Anyone who thinks today's anti-war movement is trapped in tie-dyed '60s nostalgia should go to the United for Peace and Justice website, where one can sign up online to participate in civil disobedience next Monday, at the close of a three-day protest in Washington. It's not just a sign that the peaceniks of 2005 are Internet savvy; it's a signal that the movement thinks the D.C. rally is the moment to turn the tide against the war.(To read more)
"We expect upwards of 100,000 people," says Bill Dobbs, spokesman for UFPJ. "This is going to be a big protest because of what has happened over the summer." He means the chain of events over recent months that includes the Downing Street memo, the formation of an "Out of Iraq" caucus in Congress, the attacks that killed scores of soldiers from Ohio, and, of course, Cindy Sheehan.
"She showed the cost of this war, the cost that the administration wants to hide," says Nancy Lessin of Military Families Speak Out. And Sheehan's protest is part of the reason why, Lessin says, "we're going to have the largest contingent of military families ever assembled speaking out against a war in certainly the history of this war and probably any other. We're expecting over 200 military families from all over the country."
The weekend of protest begins on Saturday, September 24, with a march and concert. Sunday there's an interfaith service. And on Monday, while some lobby Congress, others will get busted at the White House. Both are newly prominent tactics in the fight against the war, and products of the realization that protest alone won't work.
The White House's strategy to make John Roberts the next chief justice has been the very model of meticulous planning, by contrast to its utter clueless-ness in dealing with Katrina. No White House in modern history has been as adept at politics and as ham-fisted at governing. Why?(to read more)
With politics, the Bush administration has shown remarkable discipline -- squelching leaks and keeping Cabinet members on message, reaching down into the bureaucracy to bend analyses in directions that supports what it wants to do, imposing its will on congressional leaders and even making a political imprint on state legislatures. No recent president has got re-elected with controlling majorities in both houses of Congress, or been as successful in repositioning the national debate around his ideological view of the world.
With governing, it's been almost criminally incompetent -- failing to act on clear predictions of a terrorist attack like 9/11 or a natural disaster like Katrina, botching intelligence over Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, failing to secure order after invading Iraq, allowing prisoners of war to be tortured, losing complete control over the federal budget, creating a bizarre Medicare drug benefit from which the elderly are now fleeing, barely responding to the wave of corporate lootings and running the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the ground. Not since the hapless administration of Warren G. Harding has there been one as stunningly inept as this one.
The strangest aspect of media coverage of our invasion and occupation of Iraq involved that country's oil. Everyone, including the Bush administration, was well aware that Iraq sat on a sea of it. It was obvious that Middle Eastern oil was a global lifeline and an ever more valuable commodity; and yet, unless you were a faithful reader of the business pages, for days, weeks, even months on end, it was impossible to find serious discussion of Iraqi oil in the mainstream media. Forget the fact that a number of the major players in the Bush administration came out of the energy business; that Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, had had an oil tanker named after her (when she was still on Chevron's board of directors); that the neocons and their supporters evinced a special interest in the oil heartlands of our planet (a.k.a. "the arc of instability"); or that the Pentagon was staking those heartlands out, base by base.(to read more)
Nonetheless, when it came to the punditocracy just about the only discussion of Iraqi oil was restricted to the dismissal of claims by the antiwar movement that oil was either the (or a) significant factor in the invasion, a position supposedly too simpleminded to be taken seriously. As I've written before, if Iraq's main export had been video games, the press would have been flooded with pieces of every sort about our children's entertainment future; and yet, until the Iraqi resistance began blowing up pipelines, reports on Iraqi oil were as few and far between as oases in a desert. Even today, with pump prices through the ceiling and global energy supplies tight, Iraqi oil -- or the lack of it -- is not exactly headline material. As Jonathan Schell said to me recently, speaking of media attitudes, "If the Bush administration is not supposed to be interested in oil in Iraq, why are they so interested in it in Alaska?"
Committed peace and justice activists will converge on Brooklyn Oct.7-9, for a national strategy conference to broaden the network of people who refuse to pay for war. The purpose of the conference will be to develop more effective and creative methods of war tax refusal in order to extend its reach in the U.S., while providing additional support for existing individuals and groups across the country deeply engaged in war-tax resistance. If more people refuse to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this will tighten the screws of nonviolent resistance against the U.S. war machine.
We will critically look at strategies and campaigns that have worked well in the past and what we can do to improve them. We will brainstorm new ideas and techniques. We will see what can be done to encourage other constituencies to adopt this tactic for their communities. We will identify the roadblocks to resistance (e.g., fear of the IRS) and attempt to address them. And we will celebrate our ability to take away the government's control of how our tax money is spent.
On Monday night, the NYPD arrested Paul Zulkowitz at Camp Casey NYC in Union Square, despite the fact that organizers had a valid permit. Zulkowitz, a member of the Green Party's Peace Action Committee, has been one of the leading organizers of the effort to maintain a continuous presence at Camp Casey NYC in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan for the past two weeks.
This attack on First Amendment rights to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly comes as President Bush continues to claim that he is waging war in order to spread democracy and freedom. On the very day that Bush is attempting to force a Constitution on the people of Iraq at gunpoint, he and Mayor Bloomberg are working to silence dissent in the U.S.
Organizers of Camp Casey are asking everyone who possibly can to stop by at Union Square, even if its only for a few minutes, to demonstrate your support and take a stand for our Constitutional rights.
Dear Anti-war Activist,
We set up Camp Casey NYC in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan for a rally on Monday, Aug. 15, at Union Square. It was such a success that activists from many different groups have been keeping it going 24-hours-a-day ever since. They are asking for recruits to come by and take a shift. Bring signs and materials to help decorate.
Lend a hand. Support Cindy Sheehan. Help bring the troops home now.
