Law and Disorder June 25, 2012

Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Hydraulic Fracturing, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, Uncategorized, War Resister

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Updates:

  • Occupy Chicago Tribune Getting Sued Under World Property Intellectual Organization
  • Julian Assange Applies For Political Asylum – Twitter @justleft / @wlcentral

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Austerity and Coalition Government in Greece

Last week we discussed the popularity of the Syriza Party, Greece’s skyrocketed unemployment and the huge military contracts Greece is locked into with France and Germany.  In part two of our interview with Greek-American National Lawyers Guild attorney Eric Poulos we discuss the assembling of the coalition government in Greece and the economic implication.

Attorney Eric Poulos:

  • New Democracy and Syriza’s the left wing coalition opposed to the bailout got the most votes. New Democracy got about 2 percent more which is the conservative center right party.
  • Syriza got 27 percent. The Social Democrats did terribly and got only 14 percent.
  • The fascist party the Golden Dawn unfortunately kept the same percentage. The one part that lost a lot of votes was the Communist Party.
  • Almost 40 percent of the voters did not vote. I think people are just worn out.
  • Everybody across the board has taken a 15 percent reduction in pay.
  • New Democracy Party will be appointed Prime Minister.
  • Fifty percent of the cops voted for the fascist party – Golden Dawn
  • Greece is a country that was occupied by Hitler and caused untold loss and devastation.
  • This coalition that ran Syriza is a coalition which is 12 or 13 different groups.
  • The election is incredible in that it changed nothing, it changed everything, because the same parties will be ruling.
  • The people of Greece continue to suffer, it doesn’t create one job. It doesn’t help to pay for one prescription.
  • It’s not just Greece, it’s Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland too.
  • I think the only hope is that they can hook up with other countries with united action to fight against the European Union policies.
  • There has to be an upsurge in the fight against the fascists in Greece.

Guest – Attorney Eric Poulos, writer and National Lawyers Guild member.

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Reverend Billy and the Spectra Pipeline Protest Event

The plans to bring a 30 inch gas pipeline through the West Village of Manhattan is on the fast track with the support of Mayor Bloomberg.  Spectra Pipeline is the company that will deliver the high pressure natural gas hydrofracked from the Marcellus Shale deposits. A heavily protested and contentious process itself. According to an expert radioactive waste this natural gas can contain radon 70 times above normal. Radon is a tasteless odorless gas created naturally during radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and radium. The EPA reports radon causes 21 thousand deaths from lung cancer each year. NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally

Reverend Billy:

  • Our basic mission statement . . .stop shopping children. Our basic mission statement has remain the same over 10 years now.  The project of Guiliani and Bloomberg to turn our great city into a suburb.
  • It was WBAI project, Cornell West, Chris Hedges, we sang and were the house choir. The jury of those great peers found Goldman Sachs guilty of robbing from us and charged them with 87 billion dollars I believe.
  • We sat down and lock arms in the old civil rights position. A nice circle of locked arms.
  • Out of the 15 that got arrested, I was about the 8th to leave the fold. I think that eight of them will be the Blankfein 8.  It’s a lifestyle change, if you’re really gonna go all the way with these . . . we weren’t blocking anybody. . it was symbolic.
  • Those ziplock handcuffs they have, they yank on them. In the precinct house an hour later your hand is purple and I had a numb thumb for six months.
  • Sometimes shopping is a chain store that buys sweat shop goods, and sometimes its our consumption of power. How do we heat? How do we use electricity?
  • That of course is decisive in terms of climate change, which has increasingly become everybody’s politics.
  • We’ve kept fracking out of upstate New York to some degree, but Cuomo is going to let it in to some degree.
  •  They want to come from the Far Rockaways with a pipe called the Constitution and they’re coming under the Hudson River and appearing into the Meat Packing district.
  • It’s mysterious Cheney was able to keep the report of what those chemicals are from the American people.
  • We have a 700 seat house there and we’re going to take the audience over two blocks to where the pipeline is to surface.
  • I don’t think the consumer society makes prosperity.
  • A lot of the communities in our country where people are watching television all day, eating sugar and fat and unable to operate, where the kids go into the pipeline of jail. . .needs the energetic compassion of change.
  • We’re becoming our own third world here, we need to pay attention to our communities. Get those Wall Street companies out of our communities and ask ourselves what do we have that makes value here?  Right under foot, right in my neighborhood.
  • It begins with living on less money, but begins with finding value in what we do with our lives.
  • You go up the counties where Cuomo is exploding their aquifers, this just makes it worse.
  • Some people are going to get a 100 thousand dollar check. It reminds me of the wrong person winning the lottery.
  • NO PIPELINE AT THE HIGHLINE – JULY 1, 2012 worship service and political rally

Guest – Reverend Billy, (Bill Talen) A student of the writers Charles Gaines and Kurt Vonnegut, Talen has staged experimental plays, published essays and poems in Philadelphia, New York and California. At Life On the Water, a theater in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Theater, Talen presented artists such as Spalding Gray, Mabou Mines, David Cale, B. D. Wong, Holly Hughes, William Yellow Robe, the Red Eye Collective, Reno, John Trudeau, and Danny Glover reciting the works of Langston Hughes.  This experience in producing led him to the confessional monologue.  After studying with the cleric Reverend Sidney Lanier, Talen invented “a new kind of American preacher.”  Lanier, the cousin of Tennessee Williams and subject of the work Night of the Iguana, was familiar with the re-staging of biblical narratives

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