CONTENTS:
Speeches (audio, video, and transcripts)
Speakers included:
(Check out video, audio, and transcripts of individual speakers as it becomes available. More to come soon.)
Missy Comley Beattie of Gold Star Families for Peace read a statement from Cindy Sheehan
Elaine Brower (MFSO)
[text]
Kathleen Chalfant (read statement from Daniel Ellsberg)
Carl Dix, National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Carol Fisher,
World Can’t Wait supporter in Cleveland who was beaten and arrested by
police for posting fliers for the state of emergency protests
Lawrence Guyot, former SNCC member and former Chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Doris “Granny D” Haddock
C. Clark Kissinger, Bush Crimes Commission
Rev. Deborah Elandus Lake, World Can’t Wait steering committee
[text]
Lelani, International Action Center
Joe Madison the Black Eagle
Occidental College Students Ally & Leah
Rebecca Schaeffer, Georgetown Law School Student with Stand Up for the Law
[text]
David Swanson, After Downing Street
[text]
Sunsara Taylor
[text]
Juan Torres, GSFP
Ann Wright, Veterans for Peace
Daphne Wysham, Institute for Policy Studies
Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Hip-Hop Caucus
Due to the cut-off of power to the rally, some
were not able to speak. We hope to have copies of their written remarks
soon. This included:
Hampton University Student
Rhadames Rivera, Vice-President of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East
Isabel from Asociacion Tepeyac de New York
World Can’t Wait in the Heart of the Beast – February 4, 2006
by Joe Tougas
A
40 foot effigy of George W. Bush with the heads of Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney sprouting from its neck like a twisted hydra of monstrous
proportions toppled to the ground. An incensed crowd livid with a
government pre-empting attacks on the rights of its citizens defied
both weather, and executive domination, Feb. 4, in Washington D.C.
Bush’s outrageous defense of the Iraq war, NSA spying, and his
apocalyptic agenda in his State of the Union address, the World Can’t
Wait took its message to the doorstep of this regime, to make it
understood there will be no reprieve from the dissenting voice of the
people until the Bush dictatorship is out of office.
Marching
and cavorting around the White House, youth drummed, shouted, and
moshed in an icy downpour, and the elderly braved the elements with
umbrellas and canes. Soaked citizens reverberated their voices off the
walls of the Capital building, furiously demanding they be heard,
following the urgent journey after hearing the call to the capital from
around the nation. Students from UC-Berkeley, Columbia College in
Chicago, Occidental College in Los Angeles, and numerous other campuses
and high schools across the country constituted nearly half of the
crowd. A contingent of Texans brought a banner from their state.
The
diverse crowd of thousands slogged through the rain, the mud, and cold
all the way to the White House for one purpose: to demand that Bush
Step Down! Because it will never end as long as torture is being
carried out by our government. As long as science is being suppressed
at the expense of the environment and victims of AIDS, as long as we
have a dictatorial president who lies to the country to justify illegal
war, as long we have a unitary executive who orders governmental spying
on citizens for political dissent, and strangles all journalistic
coverage of it’s Constitutional violations, and disregard for
international law.
One
of the first speakers at the rally was Rebecca Shaefer, who took part
together with other Georgetown Law students in turning their backs on a
recent speech by Attorney General Gonzales justifying NSA spying and
other crimes. Shaefer’s comments revealed the ways in which, through
the tearing up of established law and the effect of this on the people,
this regime is remaking society in a fascist way. Her call for students
to take up the responsibility right now to change the course of history
crystallized the urgent, moral obligation before everybody to resist
and stop this regime.
Deborah Lake, of World Can’t Wait’s steering committee, set the record
straight that the people are the country, not the government, that the
people will not tolerate right-wing Christian control of the White
House, women’s bodies, or the rights of minorities.
As
the rain came down, Joe Madison, the Black Eagle of talk radio, urged
the crowd to take heart, ‘because the sun is going to shine.’ Madison
drew upon Martin Luther King’s call to morality against the Vietnam
War, then said point blank the Bush regime’s policies are pure ‘evil.’
Referring to Bush’s lies about WMD, he hotly bellowed, ‘Tell the truth
Mr. President or step down!’
After
walking across the nation at the age of 96, Doris ‘Granny D.’ Haddock,
left the crowd with no uncertainty that the people must rise up to
‘defend the Republic’ against all enemies, and therefore, against the
current occupiers of the White House.
C. Clark Kissinger presented the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, stamping the protest with a moral imperative to end the criminal actions of this regime on people here and around the world.
Ann
Wright, a defector from the regime and a judge at the Bush Crimes
Commission, spoke powerfully and personally to how the actions of this
illegitimate government are intolerable. Wright also paved the way for
more Republican operatives to take up the cause of the people instead
of their oppressors at a time when the truth they can tell and the
openings they can create are so urgently needed.
In
that light, actress Kathleen Chalfant read a recent statement from
Daniel Ellsberg, wistleblower and author of the ‘Pentagon Papers’,
which called for such defections now.
Invoking
the human toll of the Iraq War, and lashing at Bush’s indifference to
the pointless death no members of the administration will subject their
own children to, words of pain and warning came from those who’ve lost
their loved ones in this war.
Missy
Comley Beattie, who lost a nephew in Iraq, and Juan Torres whose son
was killed in Afghanistan were irrefutable testaments to the brutality
of a presidency that invents a fictitious threat to capitalize on
illegal and illegitimate war of unilateral
aggression.
Such
words were not wasted on Elaine Brower, whose son is stationed in Iraq.
She spoke of the past misery of women in a world without Roe v. Wade,
in which women had to go underground, in the shadows, endanger
themselves to exercise rights of their own bodies. Roe v. Wade changed
all that, and Brower spoke to the Bush regime’s agenda of re-enslaving
women, therefore, the imperative to drive it out.
Lawrence
Guyot, of SNCC, evoked the original spirit of the U.S. government’s
creation. In no uncertain terms, he declared there will never be a king
in the United States, as Samuel Alito’s unitary executive theory seeks
to mandate.
Ally
and Leah, students from Occidental College, agitated vociferously about
the attack on not only abortion rights, but also contraceptives, the
morning after pill, and women’s physical privacy. They railed against
the complicity of inaction. ‘We cannot let that happen, we must act now
or we are only helping the Bush regime with our silence!’
Carl
Dix, national spokesman for the Revolutionary Communist Party,
said ‘We’ve got to drive this fucking Bush out of office,’ and
‘we’ve got to fight relentlessly until it’s done.’ Dix recalled
being ordered to kill Vietnamese by a president who lied about a
Vietnamese threat to America(a president nostalgically praised by Dick
Cheney for its unrepentant absence of hesitation to spy on U.S.
citizens. Like Cheney’s old administration under Nixon, Dix vowed
Cheney’s current regime will be forced to step down. Dix related how he
stood in the very same spot next to the Washington Monument during the
Vietnam War, defied American imperialism in concert with a movement of
the people, and won.
officials cut power to the sound system ‘due to the weather,’ World
Can’t Wait co-initiator Sunsara Taylor repeated the absolute
requirement for the immediate end to the Bush regime’s reign of
tyranny. She agitated through the indictments of the Bush Crimes
Commission and a litany of human rights violations, from murder through
negligence in New Orleans, murder through illegitimate war, and Bush’s
lies about forewarning memos of impending loss of life before hurricane
Katrina, 9/11, and indications there were no WMD, ‘because Bush is a
liar!’ The crowd shouted this phrase in unison with Taylor over and
again.
Down
came the 40-foot symbol of the abomination of the Bush regime, then the
march on the White House began. The completely soaked, muddy crowd
lurched forward in a vehement elation of protest, and dissent to
unleash itself upon the Bush regime in the very heart of its death grip
on America.
Increasingly
the hallmarks of World Can’t Wait actions, mad dancing in the streets
moved in a steady procession along the perimeter of the White House
lawn, with drummers, bullhorns, and vocal rabblerousing. A truck led
the march with World Can’t Wait organizers riding in the back. Among
them was Finian Makepeace pounding his formidable kick drum, Spencer
the Speaker booming a hip-hop cadence, and Ayah carrying the audio
beauty and power of her voice through the march. All three came from
the Bay Area of California to drive out the Bush regime and holler
alongside the uproarious crew of Grandpas and Grannies, children, and
young adults. Flagrant hipsters, punks, hippies, cowboys, B-boys and
B-girls, all made a show of esprit de corps(flinging bodies on the
pavement in convulsions of revulsion at the Bush regime, screaming and
yelling ‘People rise up! Bush Step down’ and ‘There’s a killer in the
White House ( Drive his ass out!’
The
World Can’t Wait has advanced its campaign to drive out the Bush regime
yet another step, taking its demand that BUSH STEP DOWN right to the
White House. The protest stood out for its determination (including in
the face of horrible weather), and its conviction that the U.S. and the
world cannot be tortured (figuratively and literally) by this regime’s
global onslaught, speaking for millions here and around the world.
Politicians, voices of conscience, movie stars, and ordinary people
unifying to Drive Out the Bush Regime all demonstrate that a new
movement determined to march forth until success is strengthening and
reaching more broadly throughout society.
NEWS COVERAGE
Beginning list, more to come.
Washington Post, “Damp in Numbers,
but not in Fervor: A Few Thousand Protesters Brave the Rain to Deliver
Antiwar, Anti-Bush Message”, 2/4, C05. [click here]
ABC news, local Washington DC affiliate, video available.