Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Anti-Drone Action: Code Pink Delegation to Pakistan
Two weeks ago a delegation of 40 members from Code Pink traveled to Pakistan protesting US drone strikes. The group is also visiting families of those injured or killed by drones and to encourage relations amid the broader Muslim world. The delegation is made up of students, doctors, veterans, retirees and artists. Recently the group set out on a massive anti-drone march in Waziristan where drones have killed many civilians. In one statistic, within two years more than 90 drone attacks have killed 5000 innocent Pakistanis. We get an update on the delegation from Code Pink member Rae Abileah. Rae is the co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace. She is also a founding member of Young Jewish Proud, the youth wing of Jewish Voice for Peace. Rae has visited Israel and the West Bank several times, and has traveled to Gaza and Iran.
Rae Abileah:
- I’m the co-director of Code Pink nationally. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink has been doing work on drones for the past year and a half. She recently wrote a book Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control
- She partnered with PTI, the Pakistani Political Party and their leader and a well known lawyer for drone victims.
- They got this delegation rolling and ended up with 35 Americans in Islamabad setting out on this caravan to march to a place where really in the past decade no Americans have gone to.
- They put their bodies on the line and joined these Pakistanis going on this march.
- People in Waziristan are living with drones overhead, they don’t know when the next attack is going to come.
- It started out as a car caravan with more than 100 vehicles, they drove for hours.
- The goal was to get to south Waziristan the epicenter of the US drone attacks.
- President Obama has declared all young men in Pakistan to be potential militants. It gives the green light to shooting civilians.
- These soldiers are sitting there all day looking at the screen as if its a video game.
- These military pilots are going to work all day, pressing buttons that kill people thousands of miles away and going home to their dinner table in Vegas at night.
- It’s a primary tool for attracting militants to join the Taliban.
- We’re continuing to build grassroots support to oppose Obama’s drone program.
- During the delegation we were actually able to deliver thousands of signatures collected on a stop drones petition directly to Obama at one of his fundraisers in San Francisco.
- In Congress there’s also a Drones Caucaus, the leaders such as Bill Buck McKeon are taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from drone manufacturers.
- Soda Stream is manufactured in an illegal settlement in the occupied territories.
Guest – Rae Abileah, co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace and is a co-organizer of Occupy AIPAC, Stolen Beauty boycott of Ahava cosmetics, and Women Occupy. Rae is a contributing author to 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military; Sisters Singing: Incantations, Blessings, Chants, Prayers, Art and Sacred Stories by Women; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; and Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. She lives in San Francisco, CA.
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11 Years of War In Afghanistan
This month marks 11 years since the colonial war in Afghanistan was launched. Operation Enduring Freedom armed forces include the United States, the UK, Australia and the Afghan United Front. We’ve talked with past guests about how multi-national corporations are involved to integrate Afghanistan into the global system by building schools and infrastructure. We’ve also talked about the strategic energy alliances forming between Russia and China on one side and how three Caspian Sea oil companies continue to lock the US in to the war.
Phyllis Bennis:
- This already the longest war in history.
- We hear from President Obama that within the year 2014 combat troops will be withdrawn.
- We’re hearing new calls from different forces including most recently the Secretary General of NATO indicating there was a possibility that NATO may pull out its troops earlier then the end of 2014 because of the insider killings.
- The only figures we have began in 2007, they began counting some confirmed deaths. About 13 thousand Afghan civilians only since 2007.
- The US is there in two ways, the US has a commander happens to be the NATO commander. Other US troops are there separately. The US has almost 70 thousand troops there now, NATO has 40 thousand other troops and there are about 90 thousand US paid contractors.
- US troop casualties: Even that now is unclear.
- Last week a number of press outlets reported the 2000th US military casualty.
- Young people in Afghanistan join the military for the same reasons young people in the United States join the military, because they’re desperate for a job.
- Remember a couple of weeks ago 9 Afghan women and little girls were killed gathering wood before dawn to build a fire, to make breakfast.
- The Pentagon said, oh sorry, and somehow think that its going to make it ok.
- Add to that the lack of cultural sensitivity, the lack of language training so there’s no sense from soldiers on the ground that they have any idea what this culture is about, who these people are.
- Afghanistan is about 25 million people, the vast majority don’t live in the cities. They live in tiny hamlets and small towns, small villages, very scattered.
- What we’re seeing is an expansion of the global war on terror.
- There is an anti-war movement it’s just not as visible as we’ve seen in earlier times.
- That’s the hardest part of our work, its not building an anti-war movement, its making our government take into account the opinions of not only a movement but the American people.
- Understanding the Palestinian Israeli Conflict.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute For Policy Studies. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement. She continues to serve as an adviser to several top UN officials on Middle East and UN democratization issues.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Russell Tribunal on Palestine
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is holding its fourth and last session in New York City, October 6 through the 7th. This public session focuses on the denial of the Palestinian right to self determination and the role of the US and the United Nations. This tribunal will draw attention to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories and how Israel continues to act with impunity under international law. There will be many speakers at this event including Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, and Cynthia McKinney. We talk today with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet Alice Walker and Dennis Banks, a Native American leader, activist and author. Both of whom will be speaking at the tribunal.
Alice Walker:
- Citizens around the world are very concerned that nothing seems to move forward between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
- The traditional one (tribunal) that came into being because of Vietnam and the American war against the Vietnamese people.
- I was in Gaza shortly after the bombing and that would’ve made anyone want to have a tribunal because it was so completely devastating and horrible.
- The Israelis just sailed along as if everything was ok to kill 1400 people and 300 children, destroy the water system. We don’t have a lot of power in terms of making things change, but I think consciousness is our only hope in any case.
- The UN has been relatively helpless against the US and Israeli veto of their resolution. We want to look at – Why is that?
- How is it that we can’t get any movement in the UN toward justice for the Palestinian people?
- I think the United States and Israel are in agreement they want that territory.
- We have to remember this is an entrenched long standing pattern of how you treat indigenous people when you want what they have.
- In this country what they did is destroy the Indians.
- The Palestinians are just seen as obstructions to this grand vision. When people say real politic, they mean no matter what they have to do to implement their plan. Their plan whatever it is is supreme.
- They just gonna do that if it takes 100 years, 200 years.
- I remember sitting in Gaza after the bombing. The thing that got me was they bombed this school, not only a school but it was the American school.
- We must as human beings gather together. Gather ourselves and address these issues of destruction and they’re coming faster and faster.
Guest – Alice Walker, American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Dennis Banks:
- It seems that they’re taking a page out of Native American history and using it over there.
- You look at the burning of the sweat lodges. The whole experiment to take Native people away their parents and destroy them, put them in foster homes, boarding schools, military boarding schools.
- And keep them there for five, six, seven years. In my case it was six years before I was even allowed to see my parents.
- The whole thing is all over again.
- What can I say to warn people, to warn people about the future?
- I know they’re gonna dispossess the land from the Palestinians.
- I will not forgive the government for what it did not only to me but to thousands of thousands of young Native children.
- I’m speaking against the American people, I’m speaking against the policies of the American government.
Guest – Dennis Banks, a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinaabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. Banks is also known as Nowa Cumig (Naawakamig in the Double Vowel System). His name in the Ojibwe language means “In the Center of the Ground.” He has been a longtime leader of the American Indian Movement, which he cofounded in 1968 with Native Americans in Minneapolis.
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Chicago Teacher Strike
The Chicago teachers, with deep community support, have won a good victory last week in their ten day strike. their victory, while not complete, defends one of the great gains of the American people, public education, against the neo-liberal goal of supplanting it with private for profit non union charter schools. The teachers strike was about more than wages and hours. They fought against the dismantling of public schools in favor of for profit charter schools, a project that both the democrats from Obama down to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emannuel, champion.
The teachers demanded smaller class size, school aids, school supplies, and an end to the use of standardized tests. The new leadership of the teachers union gained its strength by being democratic and being rooted in the community, largely Black and Latino, and allied with the families of the students they teach. They began organizing in defense of their students 3 years ago.
Debby Pope:
- I started out the week as a strike coordinator. We went out and worked with 8 to 12 schools in a particular area on the picket lines and then someone else moved in to a communications role.
- Right now I’m working in a grievance department working on contract enforcement issues.
- I think the fundamental issue is the defense of public education and the defense of teaching as a profession.
- Let me make it clear that we were not legally able to bargain on some of the issues I talk about due to restrictive labor laws in Illinois.
- They have made over a hundred charter schools in Chicago in the last decade or so.
- They’ve eliminated bargaining in those schools, they’ve eliminated Chicago Teacher’s Union membership, they’ve eliminated the decent working conditions and the rights that we’ve fought for.
- They’ve given the billionaire business men a huge control over their schools.
- They have systematically defunded neighborhood schools.
- They allowed our buildings to crumble. They’ve given us computers that are decades old.
- This is an example of how they’ve been starving the public schools and then blaming us when the schools don’t work.
- We went out to the schools. We started contract action committees in all the schools. We helped teachers to understand what their rights were.
- We resumed our place as one of the largest unions in Illinois as a part of the labor movement.
- Is a teacher’s effectiveness related to his or her class size?
- Can a teacher teach 40 kids as well he or she can teach 25 kids?
- We want a better school day with a richer curriculum with art, music and drama.
- The enemies of poor children, the enemies of public education, the enemies of giving every child an opportunity are within both parties.
- We put ourselves in a position where the schools are failing.
- We blamed the schools for failing when in fact as a society set them up to fail.
- Then of course the billionaire rescuers . . . came in and said Oh my God look at what a mess the schools are. We have to privatize them, we have to charter them. We have to turn them into little business models.
- These people believe in factory schools.
- The next fight on the horizon is against school closings.
Guest – Debby Pope, member of the executive board Chicago Teachers Union and delegate. Debby Pope is a retired teacher and currently works on the CTU grievance board in contract dispute.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
- Bradley Manning Public Access Case: Amicus Brief Filed by Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press
- Southern Poverty Law Center Lawsuit Against Chemically Spraying Students
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Attorney Heidi Boghosian Speech: National Special Security Events – RNC / DNC
We hear a presentation by our own Heidi Boghosian. Heidi spoke at an event sponsored by station affiliate WSLR FM 96.5 – Sarasota, Florida. As the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, Heidi had coordinated and organized legal observers during the Republican National Convention in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. While in Florida, Heidi delivered a talk about the eroding civil rights of protesters during National Special Security events, pre-event surveillance and tactical strategies deployed by police.
Heidi Boghosian is the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association established in 1937. She has published articles on policing, protest and the First Amendment including Punishing Protest and The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent (North River Press, 2004). Her book reviews have been published in The Federal Lawyer magazine and the New York Law Journal.
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CCR Stop and Frisk Suit NYC: Floyd et al. v. New York City
Last month, a federal judge excluded portions of proposed testimony from New York City’s key witness in the Center for Constitutional Right’s Stop and Frisk class action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the defendants’ testimony untested and unreliable. The ruling supports that there isn’t evidence that the “Stop and Frisk” practice reduces crime.” said CCR Legal Director Vince Warren (quote) “The ruling soundly rejects the false choice propounded by the NYPD, between living in a safe city and being free of unconstitutional, racially discriminatory policing.”
In 2009 New York City, a record 576,394 people were stopped, 84 percent of whom were Black and Latino residents — although they comprise only about 26 percent and 27 percent of New York City’s total population respectively. Ten years of raw data obtained by court order from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) showed that stop-and-frisks result in a minimal yield of weapons and contraband.
Attorney Darius Charney:
- When we say “stop” were really talking about a detention of somebody’s liberty by the police. Frisk is a pat down of the outside of somebody’s clothing.
- For purposes of the 4th Amendment we are talking about a seizure when somebody is stopped, their liberty is taken away from them for a period of time and when they’re frisked, they’re searched.
- About 99.3 percent of the time the police find no gun.
- According the Supreme Court in a case they decided about 44 years ago, called Terry v. Ohio, for a police officer to stop someone on the street they have to have what’s called reasonable, articulatable suspicion.
- It has to be more than a hunch, or a whim or a subjective belief that somebody’s doing something wrong. It has to be articulatable specific facts that the officer is aware of that would cause him or her to reasonably believe that this person has committed a crime, is in the process of committing a crime or is about to commit a crime.
- If they have reasonable suspicion and they stop to ask you questions, you’re supposed to answer the questions.
- They may ask you for identification, that’s not against the law in New York state. You don’t have to provide it to them.
- You’re free to not answer but depending on what the questions are and if you don’t answer them, that may give the officer a basis to have probable cause to arrest you.
- For the officer to then put their hands on you, they have to have reasonable suspicion that you’re armed and dangerous.
- It can’t be that they think you have drugs in your pocket. Officers often get angry or irritated if you assert the rights that you have.
- What commonly happens in New York and other places is that somebody does assert their rights the officer may retaliate against them by issuing them a ticket for disorderly conduct.
- The person has a right to say “show me your badge” to a plain clothes police officer.
- Stop and Frisk has increased over 600 percent in New York City.
- In New York police are arresting 50 thousand people a year with small amounts of marijuana.
- The New York Police Department Stop and Frisk practices are literally going to be put on trial in a federal court in Manhattan this coming Spring.
- We were certified for a class action in May, so we have a website for class members. Stopandfrisk
- In order to fight crime you need to work together with the community and if the community doesn’t trust you, fear you, that’s not going to happen.
Guest – Attorney Darius Charney, senior staff attorney in the Racial Justice/Government Misconduct Docket. He is currently lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, and Vulcan Society Inc. v. the City of New York, a Title VII class action lawsuit on behalf of African-American applicants to the New York City Fire Department which challenges the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the FDNY.
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Afghanistan War, CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq War, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
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The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History.
We continue to look into the the Bradley Manning story, the biggest whistle-blower case in US history. Attorney Chase Madar joins us in the studio, he’s the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History. The book moves through Manning’s childhood and up to what led him to allegedly upload volumes of classified secret information to Wikileaks. Madar highlights the value of publicly exposing the endless criminal and immoral actions while government secrecy spins out of control, classifying 77 million documents a year. He also asks what can be done to protect Bradley Manning as a whistle-blower. Since his arrest 2 years ago, Manning’s formal court martial proceedings are not scheduled to begin until February 2013, and as many listeners know the most lethal charge is aiding the enemy.
Attorney Chase Madar:
- I worked as a staff attorney for many years at a great non-profit in Bushwick section of Brooklyn doing all kinds of low tech services for Spanish speaking immigrants.
- I quit that and have been writing about foreign affairs. I got put on the sight of Bradley Manning by Tom Englehart, who edits the great TomDispatch web project.
- So many important issues collide in this case, whether its the comparative risk to our security of secrecy versus leaks. How we judge threats, how we misassess threats. How we use solitary confinement as punishment, is it an acceptable punishment?
- What power does information have anyway? A lot of intellectuals think that information has an incredible catalytic effect.
- Bradley Manning enlisted in the Army in October 2007. He’s deployed to Iraq after all kinds of training in Army intelligence in 2009.
- He allegedly begins leaking things in early 2010 and he’s arrested in late May 2010 over 2 years ago now. He was held in solitary confinement, very strict punitive isolation in Quantico Marine Corp base in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011.
- We’re looking at 2.5 years of pretrial confinement.
- You can divide up the Wikileaks leaks allegedly supplied by Bradley Manning in 3 categories. Iraq material, thousands of war logs: raw reports file by soldiers, Afghan war logs, it’s a composite of a war that’s weirdly aimless.
- Obama did campaign as the whistle-blower’s best friend, and he has prosecuted twice as many as all previous administrations.
- Here’s one theory I find persuasive. It’s important for Obama to have the intelligence services on his side. This was a way for him to show the CIA that he would go along them.
- I would like to see a serious change in foreign policy which has gone off the rails.
- We haven’t the kind of course correction with Obama that many had hoped for.
- I hope Wikileaks do disrupt foreign policy more. There’s been all kinds of smack talked about Bradley Manning, he’s a weirdo, a malcontent, he did what he did because he’s screwed up, he did because he’s gay.
- His motives are very plain to see in the chat logs between him and the informant.
- The Manning chat logs – they read like a tragic novella.
- So much of our secrecy law is designed to keep the American public in the dark.
- I think we have badly confused being clueless with being safe.
- He comes across as an immensely thoughtful, courageous and very principled young man. In some ways he’s an extreme version of the millennial generation who have a lot of education and potential but find themselves not doing too well.
- His father was in Naval Intelligence and he’d grown up with a sense of patriotic responsibilities.
- What makes him turn on the inside and leak these things?
- He’s asked to look into the arrest and capture by the Iraqi authorities a group of non-violent Iraqi protesters who were handing out pamphlets that were all about corruption in Iraqi government.
- We are light years away from total transparency.
- The main thing is to make records of the court proceedings publicly available.
- I think a guilty conviction and a heavy sentence of at least 50 years is a foregone conclusion.
- The wages of government secrecy, not security but disaster.
- It looks like the court martial won’t begin until January or February.
- Go to the Bradley Manning support network website. Send him a postcard.
- It’s your patriotic duty to browse the leaks.
- Legal Atrocities – by Chase Madar
Guest – Attorney Chase Madar , a TomDispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books). Madar tweets @ChMadar. He’s a contributor to the London Review of Books and Le Monde diplomatique and the author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning (OR Books).
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Supreme Court, War Resister
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Updates:
- Maryland Law Allows Police To Collect DNA During Arrests
- Heidi Boghosian: National Lawyers Guild Monitoring RNC / DNC Demonstrations
- In Memory: Michael Nash
- In Memory: Alexander Cockburn
- In Memory: Professor John (Tito) Gerassi
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent Booklet
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Unrepentant Radical Educator: The Writings of John Gerassi
Professor John (Tito) Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek. He obtained his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a long time civil rights and anti-war militant and author / editor of ten books plus scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He was Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. Professor Gerassi discussed his book, Unrepentant Radical Educator: The writings of John Gerassi, edited and with interviews by Tony Monchinski (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education) Indypendent Book Review
The book joins personal narratives from Gerassi’s days of journalism and activism, featuring Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver and others of the era, with essays on figures such as Sartre, Camus, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One review writes, (Especially fascinating are the tales of deliberate misreporting by the major media outlets for which he worked, epitomized by the words of owner Henry Luce when Gerassi was hired: “We here at Time believe that objectivity is neither feasible nor desirable.”)
John “Tito” Gerassi:
- Time Magazine: I hear you’re coming aboard Mr. Gerassi. In the long run, it was great that I got kicked out
- Met Che Guevara in Uruguay, as a journalist for the New York Times, there was a fight with anti-Castro students, the police were scared, one man fired his gun in the air, it ricocheted and hit and killed a USIS Cuban.
- Che told me I don’t talk to the imperialist press. At the hotel, they had reserved a large table where all the left-wing characters sat around with Che. Argentines say chez vous, that’s how Che got his nickname Che.
- The Great Fear in Latin America – John Gerassi
- Che Where Are You? Eventually there will be many Che’s.
Guest – Professor John Gerassi, once an editor at Time magazine, then at Newsweek, who obtained his PhD at LSE, is a long time civil rights and anti-war militant. He is the author or editor of ten books and scores of articles and pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.
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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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