Below is a small and initial sampling of media coverage of protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Articles citing World Can’t Wait national direction Debra Sweet, and advisory board member Sunsara Taylor have appeared in the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, USA Today, and other media. Newspapers from coast to coast, and overseas, have written and told of the protests -and thought they often miss or distort the significance of what is taking place in Denver, some glimmers of the truth are getting out.
As Sunsara Taylor was quoted saying in U.S.A. Today, “The Democrats own the war in Iraq as much as the Republicans do at this point,” said Sunsara Taylor, a writer for the newspaper Revolution.”
Fizzling protests may be due to Obama
Ryan Sabalow
Originally published 06:25 p.m., August 25, 2008
Updated 06:25 p.m., August 25, 2008
Photo by Barry Gutierrez
Muller, a volunteer from Safford, VA., photographs a mounted Police
patrol in front of the Convention Center in Denver, Colo. Monday Aug.
25 2008.
Sunsara Taylor’s speech today at Civic Center in downtown Denver was
fiery and filled with passion.
An organizer with the Revolutionary Communist Party, she railed on
capitalism and urged her brethren to stand up for the impoverished and
oppressed, while calling for an immediate end to the war in Iraq.
Too bad there were only a smattering of people listening to the
impassioned New York native.
Protesters, like Taylor, so far at the Democratic National
Convention seem outnumbered by the police sent to keep them in check
and the reporters out covering any would-be ruckus.
And many of the protesters point to Barack Obama for the sparse
turnout.
Taylor said too many of her peers have erroneously bought into the
misconception that Obama would stop the war in Iraq and offer a
progressive change in Washington.
“A lot of people are confused right now,” she said, adding that the
massive police presence in town might have also kept many away.
Denver estimates its force of 1,500 police has doubled for the
convention.
Lounging with his head’s on his friend’s leg under shade trees
nearby in the park, Dave Engelkenjohn, 21, of St. Louis, echoed Taylor.
“I think people have latched on to Barack Obama as this great hope,”
he said. “I think people have been swayed that just being black that
means he’s on our side.”
Planned protests have so far seemed to fizzle, aside from a handful
of marches Sunday that drew a few hundred people and only briefly
snarling traffic on a few downtown streets.
Today, a Re-create 68 protest of the U.S. Mint building was a dud.
Although some 70 protesters half-heartedly arrived claiming they
were trying to levitate the building, the much-touted event drew more
reporters and police on horseback than activists.
The only real excitement came when Michelle Malkin, a conservative
syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator, arrived, and her body
guard got in a shoving match with a few demonstrators.
Chris Lugo, a 38-year-old small-business owner from Nashville,
Tenn., wasn’t one of them.
He stood toward the end of the line, mostly watching the smattering
of protesters chant and hold their arms high.
He said that with so many progressive Democrats like U.S. Rep.
Dennis Kucinich and Jim Hightower uniting for Obama, it’s taken much of
the pizazz out of many would-be activists’ protests plans.
“I think it’s going to be a lot bigger at the RNC (Republican
National Convention), honestly,” he said.
Denver Freedom March Draws Hundreds, Demanding Justice for
Political Prisoners
By Alex
Kane
August 25, 2008 | Posted in IndyBlog
| Email this article
DENVER,
CO-Hundreds of demonstrators marched from Civic Center Park to the
Federal Courthouse today, demanding an end to racial profiling, police
brutality and freedom for political prisoners.
Around 10am at Civic Center Park, the rally was kicked off with a
display of mock Guantanamo jump-suits, signs demanding freedom for the Cuban Five and Leonard Peltier, and speakers
ranging from Jenny Esquiveo, spokesperson for Eric McDavid,
an environmental activist sentenced to around twenty years for supposed
plans to damage property, to King Downing of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). A hip-hop group also performed in support of
political prisoners.
Barack Obama and the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, were
denounced as calls to free Mumia
Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners echoed throughout the
park.
“None of the parties have adequately addressed the [political
prisoners] issue,” says King Downing, national coordinator of the ACLU
Campaign to End Racial Profiling, in an interview.
After the rally ended, the “Freedom March”
from the park to the Federal Courthouse convened, with demonstrators
chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” and “This is what a police state
looks like,” in response to the squadron of riot police on horseback
and foot following the demonstrators.
According to members of Cop Watch on hand, a grassroots organization
that demands accountability for police actions, no arrests were made.
But the police successfully moved demonstrators off of the streets onto
the sidewalk, so “buses could get through,” one police officer from
Aurora, Colo., said.
“I’m here ” to help push home the point that the United States has
political prisoners, explicitly political prisoners, and has a lot of
them,” says
Ward Churchill, prominent American Indian Movement activist,
writer, and former professor at the University of Colorado.
“The Democrats, Obama, Biden ” are vying for ascendancy to have
control over a system that creates [prison] conditions ” that are
endemic [systematically] ” Have you ever heard of someone campaigning
for the release of political prisoners? I haven’t,” he added.
Right outside the Federal Courthouse, activists from World Can’t Wait,
an antiwar organization, in orange jump-suits knelt together with hoods
over their heads, to draw attention to the plight of prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay. Other activists from World Can’t Wait interrupted the
flow of the rally, as they “dragged” a “terrorist” to get
water-boarded, in a mock trial of what actual water-boarding is like.
Sunsara Taylor,
an activist within the Revolutionary Communist Party, a writer and a
co-founder of World Can’t Wait, gave an impassioned impromptu speech to
loud cries of approval.
“The Democrats are committing war crimes too,” she says. “It doesn’t
matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat ” [Obama] is a new face on
the same brutal and bloody empire.”
The program at the courthouse included speeches from Fred Hampton
Jr., of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee, Natsu Saito, a
spokesperson for the Cuban Five, and Pamele Africa of the MOVE
organization.
A recording of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a current prisoner on death-row, was
played as well.
“Here, politicians take the label of “democrat,” hire the cops to
beat you, hire the media to slander you, so that they can send your
children to war for oil pipelines, or to protect foreign despots and
princes,” Jamal said in the message.
JOHNSON: Police presence massive, overwhelming
By Bill Johnson
Originally published 08:25 p.m., August 26, 2008
Updated 08:25 p.m., August 26, 2008
Carlo Garcia should have never gone to jail on Tuesday. Neither
should have Alicia Forrest, though she should have known the cops
always come for those who question, even legitimately, why they are
arresting someone else.
The odd thing is, they weren’t at first going to arrest Alicia
Forrest, even after one officer dropped her right in the park grass
with his baton. She had gotten up and was talking with reporters when
suddenly she was hauled away.
An even stranger thing is that now, three days into convention-week
demonstrations and protests, the number of people so far arrested
wouldn’t fill much more than a couple sheriff’s buses.
Four years ago, with the Republicans in New York, the number of
people hauled off to jail on the first day was larger than the
population of many Eastern Plains towns.
I spent most of Tuesday trying to understand this difference.
On nomination night four years ago, the largest number of police
officers visible on the Manhattan streets in one place was maybe six.
Another six might be a full city block away.
With $50 million to spend on security, Denver, it seems, has hired
every cop in Colorado – many stationed in Civic Center Park. This is
fine if you are a delegate or visiting celebrity to this fine city; you
could fairly pin your money in your hair and not be bothered.
But it is pretty much your backside if you have decided to spend the
week protesting or demonstrating anything.
I have watched this dance to date.
Protesters gather and pick up their signs in Civic Center. Police
officers, almost all of them in riot helmets and full armor, emerge
from the shadows of the trees and move along the sidelines of the park
with them.
Cheers, chanting and already loud guys on megaphones draw them
closer. Other police teams soon emerge. Depending on the level of the
shouting, chanting and cheering, mounted policemen arrive.
This is how Carlo Garcia went to jail. He was shouting at a group of
gay hating and baiting bigots who’d taken up the demonstration spot he
and his group had long ago secured a permit from the city to occupy.
Rather than go after the gay hating and baiting knuckleheads, the
riot cops came for Carlo Garcia. Alicia Forrest should have never
attempted to show them the error of their ways.
When Glenn Spagnuolo of the Re-create 68 group arrived with a host
of media to explain his version of what had happened Monday night, in
which some 100 people were arrested, we were surrounded at police
headquarters by, you guessed it, yet another swarm of police officers
in riot gear.
Trust me, it makes you shake a little. All you can think is that you
are just doing your job.
Had I weeks ago thought of participating in a demonstration, I would
have turned and walked home the minute I arrived at the Civic Center
park, seen the flotillas of slow-driving police SUVs with riot
policemen hanging off the sides.
I would have looked at the dark figures beneath the trees, the
others on bicycles, motorcycles and on horseback. Sneeze wrong and I
could be in jail.
“It is about keeping people away,” Glenn Spagnuolo said after his
press conference, during which he said his group will no longer
negotiate with police because after Monday, “they cannot be trusted.”
“I asked my dad to come down and walk with me,” he said, “and he
refused, saying he’d seen all the police officers, that getting
arrested is a young man’s game, one he didn’t need.
“I do it for my conscience,” he said of the sparse number of
protesters. “I don’t need a crowd with me. But I’ll tell you, I am very
proud of the people who have shown the courage to come out and march.
They should be applauded. Instead, they are being arrested.”
Sunsara Taylor, a spokesperson for the World Can’t Wait group who
was in the park Tuesday when the midday arrests occurred, voiced what
everyone who was there agreed upon: The arrests were unneeded.
“They’re here to scare us,” she said. “What they are doing, it is
working.”
Indeed, it is.
It was just after 4 p.m. when I pulled my bicycle up to the Food Not
Bombs tables in Civic Center where workers everyday feed the homeless.
It was the trigger point of Monday’s mass arrests.
A few yards away, a squad of riot police stood. You could
practically bathe in the unease.
God bless America.
Please.
VIDEO: ABC News video from website (nighttime, cops and youth face off)
http://abcnews.go.com/video/
VIDEO: Ron Kovic entire speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
VIDEO: Cindy Sheehan most of her speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
SOME VIDEO Indybay in Bay Arera keeps adding documentation:
http://www.indybay.org/
VIDEO Rocky Mtn News video of Code Pink woman being struck, then grabbed up by cops
http://www.rockymountainnews.
PRINT only:
Xinhua site
http://news.xinhuanet.com/
Peoples Daily in China
http://english.people.com.cn/
MSNBC website column sneering at protest numbers
http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.
Michael Moore blog covering daily: for example (see links inside blog)
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
SF Chronicle: 1 snide column, a repeat AP story:
Fear grips immigrants after Miss. plant
raid
day after the largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S.
history, Elizabeth Alegria was too scared to send her son to school and
worried about when she’d see her husband again.
Nearly 600 immigrants
suspected of being in the country illegally were detained, creating
panic among dozens of families in this small southern Mississippi town.
Alegria,
26, a Mexican immigrant, was working at the Howard Industries
transformer plant Monday when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agents stormed in. When they found out she has two sons, ages 4 and 9,
she was fitted with a bracelet and told to appear in federal court next
month. But her husband, Andres, wasn’t so lucky.
“I’m very
traumatized because I don’t know if they are going to let my husband go
and when I will see him,” Alegria said through a translator Tuesday as
she returned to the Howard Industries parking lot to retrieve her sport
utility vehicle.
The superintendent of the county school district said
about half of approximately 160 Hispanic students were absent Tuesday.
Roberto
Velez, pastor at Iglesia Cristiana Peniel, where an estimated 30 to 40
percent of the 200 parishioners were caught up in the raid, said
parents were afraid immigration officials would take them.
“They didn’t send their kids to school today,” he said.
“How scared is that?”
One
worker caught in Monday’s sweep at the plant said fellow workers
applauded as immigrants were taken into custody. Federal officials said
a tip from a union member prompted them to start investigating several
years ago.
Fabiola Pena, 21, cradled her 2-year-old daughter as
she described a chaotic scene at the plant as the raid began, followed
by clapping.
“I was crying the whole time. I didn’t know what to
do,” Pena said. “We didn’t know what was happening because everyone
started running. Some people thought it was a bomb but then we figured
out it was immigration.”
About 100 of the 595 detained workers
were released for humanitarian reasons, many of them mothers who were
fitted with electronic monitoring bracelets and allowed to go home to
their children, officials said.
About 475 other workers were
transferred to an ICE facility in Jena, La. Nine who were under 18 were
transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
John
Foxworth, an attorney representing some of the immigrants, said eight
appeared in federal court in Hattiesburg on Tuesday because they face
criminal charges for allegedly using false Social Security and
residency identification.
He said the raid was traumatic for families.
“There
was no communication, an immediate loss of any kind of news and a lack
of understanding of what’s happening to their loved ones,” he said. “A
complete and utter feeling of helplessness.”
Those detained were
from Brazil, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama,
and Peru, said Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman.
“We have
kids without dads and pregnant mothers who got their husbands taken
away,” said Velez’s son, Robert, youth pastor at the church. “It was
like a horror story. They got handled like they were criminals.”
Howard
Industries is in Mississippi’s Pine Belt region, known for commercial
timber growth and chicken processing plants. The tech company produces
dozens of products ranging from electrical transformers to medical
supplies, according to its Web site.
Gonzalez said agents had
executed search warrants at both the plant and the company headquarters
in nearby Ellisville. She said no company executives had been detained,
but this was an “ongoing investigation and yesterday’s action was just
the first part.”
A woman at the Ellisville headquarters told The
Associated Press on Tuesday that no one was available to answer
questions.
In
a statement to the Laurel Leader-Call newspaper, Howard Industries said
the company “runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration
status of all applicants for its jobs.”
Gov. Haley Barbour
recently signed a law requiring Mississippi employers to use a U.S.
Homeland Security system to check new workers’ immigration status.
The
law took effect July 1 for businesses with state contracts and takes
effect Jan. 1 for other businesses. Mississippi lawmakers once used
laptops made by Howard Industries, but it’s not clear whether the
company has current state contracts.
Under the law, a company
found guilty of employing illegal immigrants could lose public
contracts for three years and the right to do business in Mississippi
for a year.
The law also makes it a felony for an illegal
immigrant to accept a job in Mississippi. A message was left with the
district attorney’s office after hours seeking comment on whether he
would use the law to bring state charges against Howard Industries or
the workers.
The Mississippi raid is one of several nationwide in
recent years.
On
May 12, federal immigration officials swept into Agriprocessors, the
nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, in Iowa. Nearly 400 workers
were detained and dozens of fraudulent permanent resident alien cards
were seized from the plant’s human resources department, according to
court records. In December 2006, 1,297 were arrested at Swift
meatpacking plants in Nebraska and five other states.
13 anti-abortion protesters arrested
By COLLEEN SLEVIN – 11
hours ago
DENVER (AP) – Thirteen anti-abortion activists, including Operation
Rescue founder Randall Terry, were arrested Tuesday during an
orchestrated demonstration in which they blocked a security gate near
the site of the Democratic National Convention.
Terry shouted
“Don’t vote for Obama” as he was led to waiting sheriff’s van, his
hands held together with blue plastic handcuffs. The arrested,
including a 78-year-old priest in a black cassock, stood waiting in
single file to get into the vans, each accompanied by two police
officers. About 50 officers dressed in riot gear stood guard and
processed the protesters while people, some with passes to get into the
convention, walked by.
At about the same time at the other end of
downtown, about a dozen anti-abortion demonstrators rallied outside the
Sheraton Hotel, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Hillary
Clinton were speaking at a luncheon sponsored by Emily’s List, a group
that supports women candidates. One demonstrator held a poster with
graphic images and said, “Barack Obama change this.”
Earlier
Tuesday, a group of about 50 anti-abortion activists unfurled a huge
sign on a mesa west of Denver equating the Democratic National
Convention with abortion, but later hiked back up to remove it at the
request of authorities. County officials haven’t decided whether to
issue any citations. The sign was displayed for about three hours and
group president Steve Curtis said the letters were visible from west
Denver about 10 miles away.
Before the convention, Terry met with Denver police and then
publicly announced he planned to be arrested.
When
Terry and about three dozen protesters arrived at a designated corner,
a dozen police were waiting on the opposite corner. Prostesters began
to recite the rosary.
Terry then announced the plan. He told the
group they were going to walk down the block to the DNC gate, sit down
in the street and pray. He said the police would warn protesters three
times that they would be arrested. Anyone who wanted to leave should do
so after the third warning, he said.
He told the few children in the group to remain standing to the
side, holding signs.
“You’ll be part of a legal protest that may someday be covered in
the history books,” he said.
When
the protesters first gathered at the gate, people with convention
passes were able squeeze behind them to get through. When protesters
sat down in the street, Terry asked an aide for the “red phone,” a cell
phone he used to call police. He could be heard saying “Lieutenant,
we’re here at the gate.”
Then some of the protesters moved closer
to the gate, blocking it. Secret Service officers shut it and directed
convention-goers to another gate. Protesters sang a Catholic hymn,
“Salve Regina.” They said one Hail Mary for the police officers before
a lieutenant approached them. Reading from a card, he cited the city
ordinance they were violating and warned them they would have to leave
or be arrested.
DNC Protest Crowd Much Lower Than Expected
Rocks, other potential weapons helped spark police action
Antiwar Activists Take to the Streets to “Defend Denver”
DNC Protests: CodePink protester is slammed to the ground by police in Denver
Code Pink protester still in jail after skirmish
Protesters march for immigrant rights
Final Day of DNC: Small, but Determined, Protesters Continue with Antiwar Message
ABC reporter who got busted – story here, I think there was video on ABC website
AP short, was picked up several places