts which biofuel policies in Europe, including in the UK, are having on their communities, food sovereignty and environment.

Contact:
Almuth Ernsting, Biofuelwatch, +44-1224-324797 (UK, any time)
Orin Langelle, Global Forest Coalition, +1.802.578.6980 (U.S., any time)

*************************************
3. Other Suggested Reading:

Biofuels and The Internationalization of Genocide
by Fidel Castro
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/abril/mier4/14refexf.html

Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming
by Steven Argue
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/10/18478172.php

US Marines occupy Haitian capital amid charges Aristide was kidnapped
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m02.shtml

***************
Subscribe free to Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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Colombia: Massacres by US Backed Death Sqad Government Exposed, Again

2008-04-01T17:14:52Z

Translation By: Colombia Human Rights Committee (Washington)

March 27, 2008

Arrest warrants issued for 15 members of the military for San José de Apartadó massacre

Photo: Jesús Abad Colorado _ Archive / EL TIEMPO

Eight persons died in the massacre.

Photo: Jesús Abad Colorado _ Archive / ELTIEMPO

For the Office of the Attorney General (the "Fiscalía") it is clear that the action at San José de Apartadó sought to impose fear and terror in the civilians of that community.

The decision was provoked by the testimony of Jorge Luis Salgado, a former paramilitary who accused the soldiers of assassinating, in association with the AUC, the three children and eight adults.

"The children were under the bed. The girl was very nice, 5 or 6 years old, and the little boy was also a curious little one.... We proposed to the commanders to leave them in a neighboring home, but they said that they were a threat, that they would become guerrillas in the future.... 'Cobra' grabbed the girl by the hair and ran the machete through her throat," Salgado, a native of Carepa (Antioquia), told the authorities last January 30.

The massacre in the peace community occurred on February 21, 2005.

That day, the mutilated and decapitated bodies were left in the middle of the jungle and in have-covered graves.

All the victims were members of a group that declared itself neutral in the Colombian armed conflict, and who had been zealously requesting special protection.

Though at first testimony indicated that the persons responsible for these deeds were members of the 17th Army Brigade and men under the command of Diego Murillo, 'Don Berna,' this is the first time that someone who was in the ranks of the executioners has told the story.

"None of us knew where we were arriving at, we only knew that we had to go to the hamlet La Resbalosa and go through the area accompanied by the Army," stated the former paramilitary.

Three second lieutenants involved

His testimony just precipitated several important decisions in this emblematic case that has already come before international courts. .

Twelve days ago, the Fiscalía send a communication to the commander of the Army, Gen. Mario Montoya, in which it asks him to order the appropriate persons to arrest 15 active-duty members of that armed body who in 2005 were assigned to the area where the facts unfolded.

In the letter, the Fiscalía notes that initially the members of the Army will give sworn statements.

But one of the investigators assured EL TIEMPO that their arrest was ordered "because there are sufficient indicia to presume their responsibility in the events in Apartadó."

The list that Gen. Montoya received includes three second lieutenants, four sergeants, and eight corporals.

Already in November 2007, Army Capt. Guillermo Armando Gordillo Sánchez was arrested in connection with these same facts.

The officer, mentioned several times in the record, opted to remain silent throughout the sworn statement taken from him a few months ago.

And although his defense counsel has alleged his complete innocence, the Fiscalía opted to indict him of homicide of a protected person, conspiracy to engage in criminal conduct, and terrorism, as co-perpetrator.

The radio operator of Héroes de Tolová, Adriano José Cano Arteaga, told the Fiscalía that Gordillo's group had gone out to patrol with the paramilitaries on several occasions.

'Cobra' Fell

His testimony and that of Jorge Luis Salgado David made it possible, ten days ago, for a specialized prosecutor to order the arrest of the two former paramilitary chiefs accused of active participation in the massacre.

They are Joel José Vargas Flórez and José Clímaco Falco, alias 'Cobra,' the man who allegedly beheaded five-year-old Natalia.

And while the Fiscalía defines the legal status of the Army members implicated, attorneys for the victims' next-of-kin are seeking access to the testimony of the paramilitaries on the heart-rending events of three years ago.

Salgado David, for example, recalls that the father of the beheaded girl begged on his knees for the children's lives.

In addition, he said that the girl thought she was going on an outing and prepared a change of clothes for her little brother for the trip.

"She waved goodbye with her little hand," the former paramilitary recalled.

And he added that the violence of the attack involved such extreme cruelty that when he came across the corpse of one man, allegedly a guerrilla, he almost vomited.

"He was split, destroyed at the stomach.... You could see his intestines and a white thing. I had just eaten pork, and I felt like vomiting."

Witness protection

Today, paradoxically, Jorge Salgado David, is asking for protection.

One group of demobilized paramilitaries has tried to kill him at least twice because he is refusing to go into the `Águilas Negras,' or `Black Eagles,' the emerging paramilitary group with tentacles throughout the country.

Fortunately, the authorities are already pursuing the men who want to kill him.

San José: A peace community

The massacre that occurred in 2005 in San José de Apartadó, and the situation of accusations and stigmatization that stemmed from this incident in this peace community is one of the cases that NGOs have brought before international courts to accuse the Colombian State of not working to defense human rights.

Indeed, since 2002, this community of Urabá, in the department of Antioquia, had provisional measures issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States.

The international organization has demanded that the Colombian government adopt measures to safeguard the life and integrity of the members of the peace community.

Today, more than three years after the facts, this case and that of another 170 assassinations committed since 1997 in San José de Apartadó, is before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington .

The case should then go before the Inter-American Court , based in Costa Rica , which will then have to decide the matter.

In addition, reports on some of these crimes have been sent to the International Criminal Court, the European Parliament, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, and other international organizations.

The members of the Army for whom arrest warrants were issued

In the letter sent to Gen. Mario Montoya, the Fiscalía asks for the immediate arrest of second lieutenants Alejandro Jaramillo Giraldo, Jorge Humberto Milanés Vega, and Édgar García Estupiñán.

Also included are second sergeants Ángel María Padilla Petro, Henry Guasmayán Ortega, Darío José Brango Agamez, and Óscar Jaime González, and corporals Sabaraín Cruz Reina, Ricardo Bastidas Candia, Héctor Londoño Ramírez, Luis Gutiérrez Echeverría, Jesús David Cardona Casas, Yuber Carranza Rodríguez, Ramón Mican Guativa, and José Carmona.

Extra-officially it was learned that five have already been arrested.

Already in November 2007 Capt. Guillermo Armando Gordillo Sánchez had been arrested in connection with these same facts.

He was the commander of the Bolívar Company, part of the Vélez de Carepa Battalion (Antioquia), who carried out Operation 'Fénix' during the days on which the massacre occurred.

For the investigative agency, "his presence at the time and place is clear and undeniable."

Therefore, he was denied pre-trial release, and has been behind bars since last November.

Several witnesses have testified against him, indicating that the officer agreed to carry out joint patrols with the paramilitaries from the unit known as Bloque 'Héroes de Tolová', which demobilized as part of the peace process with the Government.

One of the witnesses is Adriano José Cano, who was the radio operator of that paramilitary faction, who told the Fiscalía that after the massacre, the captain reproached the paramilitaries for what they had done.

"He told them that it was a major blunder," he said, adding that the members of the military did nothing to prevent the crime or to pursue those responsible.

The now former paramilitary said that the members of the AUC were the Army's guides, but when they reached the campesinos' homes "they entered the houses, intimidated, tortured, and killed" using machetes and firearms.

Cases in which members of the military forces or National Police have been involved

JAMUNDÍ

Last February 18 Col. Byron Carvajal, former commander of High Mountain Battalion No. 3 (Batallón de Alta Montaña No. 3), and 14 of his men were convicted by a judge in Cali for the murder of 10 police officers and one informant in the rural part of Jamundí (Valle del Cauca).

The sentence will be handed down on April 21, but it is thought that it will not be less than 25 years. In the colonel's case, he having apparently planned the attack, a penalty of 40 to 60 years is not out of the question.

RETAKING OF THE PALACIO DE JUSTICIA

The Fiscalía ordered the arrest of (ret.) Col. Alfonso Plazas Vega, in mid-July 2007, in relation to the disappearance of Carlos Rodríguez and Cristina Guarín, who were employees in the cafeteria of the Palacio de Justicia, and Irma Franco, a member of the M_19 guerrilla organization.

As part of the proceeding into these two disappearances, (retired) sergeants Antonio Jiménez and Ferney Causalla were arrested; at the time that had been part of Army intelligence (B2 del Ejército), which participated in retaking the Palacio.

MAPIRIPÁN MASSACRE

Col. Lino Sánchez was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the massacre, which took place from July 15 to 20, 1997, in the municipality of Mapiripán , Meta , which resulted in the deaths of more than 49 persons. The same sentence was imposed, as indirect co-perpetrators, on sergeants Juan Carlos Gamarra Polo and José Miller Urueña Díaz,

In 2003, the Fiscalía indicted Gen. Jaime Alberto Uscátegui, but he was acquitted in November 2007 by a judge in Bogotá.

u.investigativa@eltiempo.com.co

Killed in the massacre were Luis Guerra, his wife Beyanira Areiza, and their son Deyner Guerra. In addition, Alfonso Bolívar, his wife Sandra Graciano, their children Natalia and Santiago , and Alejandro Pérez. Jesús Abad Colorado _ Archive / EL TIEMPO

For the Fiscalía it is clear that the action in San José de Apartadó sought to impose fear and terror among the civilians in that community. Jesús Abad Colorado _ Archive / ELTIEMPO

posted in *Activists* - 0 replies

VISION of FREEDOM ~ 1993-2012

2008-03-28T22:00:20Z

http://worldgathering.net/vision.html
~~~~~~~~~

Vision of Freedom ~ 1993-2012

The Rainbow Dream Vision of Hope
Intertribal Medicine Societies of Turtle island
The Twenty Count: 1993-2012

Make copies of the Rainbow prophecy, and give or send them to people anywhere on the planet. Then let them be guided by their hearts to do the same until all planetary citizens are brought to life in the Rainbow dream, so that we may dream and work together for true peace. Love, Thunder Woman

Introduction by Aleran
Throughout the ages humanity has sought out the prophecies of the spiritually gifted to instil a clear hope and vision into life. During this time many prophecies come to us trying to lead us in many different directions.
Some prophecy points to disaster, hopelessness and the annihilation of mankind. But other prophecies create a vision of joyful transformation through quantum leaps into love and light.
As things stand now, the human race is dreaming a hell.
But as individuals and as a collective humanity it is our potential to dream of paradise and to create the kingdom of heaven on our Mother Earth.
Could it be that the pain in our hearts caused by the hell we have created will spur us on into visions and creations of a world formed in love?
It is my prayer and dream, along with a multitude of others who have taught me to dream the Rainbow dream, that each and every one of you learn to dream both while awake and sleeping, the dream of unity and love through divine transformation.
This prophecy on the following pages is a dream and vision that is a potential reality for mankind. It is not an ultimatum. But it is ours to behold and to create if we only dare to dream it together.

The Rainbow Dream Vision of Turtle Island
Prophecies of The Native Americans
1993-2012

PART ONE ~
The distribution and giving back to humanity of the Twenty Count.
In the Turtle Island lore we say it is the time of finding one’s path with heart.
The time of seeking perfection, growth and development.
Most importantly the time of trust and innocence, when mythologies of the world are finally revealing secrets.

PART TWO ~
The critical time. The time of the animal. The time of Tuwalananie, the dark force.
The reason for this is that seeds of light have been planted and we are starting to grow and the teachings are starting to come out and all those ones who have taught partial truths, who have taught deliberate lies in history, are going to be threatened by the awakening of the Rainbow people because the Rainbow people exist in every country, in every nation, in every land.
The Dark Forces will be threatened and they will use their power and their power exists in technology. We are going to see new technology appearing which will be a tremendous threat to the survival of humanity.
We must exert our influence by gathering together and sharing our ideas and plans for alternative power and for world peace. If we put a double amount of energy with what we are for, we can change it. We can change it.

PART THREE ~
The time of human to human communication.
The time the human family finally starts to become human.
There will be more information brought out into open format than has ever been seen on this planet.
We will re-establish contact in a very knowledgeable way with our ancestors from the stars.
So mark that down because it will happen. The first contact will be with the Pleiades and will be totally acknowledged and will be known to all the world powers. The second contact will be with Sirius.

PART FOUR ~
When truth seekers begin to open the veil of the crack between the worlds, we will see our memory circles.
Many of the leaders who are trying to keep us locked in the past, will not function today, will fall.
Many teachers and wise people will be seen for who they are and they will be the farmers, the labourers and the gas station attendants because the tagashala will be fully awakened.
People will begin to link up with other people in gathering together circles.
Many of these will be the so-called 'common people' and not the teachers you see up there now.

PART FIVE ~
The various winged serpent wheels will begin to turn, to dance once again and when they do the rainbow lights will be seen in dreams all over the world and these rainbow light dreams will help awaken the rest of humanity.
We will sit in a new circle of law.
All civil and social laws will have to be in conformity with natural laws or the people will not accept them and they will have the enlightenment necessary to reject those laws.
Science will once again become metaphysics. They will discover four laws that will help them jump to universal law and transcend the time-space continuum which is the limitation of the age and once again we will begin to take our power and to work with rules and laws that are cosmic laws.

PART SIX ~
We will once again see the way to continue a new dream.
We will be given the road map back to the stars and we will see the star people come out of the illusion of their two-legged form and into their actual great sleeper-dreamer form.
A powerful time approaches humanity and its really hard for me to talk about it.
I am a great dreamer but I don’t know if I dream that large.
We will see a real shift in planetary consciousness.
Many of the enemies of the humans will begin to drop away.
We will totally gain the light of the great light wheel.
There will be one humanity, one planet composed of all the different ways of dancing in complete harmony in the great gathering together circle.
All the seeds will be planted.
The Earth will have its true reality formed.
It will join the sisterhood of planets, the daughters of Copperwoman and it will create within itself all forms of all things in harmony with the everything.
We will see a whole new way of perfection.
There will be plants on this grandmother earth that will give life and sustenance as never before seen.
Starvation on the earth, all those things will be gone. There will be total balance and harmony.

PART SEVEN ~
The new race of humans will begin to design their new reality of life on this planet as they intended it to be when they first came here from the stars.
We will begin to establish this planet and use the collective consciousness to hold the power of this space in harmony with the Great Circle of Twelve and all the planets. There is a whole lot I don’t even know. There is more that I am not supposed to talk about yet.
The dream will be actualised and this planet will hold its space in the great council of planets and become a part of the universal enlightened sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity and keepers of the light circles. It's happened on many planets and it's expected to happen on a lot of other planets.
There will be a moment when the population will be 'the' Population, and something great will happen.
This planet will have its design of energy movement guided by all of humanity living here.

The Great Spirit will leave its seed and the egg of everything here on this planet and it will create itself 20 times over at the speed of light and this prophecy ends as I have been given it by the Grandmothers that I share with you now.

~~~~~~~~~

Vision of Freedom ~ 1993-2012

We can change it. Put a double amount
of energy with what we are for.

Make copies of the Rainbow prophecy, and give or send them to people anywhere on the planet. Then let them be guided by their hearts to do the same until all planetary citizens are brought to life in the Rainbow dream, so that we may dream and work together for true peace. Love, Thunder Woman

http://worldgathering.net/vision.html

~~~~~~~~~

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Free "Free Cascadia" Bumperstickers!

2008-03-25T05:56:02Z

For those of you not aware, Cascadia is the unique coastal-mountain bioregion between San francisco and the Alaskan panhandle in which the dominant culture is one of respect and honor for the environment and a strong tradition of democracy and social justice. The borders of Cascadia vary, but by some estimates stretch from 42° to 60° north latitude. It's western border consists of the Pacific Coast and a portion of the American state of Alaska. On the east, it borders the American states of Idaho and the Canadian province of Alberta. Cascadia is divided into three prefectures: British Columbia, Oregon and Washington.

To raise awareness of the bio-region, the Cascadian Independence Project has just come out with a batch of 'Free Cascadia' bumperstickers. Orders of up to 5 bumper stickers over the internet are going to be free or by donation. So if you're interested in the concept of Cascadia, just send an address to cascadianow@gmail.com, and we can have them in the mail in the next couple of days.

If you would like to see a picture of them you can go to http://www.cascadianow.org/mediastickers.html

For those who have not previously heard of us, the Cascadian Independence Project is a grass-roots political movement dedicated to building awareness and support for local democracy, global community, and the freedom and eventual independence of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

The CIP is also looking for members to form CIP chapters in their communities, schools or cities. If you're interested and would like to volunteer or form your own chapter, please email us at cascadianow@gmail.com!

For more information, please check out the main website at http://www.cascadianow.org

Thanks!

--Brandon

posted in *Activists* - 1 reply

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VISION of FREEDOM ~ 1993-2012

Free "Free Cascadia" Bumperstickers!

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