by Allen Lang 6/02/06
In the past two months the Sensenbrenner Bill- Hr 4437 has been the headlines and debated on every news channel. Hr 4437 is part of the unprecedented and sweeping measures that represent the radical remaking of society that taken together as a package represent the beginning structures of fascism. This Bill would make 11 million immigrants felons and would make it illegal for people to provide them with assistance. The bill would not just detain immigrants without the right paper work and send them on a plane back home. This would be a world of horrors, concentration camps, people hurled into legal black holes, families torn apart and strengthen the police state apparatus.
A movement like no other in my lifetime erupted and poured into the streets in cities and small towns around the country. People living under the gun and risking the most, stepped out into the streets in massive numbers and compelled every force in society to respond to their demands. The movement captured the hearts and minds of the youth, who walked out of class, and in cases like in L.A walked out of classes day after day to protest the bill and what it represented.
Anthony Saltero was one of those youth. He was born in the U.S, as well as his mother. He was not affected by Hr 4437, but he could not stand by and stay silent. He and other classmates organized walkouts on April 28th to protest Hr 4437. Days later, as a result of school administration threatening, that he would face up three years in prison and his mother would be fined for his participation in the walk outs- Anthony Soltero went home and shot himself in the head with his stepfather’s rifle.
Let it be clear, we have no future under the Bush Regime and we will not stop until these criminals are driven from power!
This is serious. This is a matter of life and death. And more than that this has everything to do with the future of humanity and the planet we inhabit.
Last July World Can’t Wait issued a Call to Drive out the Bush Regime. It dared to speak an unspoken truth and stood out in its scope that presented a coherent program moving towards a fascistic society. Is this still not the case?
Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
Recently news has been breaking about revelations coming out that on November 19, 2005, U.S. Marines stormed into the village of Haditha and murdered 24 people in cold blood. U.S Marines went door to door, from one house to the next and they killed people, men, women and children, execution style- point blank to the head. They dragged four men into a closet and they shot them.
The U.S has carried out a doctrine of preemptive war that disregards any International treaties, human right laws and now has made serious threats of using nuclear weapons on Iran.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it.
Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
Since the call was written there have been more and more photos of disfigured corpses and human bodies stretched to their limits, an uncovered network of prisoners flown across the globe to torture chambers and doctors who have been employed to develop and administer the most brutal forms of mental and physical punishment.
Where is the opposition to this in the halls of power? Not from a Democrat, but from Senator John McCain. This was portrayed as McCain taking a stand against torture, this was going to limit Bush’s ability to torture people. What was the real deal with this? It actually made things worse. Michael Ratner, President of CCR, said, ‘It makes three points and I’ll paraphrase. First, speaking as the president, ‘My authority as commander in chief allows me to do whatever I think is necessary in the war on terror including use torture. Second, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by Congress. Third, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by the courts.’ There it is. There you have it. That boring stuff I learned as a junior high school student about checks and balances or about limited law or about authority under law – out the window. Gone.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it.
Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
The Patriot Act, a measure introduced to Congress that gives the U.S government unprecedented power to spy, obtain information, and detain people has been widely opposed and nearly 400 city governments as well as seven state legislatures have passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act. Since the Call has been produced the Patriot Act has been voted permanent- not temporary, not a law that is enforced when we are war, but permanent.
‘Like all compromises, it includes provisions that are not supported by everyone in this body. However, Democratic and Republican members of the Judiciary Committee came together in a spirit of cooperation and compromise to agree on this bill, and I strongly support it,’ said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it. More and more we are seeing that there is clear and widening gap between people’s convictions and the agenda of the Democrat Party leadership.
Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
This past week in Wisconsin a state law was passed that mandates that all public schools teach abstinence as the preferred behavior for unmarried people. This law, signed by the state’s Democrat Governor, enforces a Christian fundamentalist view on sex, where women’s role is to be breeders, and means students will not learn how to protect themselves from STD’s and unwanted pregnancy.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it.
Your government suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
The United States emitted more greenhouse gases in 2004 than at any time in history, confirming its status as the world’s biggest polluter. We are getting closer and closer to the point of no return where irreversible damage will cause large parts of the earth to be sunk under water. As opposed to working overtime to change a dire situation, the Bush Regime has barreled ahead and have outright suppressed scientists, censored and fabricated their research and straight up silenced them.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it.
Your government is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.
Since the Call was written there has been a decision to refuse over the counter sales of Plan B emergency contraception, or the morning after pill. The Bush appointed FDA commissioner ignored not only scientific fact but the opinions of FDA top officials.
Recently is has been discovered that, Dr. Steven Galson and Dr. Janet Woodcock, both career scientists and top FDA officials, were completely excluded from the decision-making process. Both had recommended, based on the actual scientific evidence that Plan B was perfectly safe to sell without a prescription. In a completely unprecedented move, the decision was made by then FDA commissioner Lester Crawford without listening to or consulting other FDA officials.
In her book How The Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, Cristina Page who will be speaking Friday, documents how ‘there is not one pro-life group in the United States that supports the use of birth control’.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it. These are not abstract numbers or laws, there are real lives at stake.
Your government enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.
Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Howard Dean went on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, a show whose agenda is promoting a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism to millions of viewers and advocating this as government policy. The fact that Dean went on this show as a friendly guest already says much about the Democrats’ strategy of finding common ground with religious fanatics. But his words on the show were even worse.
The Democratic Party platform from 2004 says that marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s what it says.
This is real, this is permanent and it will only get worse unless a movement of millions of people stop it.
What) the fuck) is going on in this country? Why is this happening? Can we get out of this situation? How can we get out of this situation? Is it too late? Is it not affecting people bad enough? Do people know this?
To quote from the film The Matrix ‘These are the questions that drive us, these are the questions that brought you here today.’
There was a decision to bar over the counter sales of Plan B emergency contraception. There are politicians with a lot of grass root support, attempting to pass laws allowing clerks to refuse selling birth control pills on the basis of religious beliefs.
When you hear that do you think of women being stamped as incubators and the state holding televised executions of doctors who provide abortions? Or do you think oh that is just South Dakota, that won’t overturn Roe it would just cause people to revolt and they wouldn’t take out birth control that is too extreme?
Major shifts in the global economy are causing massive dislocation and upheaval in people’s lives, work, and culture, moving populations around the word and creating a great amount of instability. Many are searching for answers and looking for something solid to hold on to in the face of all this. Bush has given an immense amount of backing, politically and financially, to depraved religious leaders and their programs that influence millions of people. There is much to be said on this and we will hear about this when Esther Kaplan speaks Tuesday night. We will talk more on the difference between practicing religion and theocracy and how there are different views in Christianity; the need to have a movement of various progressive religious forces and how that is different than the hateful brand of theocracy that guides Bush.
But, the truth of the matter is there is a hardcore base of Christian fundamentalists who view overturning abortion and contraception as a benchmark and a necessary step to save a nation from sin. This is not a lunatic fringe. Judge Roberts and Alito breezed into the Supreme Court. Alito is a Christian Ayatolla who clearly stated that he will seek to overturn abortion and he has disagreements with the Warren Court decisions- one of them being the desegregation of public schools. This is highest level of law. When Bush was reelected in 2004 far right strategist Richard Viguerie said, ‘Now comes the revolution, if you don’t implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?’ If by implement a conservative agenda he means ram a fascist program down our throats, then yes, this is their time.
And even though a majority of Americans consider themselves pro- Choice you couldn’t tell that watching the news on T.V. That is invisible and will only get worse unless millions of people take to the streets to make it known; that this is unacceptable, that hateful religion doctrine cannot determine the role women play in society, that this regime does not represent us and we will drive it out. This is what needs to happen October 5th.
I want to move to the situation of the campuses. Let’s go back to Alito. Alitio graduated from Princeton. In reflecting on his college years Alito said ‘Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. And I saw some very smart people behaving irresponsibly’. I urge everyone here, on October 5th, behave VERY irresponsibly.
I want to contrast that with an excerpt of an essay written by a member of Vet for Peace and alumni of Princeton:
‘Then, in the spring of 70, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger completely abandoned law and decency and invaded Cambodia. Kent State followed. And Jackson State (How many remember that?). The campus reacted as if it had been punched in the stomach. Seven thousand people came together at Jadwin Field House to consider how a responsible academic community should react to blatant, criminal immorality on the part of its government. We decided by acclimation: the university would be closed. We were on strike. It was surely Princeton’s finest hour and we knew it. There was a lump of pride in our throats, a sense of history in our hearts.
Shortly after, in one of the plush locker rooms in Jadwin, the Princeton lacrosse team met without coaches. We argued, discussed, agonized and in the end about half of us decided we could not in good conscience continue to play this game while Nixon rampaged, while so many innocent people died and while the university was on strike. It is difficult to explain to anyone who has not played varsity athletics the difficulty of this decision, but to a young jock, it meant a lot. ‘
In building this some asked why a student training instead of just a training? Why concentrate on students and the campuses so much?
Because of stories like the one I just read from Princeton. Because students are open and being exposed to new ideas and ferment and resistance on campuses can spearhead a lot of the intellectual debate and effect the political direction of the country. The movement to Drive out the Bush Regime needs to take form in the elite and nationally prominent universities where it will make a difference if students and professors going into print demanding that the regime go. We’ve seen at campuses like M.I.T, which is the top Science and engineering school in the country, how much the military and government has it’s claws sunk into that university, how they have think tanks that research and perfect their death machine and how much of a difference it would make if that campus publicly spoke out against the Bush Regime and refused to be the generation that creates the next Doomsday device.
And because there are millions of us; on campuses and classrooms, at concerts and in libraries. We are recruited in their armies and locked in their prisons. Because we will argue for what is right and true late into the night and carry a banner of resistance that could bring the nation to a halt. People who are not content with simple answers and who challenge the old guard. People who may not have a lot of money, but have a lot of creativity, daringness, energy and passion. Historically students have carved out new paths and blazed new trails. We could be the generation that drives out the sitting regime in the world’s only Superpower. Or we could inherit a world beyond our greatest nightmares. Or at the rate we are going, there might not be much of a world to inherit.
We have to challenge people on the basis of what is true and what is right. Are you for torture or are you against it? Are you against the occupation of Iraq? You are- than why would you say the only way to stop it is getting Democrats who voted for and still support the war in Iraq- elected into office?
Yes there is another way other than official politics to really change all of this madness and destruction.
This is the argument we must make and we have to win people to seeing that our actions in the streets on October 5th will be decisive. This will be key in making this Summer a World Can’t Wait Summer and whether or not October 5th is going to be something really different than what has existed in the past, whether or not we are going to transform the political terrain with a day that sends shockwaves across the world.
Let’s look at some of what we hear and how you should oppose the policies of the Bush Administration. ‘We shouldn’t torture people because it creates more terrorists and risks our safety. The war in Iraq is wrong because it is leaving us more open to other terrorist attacks. This administration is failing in improving national security. I’m against the war, but I think the government should be able to obtain people’s information because it will make our nation safer. We need military guards in every major bus terminal because it will make people feel safer.’
Do you feel safe now that you know the president can crush a 10 year old’s testicles if he wants to? Do you feel safe now that the U.S military can rape young Iraqi girls in front of their family? Is your safety worth a Pakistani man being hung from a ceiling and being slashed with a razor once a week for three years?
To quote former U.K ambassador Craig Murray, ‘I would rather die than have someone tortured for my safety.’
We just had to add on the guidelines for this training how to deal with random bag searches at the subway. That the NYPD can search people’s bag at random on the train and they do it all the time. What kind of fucking world are we living in where people have to include on their Training Guidelines, how to deal with random bag searches. We have said this is historic because it is the first World Can’t Wait Summer training, but it may be the last summer training, depending on what we do and what happens on October 5th. I am serious. There are people in Germany who remember the last demonstration they went to, to protest Hitler. The concentration camp in Auschwitz was the size of Manhattan. These people think they are on a mission from God. The constitution was written by mortals, how does that stack up against their Bible? No we are not at a point of full on fascism, no we haven’t killed 6 million people yet and no Bush is not the same as Hitler, but the similarities are way too close to remain silent and the similarities are way too close to nitpick about the exact wording for 3 months before someone decides to send it out over their e-list.
But what is also different is the stakes we face. Playwright Harold Pinter had this to say; “The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide. I give my full support to the Call to Drive out the Bush Regime.”
But we really have to go out into the world and obliterate the logic that holds people back and we have to struggle for people to face reality and mobilize to be in the streets on October 5th. We shouldn’t intend to be assholes, but there are going to be people out there who think we are assholes and I’m perfectly alright with that.
This is what we have to hammer at all through this training: What are we saying to people? We’ve been emailing the Gay Straight Alliance Group on campus for weeks now and they invite us to speak at their meeting. What do we have to say to them? Why do they need to mobilize everyone they know to be in the streets on October 5th and cause a lot of ruckus that day?
When you are in a room of people cheering because they’ve opened a women’s center on campus, who is going to be the person who stands up on a chair and just says, ‘This situation is fucked. I am all for women’s centers and we should have had one for years, but we cannot plod along as if the ground isn’t being ripped up from under our feet, as if abortion isn’t hanging by a thread, we cannot deny the truth no matter how frightening it is, at this point if we do not mobilize to shut this campus down and join with thousands of others in the streets to reject this administration’s agenda and drive these people out on October 5th than whatever gains we have made will be crushed by this regime’. And people might have to risk getting the center closed down for taking this stand and we will mobilize people to defend it, but campuses do not exist in a bubble, New York does not exist in a bubble, San Francisco does not exist in a bubble- this will be a country on lock down. Let’s not make people jump through hoops to be part of this movement, but people are going to have to take some risks and we have to convince them that these are risks worth taking.
Through bold actions and compelling arguments we need shake things up on campus and pierce through a lot of the politics as usual and shatter the hum-drum ‘ I’ll wait- and see’ attitude. I am not going to get into specifics, but during the course of this training we are going to have to brainstorm and concretize why people have to be on a mission to make October 5th a day that marks a new level of resistance against the regime and what that is going to look like. We need plans, but we need more than just plans.
We need your ideas and voices. We have to step back and understand the sweeping changes, the mood of people, the mood of our peers, the basis for this radical change and from that we need a flood of ideas. We need people to create a national poster- an idea of what that is going to look like and who can design it. We need to be looking at this as a springboard into the summer. July 4th we want to have block parties with bands playing in towns across the country. There needs to be one in New York and people should have an eye toward organizing that- researching bands, contacting bands, if we run across a lawyer doing outreach maybe he could get the permit.
World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime is organizing a bus tour to go through the contested areas of South Dakota, New Orleans, creationist museums and places like Dover, Pa where religious fanatics tried to introduce intelligent design into public schools. This training is not just a student thing or a New York thing; it is people taking responsibility for this whole movement and needs to be forging a core of leaders who are going to be charged with a historic mission to turn the tide, to blaze across this country, leaving behind a lot of controversy and organizers, all building up to October 5th.
This will not be easy. We approaching the 2006 elections and even if voting is not something you are into or something your circle of friends are not talking about, the political terms that it will create will be demobilizing and paralyzing. Sometimes it might feel like a long stretch of yellow lights for miles and you are just keeping your head above water. We have to be looking for those openings that are going to shoot us forward and get us in a whole different ballpark. Maybe Bush is speaking the next town over tomorrow. We have to have the orientation that sometimes it might be worth dropping everything you are working on and jump at a chance to propel this movement forward and disrupt him.
We do have to confront something big here. People are having their dreams and ability to change the world being ripped up in front of them by a group of criminals who have control over the military, media, courts, congress and major religious institutions.
This will not be easy for the Bush Regime either. It’s not as if their gliding along on some sailboat to fascist land. They are putting all of their chips on the table and everything isn’t turning out how they expected. What do I mean by this? One word: Iraq. People like Abu Ghairab commander General Karpinsky blowing the whistle on crimes of the Bush Regime, ex- C.I.A analysts like Ray McGovern confronting Rumsfeld with his lies, a whole movement of military families speaking out against the war, top intellectuals and artists calling for impeachment. There is a lot riding on their ability to wrap up the Middle East, to overturn abortion, to cement the architecture of a police state and carry through on a lot of what they have unleashed in the world.
But if their crimes against humanity and radical remake of society are met with our acquiescence- then regardless of who wins in either election the Bush Agenda will remain intact and legitimized. This is not hype or a ploy to get people involved in organizing for October 5th. Really do the research, get into what these politicians are saying and deal with the reality we are facing. The people’s will, their anger and aspirations, will not be expressed in the elections. Dean, Clinton and Conyers have all gone on record to rule out the idea of impeachment.
We must have a plan and a vision and fight to fulfill that plan, but we are stepping out into the unknown. There are many people agonizing, they are peeking their head over the cliff and they are standing at the edge. We have to dive into the unknown and we have to be up for a wild ride.
This is the 21st century. This is a world at the crossroads being violently ripped apart. Many in our generation have no hope for the future we face. Some are filling stadiums to pledge their obedience and allegiance to Christ and Holy War. Than there are those who are shocked and disgusted by the actions the government is committing in their name. Those who are questioning and have a sense that something is wrong, but not quite sure.
With all of this I have nine words to say them: The World Can’t Wait- Drive Out the Bush Regime.