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Article by: Louis Posner, Chairman@VoterMarch.org, Monday 01 Jan 2001
Summary: In order to preserve our Democracy, we believe Florida's Electors should be challenged in 2001.
Article: On January 6 at 1 pm, Congress will meet in Joint Session to count the Electoral College votes.
Electors have been challenged twice in our history - 1877 and 1969.
In order to preserve our Democracy, we believe Florida\'s Electors should be challenged in 2001. We may not win, but we believe it is essential to make the effort for the following reasons:
1. A massive political crime was committed - the Presidency of the United States was stolen. For the sake of history, the record needs to show that members of Congress were willing to stand up and denounce the crime.
2. We also need the record to show that a lot of Members of Congress - perhaps even a majority - were willing to allow the Presidency to be stolen. In 2 years, we can use this vote against these Members.
3. We need to turn the Democratic Congressional minority into a fighting opposition party. If they fight this historic and just battle, they will find it infinitely easier to fight all of the battles to come - starting with the nomination of John Ashcroft, and eventually all of the substantive battles on the issues we care about.
It only takes 1 Senator and 1 Representative to file a challenge. After that, the Senate and House must debate the challenge for 2 hours and then vote.
Democrats.com have lined up several Representatives who are willing to file the challenge. They expect to have a Senator by Tuesday.
Democrats.com have organized all of the information - including a letter to Congress - at the www.TrustThePeople.com.
Voter March is making an urgent appeal to all of our supporters to visit the www.TrustThePeople.com site and show support for this important project!
Thanks so much for your help!!!
Louis Posner, Esq.
Chairman@VoterMarch.org
www.VoterMarch.org
VoterMarch, a grassroots organization for voter rights, founded on Nov. 14, 2000.
Showing posts with label Lou Posner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lou Posner. Show all posts
Friday, August 10, 2012
ARCHIVES: VOTER MARCH TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY and VOTER RIGHTS, Wash. DC, 5/19/2001
5/19: FIVE THOUSAND PROTEST Bogus-President BUSH In DC, 34 posts by 17 authors in alt.politics.democrats.d
5/20/01, VOTERMARCH.ORG, VOTER MARCH TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY and VOTER RIGHTS, Saturday, May 19 2001 http://VOTERMARCH.ORG/May19/May19rr.html
Five thousand who believe democracy is worth the struggle rallied and marched from Lafayette Park, facing the White House, to the West Capitol steps in Washington on Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 19, 2001.
The Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy - East Coast sponsored by VoterMarch.org and co-sponsored by over 50 different pro-democracy groups, gathered activists from as far as Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and of course, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware.
Organized by Louis Posner, a New York attorney and leader of the group of volunteers, Voter Rights March produced the successful Anti-Inauguration Rally, and, via an internet call, created this Rally and its West coast twin that contemporaneously took place in San Francisco.
Led by an American flag, the March--peppered by protest banners ranging from the satirical through the clever to almost reverent statements of Democracy--moved past the Justice Dept. and the Supreme Court on its way to the West Capitol steps.
At the Court it was met by the Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania contingent. It had bussed in to first protest against the five who had sullied the Court by ignoring the law and the will of the voters and by appointing the Governor of Texas to sit in the White House.
Forming a round rosy single-file picket line in front of the Court building, the 50 Southeast Pennsylvanians chanted and raised their banners until they were met by and joined the March on its way to the Capitol.
Posner led off the speakers at the Capitol. Hundreds of tourists who had come just to visit the building stood and listened to electrifying statements of the meaning of Democracy.
Frequently applauding the speakers they heard what our "public servants" who we elected and pay to occupy the Building are failing to do.
Other well known progressive leaders speaking included Robert Borosage, Washington labor movement veteran and Co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future; Ted Glick, National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network; Ronnie Dugger, Founder of the Alliance for Democracy, Michael Rectenwald, Founder and Chair of Citizens for Legitimate Government;. Phil Berg, the attorney who filed the Florida class action to overturn the Presidential Election, and the Rev. Sekou, on behalf of the Democracy Summer Coalition (NAACP, IPS, IPPN, Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Global Exchange, etc.)
Tears were brought to the eyes of many participants with the appearance of a group of WW2 veterans. Ranging in age from 76 to 92 they came from as far as Texarkanna, Texas to remind us, on this Armed Forces Day, that 14 million young Americans had fought, and many died, to protect what the Supreme Court, the amoral Florida and Texas twin governors and the Republican Party are destroying.
The day was just a day. But it was a rejuvenating and inspiring day:
* A day in which we promised to refer to the occupant in the White House by his only legitimate elected title, "Governor"
* A day in which we promised to continue the struggle for progressive causes.
* And a day in which we promised to work to elect a President of the United States at the end of this four- year hiatus.
---=Hal Rosenthal
_______________________________________________
The next action comes in the voting booth, beginning 2002.
Then comes 2004, when the boil on the butt of DEMOCRACY is finally excised and sent back to Texas.
If he isn't impeached before then .
C_S
=================================================
http://www.PresidentMoron.com
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
http://www.LegitGov.org/
================================================
5/20/01, VOTERMARCH.ORG, VOTER MARCH TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY and VOTER RIGHTS, Saturday, May 19 2001 http://VOTERMARCH.ORG/May19/May19rr.html
Five thousand who believe democracy is worth the struggle rallied and marched from Lafayette Park, facing the White House, to the West Capitol steps in Washington on Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 19, 2001.
The Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy - East Coast sponsored by VoterMarch.org and co-sponsored by over 50 different pro-democracy groups, gathered activists from as far as Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and of course, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware.
Organized by Louis Posner, a New York attorney and leader of the group of volunteers, Voter Rights March produced the successful Anti-Inauguration Rally, and, via an internet call, created this Rally and its West coast twin that contemporaneously took place in San Francisco.
Led by an American flag, the March--peppered by protest banners ranging from the satirical through the clever to almost reverent statements of Democracy--moved past the Justice Dept. and the Supreme Court on its way to the West Capitol steps.
At the Court it was met by the Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania contingent. It had bussed in to first protest against the five who had sullied the Court by ignoring the law and the will of the voters and by appointing the Governor of Texas to sit in the White House.
Forming a round rosy single-file picket line in front of the Court building, the 50 Southeast Pennsylvanians chanted and raised their banners until they were met by and joined the March on its way to the Capitol.
Posner led off the speakers at the Capitol. Hundreds of tourists who had come just to visit the building stood and listened to electrifying statements of the meaning of Democracy.
Frequently applauding the speakers they heard what our "public servants" who we elected and pay to occupy the Building are failing to do.
Other well known progressive leaders speaking included Robert Borosage, Washington labor movement veteran and Co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future; Ted Glick, National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network; Ronnie Dugger, Founder of the Alliance for Democracy, Michael Rectenwald, Founder and Chair of Citizens for Legitimate Government;. Phil Berg, the attorney who filed the Florida class action to overturn the Presidential Election, and the Rev. Sekou, on behalf of the Democracy Summer Coalition (NAACP, IPS, IPPN, Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Global Exchange, etc.)
Tears were brought to the eyes of many participants with the appearance of a group of WW2 veterans. Ranging in age from 76 to 92 they came from as far as Texarkanna, Texas to remind us, on this Armed Forces Day, that 14 million young Americans had fought, and many died, to protect what the Supreme Court, the amoral Florida and Texas twin governors and the Republican Party are destroying.
The day was just a day. But it was a rejuvenating and inspiring day:
* A day in which we promised to refer to the occupant in the White House by his only legitimate elected title, "Governor"
* A day in which we promised to continue the struggle for progressive causes.
* And a day in which we promised to work to elect a President of the United States at the end of this four- year hiatus.
---=Hal Rosenthal
_______________________________________________
The next action comes in the voting booth, beginning 2002.
Then comes 2004, when the boil on the butt of DEMOCRACY is finally excised and sent back to Texas.
If he isn't impeached before then .
C_S
=================================================
http://www.PresidentMoron.com
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
http://www.LegitGov.org/
================================================
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
ARCHIVES: VOTER MARCH PROTESTS SCALIA AT HOFSTRA U. ETHICS CONFERENCE, 9/9/2001
SCALIA PROTEST
VOTER MARCH PROTESTS SCALIA AT HOFSTRA U. ETHICS CONFERENCE
Antonin Scalia, one of the five ultra-conservative U.S. Supreme Court Judges who stopped the legal hand count of votes in Florida in Election 2000, appeared at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, NY on Sunday, September 9th. To add insult to injury, Scalia was the keynote speaker and was honored at this Hofstra Law School Ethics Conference.
There were hundreds of protestors just outside the Conference, including a contingent from Voter March New York that came up by Charter bus. Inside the Conference, Voter March Chairman Louis Posner, Esq. introduced himself as a New York attorney and asked Scalia "Your Honor, you have discussed the ethics of lawyers, while little or nothing has been said about the ethics of Judges. There has been much controversy over your decision in Bush v. Gore including accusations that you acted unethically. Could you please respond to these accusations?" Justice Scalia responded "Yes, I didn't" in a smug and cavalier manner. Posner then responded "No further questions" to remind Scalia that he should be on trial for his crimes. Chris Acosta, Voter March National Steering Committee, never made it to the question and answer session as he was ejected from the Conference for exercising his First Amendment rights when he exclaimed "Ethics - Ha, Ha, Ha."
The protests and Acosta's encounter with Scalia were mentioned in News Day:
Question of Ethics for Scalia Election ruling sparks protest at Hofstra talk
By Bart Jones STAFF WRITER
September 10, 2001
Outside, nearly 100 people yesterday protested the appearance of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a conference at Hofstra University, saying the justice helped President George W. Bush "steal" last November's election.
But inside, he was warmly received by legal scholars and attorneys who came to hear him, and he later received a standing ovation.
Inviting Scalia to discuss judicial ethics is "like asking Idi Amin to talk about human rights," said Nancy Solomon, 44, of Roslyn.
But Hofstra officials defended Scalia, saying he has ccumulated an impressive record on the bench and has led a rilliant career.
"Someone who carefully looks at his career ... would find he's a highly principled judge," said David Yellen, dean of Hofstra University School of Law. He called the protest "severely misguided."
Scalia did not directly address the protesters during his 40-minute keynote speech. The protesters said Scalia let his conservative ideology dictate his support of the high court's majority opinion that stopped the presidential vote recount in Florida and effectively handed the presidency to Bush.
A heckler in the audience, Christopher Acosta, 50, of Manhattan, was asked to leave by Hofstra authorities after emitting several loud ha, ha, ha's in response to comments by Scalia. After one of the outbursts, Scalia stopped speaking. Staring at Acosta he said, "there is a lawyer joke right there." The audience broke out in laughter.
Scalia did not discuss in depth the court's vote on the November election in the close contest between Bush and former vice president Al Gore, saying it would be "inappropriate."
But generally, Scalia defended the court's decision to end the recounts, and said critics were divided on the issue depending on political persuasion.
In other areas, he argued that imposing a mandatory attorney ethics code could be problematic, but he said ethics are a critical part of the profession.
He also said too many lawyers work absurdly long hours, short-changing their responsibilities as parents, community leaders and members of churches and synagogues.
Lawyers, he said, have gotten the idea that if they're not working long hours seven days a week they're "not really big-time ... that's just silly."
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.
PETITION: Petition to the Dean of Hofstra Law School protesting Scalia at its Ethics Conference was personally delivered to Dean Yellin by Lou Posner at the Ethics Conference, along with over 700 signatures.
VOTER MARCH PROTESTS SCALIA AT HOFSTRA U. ETHICS CONFERENCE
Antonin Scalia, one of the five ultra-conservative U.S. Supreme Court Judges who stopped the legal hand count of votes in Florida in Election 2000, appeared at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, NY on Sunday, September 9th. To add insult to injury, Scalia was the keynote speaker and was honored at this Hofstra Law School Ethics Conference.
There were hundreds of protestors just outside the Conference, including a contingent from Voter March New York that came up by Charter bus. Inside the Conference, Voter March Chairman Louis Posner, Esq. introduced himself as a New York attorney and asked Scalia "Your Honor, you have discussed the ethics of lawyers, while little or nothing has been said about the ethics of Judges. There has been much controversy over your decision in Bush v. Gore including accusations that you acted unethically. Could you please respond to these accusations?" Justice Scalia responded "Yes, I didn't" in a smug and cavalier manner. Posner then responded "No further questions" to remind Scalia that he should be on trial for his crimes. Chris Acosta, Voter March National Steering Committee, never made it to the question and answer session as he was ejected from the Conference for exercising his First Amendment rights when he exclaimed "Ethics - Ha, Ha, Ha."
The protests and Acosta's encounter with Scalia were mentioned in News Day:
Question of Ethics for Scalia Election ruling sparks protest at Hofstra talk
By Bart Jones STAFF WRITER
September 10, 2001
Outside, nearly 100 people yesterday protested the appearance of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a conference at Hofstra University, saying the justice helped President George W. Bush "steal" last November's election.
But inside, he was warmly received by legal scholars and attorneys who came to hear him, and he later received a standing ovation.
Inviting Scalia to discuss judicial ethics is "like asking Idi Amin to talk about human rights," said Nancy Solomon, 44, of Roslyn.
But Hofstra officials defended Scalia, saying he has ccumulated an impressive record on the bench and has led a rilliant career.
"Someone who carefully looks at his career ... would find he's a highly principled judge," said David Yellen, dean of Hofstra University School of Law. He called the protest "severely misguided."
Scalia did not directly address the protesters during his 40-minute keynote speech. The protesters said Scalia let his conservative ideology dictate his support of the high court's majority opinion that stopped the presidential vote recount in Florida and effectively handed the presidency to Bush.
A heckler in the audience, Christopher Acosta, 50, of Manhattan, was asked to leave by Hofstra authorities after emitting several loud ha, ha, ha's in response to comments by Scalia. After one of the outbursts, Scalia stopped speaking. Staring at Acosta he said, "there is a lawyer joke right there." The audience broke out in laughter.
Scalia did not discuss in depth the court's vote on the November election in the close contest between Bush and former vice president Al Gore, saying it would be "inappropriate."
But generally, Scalia defended the court's decision to end the recounts, and said critics were divided on the issue depending on political persuasion.
In other areas, he argued that imposing a mandatory attorney ethics code could be problematic, but he said ethics are a critical part of the profession.
He also said too many lawyers work absurdly long hours, short-changing their responsibilities as parents, community leaders and members of churches and synagogues.
Lawyers, he said, have gotten the idea that if they're not working long hours seven days a week they're "not really big-time ... that's just silly."
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.
PETITION: Petition to the Dean of Hofstra Law School protesting Scalia at its Ethics Conference was personally delivered to Dean Yellin by Lou Posner at the Ethics Conference, along with over 700 signatures.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
ARCHIVES: Press Release on Voter March Grassroots Group, April 15, 2001
PRESS RELEASE 
Contacts:
Louis Posner, Esq. New York Headquarters 212-492-5175 chairman@votermarch.org | Anne Keith Media – East Coast 804-760-0296 Media@votermarch.org |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Internet’s Fastest Growing Grassroots Group
New York, NY-- Voter March, a grassroots group formed in the response to the debacle of the 2000 election has logged over one million hits to its Website (http://web.archive.org/web/20070917115303/http://www.votermarch.org/). Part of the growing Pro-Democracy movement, Voter March has built an online community of activist members. There are more than 60 state and local chapters of Voter March, many of which are several hundred strong. Membership in Voter March email lists and egroups is currently over 10,000 individuals, with more people joining every day. Linked to thousands of websites throughout the Internet, Voter March is the fastest-growing grassroots group in the country.
Voter March is the organization that staged the very successful Inaugural Day Voter March in DC’s Dupont Circle on January 20 of this year and is the organizer of the Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy planned for May 19, 2001 in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. Information about both events can be found at the Voter March website, http://web.archive.org/web/20070917115303/http://www.votermarch.org/ and for the West Coast at http://web.archive.org/web/20070917115303/http://www.voterwest.org/.
An Internet-based advocacy group founded in November of 2000, Voter March is not funded or controlled by any other organization. Voter March organizers are all volunteers, donating their time and skills to the cause. The Voter March platform calls for critically needed voting and electoral reforms. The chairman and founder is Louis Posner, a New York City attorney listed in "Who's Who in America." Robert Rogers of Virginia, a retired aviation test pilot, is Vice Chairman and a founding member.
Voter March is the organization that staged the very successful Inaugural Day Voter March in DC’s Dupont Circle on January 20 of this year and is the organizer of the Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy planned for May 19, 2001 in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. Information about both events can be found at the Voter March website, http://web.archive.org/web/20070917115303/http://www.votermarch.org/ and for the West Coast at http://web.archive.org/web/20070917115303/http://www.voterwest.org/.
An Internet-based advocacy group founded in November of 2000, Voter March is not funded or controlled by any other organization. Voter March organizers are all volunteers, donating their time and skills to the cause. The Voter March platform calls for critically needed voting and electoral reforms. The chairman and founder is Louis Posner, a New York City attorney listed in "Who's Who in America." Robert Rogers of Virginia, a retired aviation test pilot, is Vice Chairman and a founding member.
ARCHIVES: Press Release for Voter Rights March, May 19, 2001
PRESS RELEASE 
Contacts:
Louis Posner, Esq. New York Headquarters 212-492-5175 chairman@votermarch.org | Anne Keith Media – East Coast 804-760-0296 Media@votermarch.org |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Grassroots Group to Demand Voting Reform at Bi-Coastal Event
New York, NY and San Francisco, CA -- On Saturday, May 19, 2001, individuals from coast to coast will gather for the Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy. There will be an East Coast march/rally in Washington, DC and a West Coast in San Francisco, California. The DC event will be held at the West Capitol steps and adjacent area of the National Mall including First to Third Streets from 12:00 noon to 5:30 pm (ET). At 12:00 noon there will be a circular march past from the West Capital steps past the U.S. Supreme Court, followed by speakers and entertainers at 1:00 pm. West Coast marchers will gather at Justin Hermann Plaza at 10am and march to the Civic Center Plaza for a rally from noon until 4:00pm (PT). The purpose of the march is to demand critically needed voting reforms, to call for a full investigation of the irregularities in the 2000 election, and to protest the illegitimate President's service to the right wing agenda during his first 120 days in office. Political commentators will share the stage with prominent activists and entertainers voicing their outrage over the latest presidential election. The event is sponsored by Voter March, a grassroots group formed in the response to the debacle of the last presidential election. Part of the growing Pro-Democracy movement, Voter March is an entirely volunteer organization that staged the very successful Inaugural Day Voter March in DC’s Dupont Circle on January 20 of this year. Information about both events can be found at the Voter March website, www.votermarch.org.
“We expect the crowd on May 19 to be as diverse as the one at the inaugural protest—male, female, old, young, gay, straight, black, white-- many of them ‘first-time’ protesters,” says Voter March Chairman Louis Posner. “The indignation over the Supreme Court's highly partisan decisions is wide-spread and cuts across all social lines. Voter March continues to grow as more and more people commit to ensuring that the rights of voters can never again be trampled on.”
As with the January protest, there will be bus convoys to the DC event from New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and many other cities. The San Francisco event will have large groups traveling from Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Phoenix, Nevada and many other Western cities.
As part of the May 19 events, Voter March will present a platform calling for a Voters' Bill of Rights that includes:
1) Strict enforcement and extension of the Voting Rights Act, to prevent the disenfranchisement of voters, and full investigation and prosecution of offenders;
2) User- friendly voting, requiring funding to replace old and unreliable machines to ensure that every vote is counted fairly and accurately;
3) Establishment of real campaign finance reform and restrict the use of "soft" money campaign contributions;
4) Abolishment of the Electoral College and its replacement with a majority rule election, or substantial reform of the electoral system to allow for proportional representation;
5) Increasing voter participation in elections by eliminating bureaucratic hurdles, registering citizens to vote and reducing the voter apathy that results in half of the eligible population not voting.
The Voter Rights March will also be protesting Bush's right wing agenda that is drastically turning back gains in environmental protection, separation of church and state, world peace initiatives and other civil rights and social issues.
An internet-based grassroots advocacy group founded in November of 2000, Voter March is not funded or controlled by any other organization. Voter March organizers are all volunteers.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
ARCHIVES: M19 - A Report from the Voter Rights March
M19 - A Report from the Voter Rights March, Democratic Underground
May 22, 2001
by William Rivers Pitt
"You can't stop a rooster from crowing once the sun is up, and the sun done come up." - Old folk saying
The train jarred to a stop in the station as a wet dawn peeled across the sky above Washington, D.C. I rose groggily from the cramped, lotus-like ball I had been trying to sleep in for the last ten hours, gathered up my bag, and walked into the cavernous emptiness of Union Station. My head was thumping sickly as I collected my wits; in order to ensure a quiet night of rest, I had medicated myself with several beers and a healthy dollop of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
When I had first boarded the train at 8:30 pm in Boston the night before, I had figured on a long, lonely trip down to D.C. I had not been five minutes in my seat, however, when I heard a snatch of conversation from the seats in front of me: "...saw the VoterMarch website a few weeks ago, and knew I had to come."
I lurched over the headrest and introduced myself. Here were Laura and Adam, taking the same journey for the same reasons as I was. Laura, in fact, had been in Washington for the inauguration with the 30,000 other protesters who had been so assiduously ignored by the media. Laura and Adam were perfectly normal people. They were not pierced, purple-haired anarchists. Adam worked for Sun Microsystems, and Laura was out from Colorado on a tech-work contract that would keep her in Boston a year. They both could have passed for accountants in any city in America. This was, I felt, a very good sign. I reasoned that it would be harder for the media to ignore a protest driven by ordinary citizens.
Laura, Adam and I wandered into the bowels of Union Station on the morning of May 19th in search of a cup of coffee. This proved to be a hard nut to make. The place was deserted, all food shops closed. We finally found a barbecue joint run by an early-rising Korean family, and as we sipped their potent brew, we talked about why we were here.
The Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy had several specific purposes behind its inception: to bring attention to the fact that the November election was a catastrophe and that election reform is a moral American imperative, to point out that some 180,000 votes have yet to be recounted in Florida despite a requirement for same inked into the books of the Sunshine State's laws, to cast a glaring light upon the scurrilous actions taken by the United States Supreme Court on December 13, 2000, to shout as loudly as possible that George W. Bush is not President because he was selected and not elected, and lastly to remind all who would listen that Albert Gore, Jr. is the rightful President of the United States for good or ill.
This is a long laundry list of grievances, but underneath it all is a motivation that harkens back to the days before the voting reform laws passed in 1964. At the bottom, the Voter Rights March was about protecting the basic American right to vote, and about ensuring that all the votes which are cast are counted fairly and equally. If this seems like a reactionary and foolish platform, bear in mind that by the end of this day, May 19th, I would meet a dozen people from Florida who believed their votes had not been counted. The hurt and anger in their eyes was fresh and electric; after 157 days they had not "gotten over it," and were I to make a bet, I would confidently put money on the idea that they never, ever would.
I have participated in many protests in the last ten years. In 1991 I was marching against the Gulf War, shouting with swollen throat into the face of an 80% approval rating for that ill-conceived massacre. I marched against General Electric with those who were getting screwed by that company's pension fund, which is swollen with millions of dollars earned by everyday workers who see little of it after 30 years of service. I marched to protest the execution of Gary Graham on the eve of the 2000 election.
This gathering in Washington on May 19th, however, was something else entirely. The other protests I had participated in had been focused on a specific, narrow grievance - a war, a company, the death penalty. This march was focused upon the fact that a basic and fundamental American right had been abrogated, and because of this, a man had been installed in the White House who had not won the election. Nothing like this had ever happened in all of American history, and the fact that ordinary American citizens were compelled to come to Washington, D.C. from as far away as Alaska, California and Minnesota on May 19th in defense of the simple right to vote exposes the degree of rage that lingers in the electorate.
Laura, Adam and I came out of Union Station at 7:30 am and headed for Lafayette Park under a sky heavy with rain. We walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the building holding the Department of Labor, whose steps were laden with homeless men huddled against the wet. We passed the Federal Courthouse, and I mentioned that the last time I had come to this city, in 1998, the front of that building had been crowded with reporters covering some aspect of the Clinton trials. We passed the headquarters for the FBI, housed in a building owned by Reverend Moon, and I wondered aloud how many more boxes of undisclosed McVeigh documents were still hidden behind those walls. Behind us, the Capitol dome loomed above the street. We would be seeing it again soon enough, when the March arrived at the western steps.
When we finally arrived in front of the White House, my heart sank. There were a few early-bird high school groups, and the anti-nuclear protest station that had been in place since 1981 squatted eternally in the Park, but beyond that I counted a meager collection of six Voter March participants. Most of them were 'Fringe Folk,' members of a group that had created a clearinghouse for protest announcements at www.FringeFolk.com. I would later be informed that the definition of 'Fringe' according to these people was defined by Bush, who claimed that the only people who opposed him were "on the fringe."
I made myself busy for the next couple of hours as the Park began to fill with protesters. I introduced myself to Democratic activists from Kansas, Pennsylvania and Arizona. I helped construct a sound stage where speeches would be delivered around noon. I snapped pictures of signs and banners that began to wave in the swelling crowd. Somewhere along the way I lost track of Adam and Laura, though I occasionally spotted them in the crowd.
I must have spoken to 50 people before 10:00 am, and I was impressed by the amount of information they possessed. This crew was not a bunch of young reactionaries simply looking for a reason to shout. The median age of the gathering was about 40, and they all knew exactly why they were there.
I would start a sentence about ChoicePoint, and they would finish my sentence with specified statistics on exactly how many Florida voters had been blown off the rolls before the election. I would say, "The Bush energy policy." and eight people would turn to finish my thought, using phrases like "money laundering" and "campaign contributor payoffs." I felt like I was sitting in my living room conversing with 100 manifestations of my own brain. I have never been quite so comfortable in the company of strangers. Even my 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' t-shirt drew compliments, proving to me that these people had read the right books.
The speeches began around 11:30 am. By this time the crowd numbered in the hundreds, and more buses were arriving each minute. We heard from Lou Posner, one of the central organizers of the march, who looked like a blue-suited roadie for Crosby, Stills & Nash, but had the eyes of an assassin with his mark in the gunsight. We heard from Bob Kuntz of OralMajorityOnline.com, who declared his candidacy for the governorship of Florida and delineated all the reasons why Jeb Bush had to go. We heard from a woman who had been an observer during the recount, and she bore witness to the mob action and calumny that motivated this march.
Soon enough, the moment arrived. The signs and banners were hoisted, and the crowd formed into a long column as we began our march to the Capitol steps. I took a spot at the vanguard, just behind the main Voters Rights March banner and next to an elderly group bearing a loud sign that read, "WWII Veterans Against Bush." An older woman with a bullhorn became the chant leader; she looked and sounded like a union organizer with many marches under her belt. In front of us all, a man bore a huge American flag, and another man made sure that none of us marched in front of it. The flag was to be first.
As we passed the White House I found my voice, and raised a bull-throated roar that quoted the title of the column I wrote back in December: "Not my President! Not my President! Not my President!" As I howled, I pointed a fist at the residence, where the usurper lived in illegitimate splendor. The chant was picked up by those around me, and as we passed the Treasury building it was being shouted by everyone in the march. I paused to look at the mass of people behind me. I am no good at counting crowds, but it seemed clear that the six who began the morning had swelled into the thousands. Traffic stopped around us as our police escort led us slowly towards the Capitol. Many of the drivers we had slowed with our procession beeped and waved, drawing a cheer from the marchers.
Some of the chants heard on the street:
"Gore got more!"
"We'll move on when he moves out!"
"Cocaine conservative!" (another one of mine)
"George was AWOL!" (shouted whenever we saw people in uniform)
"Jail to the thief!" "Investigate the fraud!"
"Where's the Washington Post?!"
"Never forgive, never forget!" (me again)
"Count all the votes!"
"This is democracy!"
"Shame on the court!"
The march passed the Department of Justice, where we paused and shouted for an investigation of the Florida vote. We circled the Supreme Court and heaped vitriol upon those who had broken faith with the American people by selecting a President before the votes were counted. Every step of the way we were photographed by tourists, some of whom were gape-mouthed at the fact that there were still people angry about the election. Not one person, however, gave us the finger or shouted us down, a testament to the hope that America knows full well that all is not right with its election process.
We arrived at the steps of the Capitol around 2:00 pm sweaty, sore-voiced, but not nearly finished. Lou Posner addressed the crowd again, warming us up for the speakers to come. Among the crowd was a lone figure in a brown cowboy hat, a pot bellied man with a mustache and sweat-stains growing under his armpits. He held aloft a Bush/Cheney sign and tried to shout down the speakers, but was himself shouted down by the marchers around him. After a little while he disappeared. Before us, the Capitol was festooned with more tourists, many of whom clapped and cheered as the speakers berated the Democrats in Congress for failing to call for investigations into the election. Once this Bush supporter was gone, we were alone among the faithful, unmolested by any GOP supporters.
Darting through the crowd was a cameraman for CNN, and the march organizers did their best to give him clear shots of the crowd and the signs they carried. I wondered to myself if the images he was capturing would ever find their way onto a news broadcast. I had my doubts.
After a number of speakers got the crowd's juices flowing, a man in his 60s walked slowly to the microphone and began speaking in a quiet voice. His name was Ronnie Duggar, founder of The Alliance for Democracy, and he had spoken at Dupont Circle during the inauguration protests in January. As he spoke, the crowd hushed, for surely there was power in his diminutive frame. I had a mini tape recorder with me, and I held it aloft to record his speech. I cannot begin to give you the electricity his words gave the crowd with these simple, typed sentences. But I would be remiss if I did not share them with you, for they were the best I have yet heard. They burned. Here are some slices of his most notable comments, re-created to the best of my abilities from my tape recorder:
"After the secret, four-month Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a matron of that city approached Benjamin Franklin afterwards, and asked what they had produced. 'A republic, if you can keep it,' Franklin said. Well, we haven't kept it. We've lost it. George W. Bush and his lawyers, led by the crafty James Baker III and five members of the Supreme Court, who invented a Constitutional right for the occasion, have usurped from the people the right to choose the President of the United States. The judges overthrew the government by selecting the President themselves, 5-4, rather than let events take their constitutional course."
"When Governor Bush was sworn in by Chief Justice Renquist of the court that had stolen it for him, the government itself was seized in a judicial and presidential coup de'tat."
"Congress and the presidency had already been de-legitimized across the past 20 years by the triumph of uncontrolled campaign finance corruption over the common good. Now, in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court de-legitimized itself and the court system arrayed below it. This is no longer a respectable government, because we've lost the only three branches of government we've got. We've lost our entire government to a corporate oligarchy that now governs us without our permission."
"The only basis for democratic legitimacy is the consent of the governed. The presidency has been seized, therefore the government has been seized. What does it mean to realize that your government is illegitimate? What does it mean? What do we do? We have lost the very authority of law for our everyday lives. What Bush damaged when he accepted the presidency was much more than our politics, much more than our democratic self-esteem. He made a mockery of our most fundamental agreement to respect and obey the law the government passes, to co-operate with the government, because it is ours."
"We will label these four years of Bush illegitimacy as the Lawless Years, the tyranny in American history, the Tyrannical Interlude. We trust that George II will not be succeeded by George III, throwing us right back to where we were in 1775, because we are men and women and students on fire with controlled anger and we refuse to consent!"
Mr. Duggar went on in this vein for some time, his voice quivering with rage as he lashed the crowd with his words. The cheering swelled to a roar as he called upon us never to name Bush president. Call him Governor among friends and family, at the bar or at work, Duggar asked, and in this daily act of dissent spread the word that the fight is not over, will never be over, until the man not duly elected is cast from the White House like so much refuse. Duggar called for the organization of a multi-faceted group, based upon the framework of the old Rainbow Coalition, whose cause will be the re-invigoration of democracy and the reformation of American voting rights.
Duggar concluded his remarks quietly with a solemn invocation: "When we're ready, we'll start things up again as the new American Democracy, the new American Revolution, democracy and justice at last more nearly realized among us. And then we can whisper to each other, and to ourselves, 'Yes...the new American Democracy.'"
The speeches and music went on into the afternoon. I worked my way through the crowds, meeting, networking, getting and giving information. As the sun got lower in the sky I felt the quakings of exhaustion in my legs, and shouldered my pack to leave. As I made my way back to Union Station, I considered everything I had seen and heard.
I was reminded of an interview I had seen on television once. A musician was talking about the first Velvet Underground album ever released. The album sold only about 2,000 copies, this musician said, but everyone who bought it went out and started a band. I think this Voter Rights March will have the same effect.
We did not shut down Washington, D.C., and I doubt our number rose above 3,000 people. But each and every person who came, those from New Jersey, California, Alaska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon, New York, Virginia, Kansas, Colorado and Arizona to name a few, will all return home knowing they are not alone. They will become active within their sphere, and if we come back together in a year, our numbers will have certainly grown. Big storms gather around small particles, and there were thunderclouds on the brow of all present on May 19th.
This is only the beginning. I awoke at 12:17am that night to the voice of the conductor announcing the train's arrival in Boston. I had covered some 1,200 miles in just over 24 hours, and my body was at the end of its reserves. I gathered my stuff and reeled into the street to find a taxi.
A 50 year old cabbie who looked like some strange hybrid between Elvis and Johnny Cash let me sit in the front seat. He asked where I was coming from, and I told him D.C. He asked what I was doing there. I feared becoming engaged in an argument about politics in my weakened state, and chose only to tell him I had attended "some protest thing."
He turned his head sharply towards me. "I hope you was protesting Bush," he said. "That bastard is bad news."
Comments? Contact the author at w_pitt@hotmail.com.
code PZS4XEFVQK5X
May 22, 2001
by William Rivers Pitt
"You can't stop a rooster from crowing once the sun is up, and the sun done come up." - Old folk saying
The train jarred to a stop in the station as a wet dawn peeled across the sky above Washington, D.C. I rose groggily from the cramped, lotus-like ball I had been trying to sleep in for the last ten hours, gathered up my bag, and walked into the cavernous emptiness of Union Station. My head was thumping sickly as I collected my wits; in order to ensure a quiet night of rest, I had medicated myself with several beers and a healthy dollop of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
When I had first boarded the train at 8:30 pm in Boston the night before, I had figured on a long, lonely trip down to D.C. I had not been five minutes in my seat, however, when I heard a snatch of conversation from the seats in front of me: "...saw the VoterMarch website a few weeks ago, and knew I had to come."
I lurched over the headrest and introduced myself. Here were Laura and Adam, taking the same journey for the same reasons as I was. Laura, in fact, had been in Washington for the inauguration with the 30,000 other protesters who had been so assiduously ignored by the media. Laura and Adam were perfectly normal people. They were not pierced, purple-haired anarchists. Adam worked for Sun Microsystems, and Laura was out from Colorado on a tech-work contract that would keep her in Boston a year. They both could have passed for accountants in any city in America. This was, I felt, a very good sign. I reasoned that it would be harder for the media to ignore a protest driven by ordinary citizens.
Laura, Adam and I wandered into the bowels of Union Station on the morning of May 19th in search of a cup of coffee. This proved to be a hard nut to make. The place was deserted, all food shops closed. We finally found a barbecue joint run by an early-rising Korean family, and as we sipped their potent brew, we talked about why we were here.
The Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy had several specific purposes behind its inception: to bring attention to the fact that the November election was a catastrophe and that election reform is a moral American imperative, to point out that some 180,000 votes have yet to be recounted in Florida despite a requirement for same inked into the books of the Sunshine State's laws, to cast a glaring light upon the scurrilous actions taken by the United States Supreme Court on December 13, 2000, to shout as loudly as possible that George W. Bush is not President because he was selected and not elected, and lastly to remind all who would listen that Albert Gore, Jr. is the rightful President of the United States for good or ill.
This is a long laundry list of grievances, but underneath it all is a motivation that harkens back to the days before the voting reform laws passed in 1964. At the bottom, the Voter Rights March was about protecting the basic American right to vote, and about ensuring that all the votes which are cast are counted fairly and equally. If this seems like a reactionary and foolish platform, bear in mind that by the end of this day, May 19th, I would meet a dozen people from Florida who believed their votes had not been counted. The hurt and anger in their eyes was fresh and electric; after 157 days they had not "gotten over it," and were I to make a bet, I would confidently put money on the idea that they never, ever would.
I have participated in many protests in the last ten years. In 1991 I was marching against the Gulf War, shouting with swollen throat into the face of an 80% approval rating for that ill-conceived massacre. I marched against General Electric with those who were getting screwed by that company's pension fund, which is swollen with millions of dollars earned by everyday workers who see little of it after 30 years of service. I marched to protest the execution of Gary Graham on the eve of the 2000 election.
This gathering in Washington on May 19th, however, was something else entirely. The other protests I had participated in had been focused on a specific, narrow grievance - a war, a company, the death penalty. This march was focused upon the fact that a basic and fundamental American right had been abrogated, and because of this, a man had been installed in the White House who had not won the election. Nothing like this had ever happened in all of American history, and the fact that ordinary American citizens were compelled to come to Washington, D.C. from as far away as Alaska, California and Minnesota on May 19th in defense of the simple right to vote exposes the degree of rage that lingers in the electorate.
Laura, Adam and I came out of Union Station at 7:30 am and headed for Lafayette Park under a sky heavy with rain. We walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the building holding the Department of Labor, whose steps were laden with homeless men huddled against the wet. We passed the Federal Courthouse, and I mentioned that the last time I had come to this city, in 1998, the front of that building had been crowded with reporters covering some aspect of the Clinton trials. We passed the headquarters for the FBI, housed in a building owned by Reverend Moon, and I wondered aloud how many more boxes of undisclosed McVeigh documents were still hidden behind those walls. Behind us, the Capitol dome loomed above the street. We would be seeing it again soon enough, when the March arrived at the western steps.
When we finally arrived in front of the White House, my heart sank. There were a few early-bird high school groups, and the anti-nuclear protest station that had been in place since 1981 squatted eternally in the Park, but beyond that I counted a meager collection of six Voter March participants. Most of them were 'Fringe Folk,' members of a group that had created a clearinghouse for protest announcements at www.FringeFolk.com. I would later be informed that the definition of 'Fringe' according to these people was defined by Bush, who claimed that the only people who opposed him were "on the fringe."
I made myself busy for the next couple of hours as the Park began to fill with protesters. I introduced myself to Democratic activists from Kansas, Pennsylvania and Arizona. I helped construct a sound stage where speeches would be delivered around noon. I snapped pictures of signs and banners that began to wave in the swelling crowd. Somewhere along the way I lost track of Adam and Laura, though I occasionally spotted them in the crowd.
I must have spoken to 50 people before 10:00 am, and I was impressed by the amount of information they possessed. This crew was not a bunch of young reactionaries simply looking for a reason to shout. The median age of the gathering was about 40, and they all knew exactly why they were there.
I would start a sentence about ChoicePoint, and they would finish my sentence with specified statistics on exactly how many Florida voters had been blown off the rolls before the election. I would say, "The Bush energy policy." and eight people would turn to finish my thought, using phrases like "money laundering" and "campaign contributor payoffs." I felt like I was sitting in my living room conversing with 100 manifestations of my own brain. I have never been quite so comfortable in the company of strangers. Even my 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' t-shirt drew compliments, proving to me that these people had read the right books.
The speeches began around 11:30 am. By this time the crowd numbered in the hundreds, and more buses were arriving each minute. We heard from Lou Posner, one of the central organizers of the march, who looked like a blue-suited roadie for Crosby, Stills & Nash, but had the eyes of an assassin with his mark in the gunsight. We heard from Bob Kuntz of OralMajorityOnline.com, who declared his candidacy for the governorship of Florida and delineated all the reasons why Jeb Bush had to go. We heard from a woman who had been an observer during the recount, and she bore witness to the mob action and calumny that motivated this march.
Soon enough, the moment arrived. The signs and banners were hoisted, and the crowd formed into a long column as we began our march to the Capitol steps. I took a spot at the vanguard, just behind the main Voters Rights March banner and next to an elderly group bearing a loud sign that read, "WWII Veterans Against Bush." An older woman with a bullhorn became the chant leader; she looked and sounded like a union organizer with many marches under her belt. In front of us all, a man bore a huge American flag, and another man made sure that none of us marched in front of it. The flag was to be first.
As we passed the White House I found my voice, and raised a bull-throated roar that quoted the title of the column I wrote back in December: "Not my President! Not my President! Not my President!" As I howled, I pointed a fist at the residence, where the usurper lived in illegitimate splendor. The chant was picked up by those around me, and as we passed the Treasury building it was being shouted by everyone in the march. I paused to look at the mass of people behind me. I am no good at counting crowds, but it seemed clear that the six who began the morning had swelled into the thousands. Traffic stopped around us as our police escort led us slowly towards the Capitol. Many of the drivers we had slowed with our procession beeped and waved, drawing a cheer from the marchers.
Some of the chants heard on the street:
"Gore got more!"
"We'll move on when he moves out!"
"Cocaine conservative!" (another one of mine)
"George was AWOL!" (shouted whenever we saw people in uniform)
"Jail to the thief!" "Investigate the fraud!"
"Where's the Washington Post?!"
"Never forgive, never forget!" (me again)
"Count all the votes!"
"This is democracy!"
"Shame on the court!"
The march passed the Department of Justice, where we paused and shouted for an investigation of the Florida vote. We circled the Supreme Court and heaped vitriol upon those who had broken faith with the American people by selecting a President before the votes were counted. Every step of the way we were photographed by tourists, some of whom were gape-mouthed at the fact that there were still people angry about the election. Not one person, however, gave us the finger or shouted us down, a testament to the hope that America knows full well that all is not right with its election process.
We arrived at the steps of the Capitol around 2:00 pm sweaty, sore-voiced, but not nearly finished. Lou Posner addressed the crowd again, warming us up for the speakers to come. Among the crowd was a lone figure in a brown cowboy hat, a pot bellied man with a mustache and sweat-stains growing under his armpits. He held aloft a Bush/Cheney sign and tried to shout down the speakers, but was himself shouted down by the marchers around him. After a little while he disappeared. Before us, the Capitol was festooned with more tourists, many of whom clapped and cheered as the speakers berated the Democrats in Congress for failing to call for investigations into the election. Once this Bush supporter was gone, we were alone among the faithful, unmolested by any GOP supporters.
Darting through the crowd was a cameraman for CNN, and the march organizers did their best to give him clear shots of the crowd and the signs they carried. I wondered to myself if the images he was capturing would ever find their way onto a news broadcast. I had my doubts.
After a number of speakers got the crowd's juices flowing, a man in his 60s walked slowly to the microphone and began speaking in a quiet voice. His name was Ronnie Duggar, founder of The Alliance for Democracy, and he had spoken at Dupont Circle during the inauguration protests in January. As he spoke, the crowd hushed, for surely there was power in his diminutive frame. I had a mini tape recorder with me, and I held it aloft to record his speech. I cannot begin to give you the electricity his words gave the crowd with these simple, typed sentences. But I would be remiss if I did not share them with you, for they were the best I have yet heard. They burned. Here are some slices of his most notable comments, re-created to the best of my abilities from my tape recorder:
"After the secret, four-month Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a matron of that city approached Benjamin Franklin afterwards, and asked what they had produced. 'A republic, if you can keep it,' Franklin said. Well, we haven't kept it. We've lost it. George W. Bush and his lawyers, led by the crafty James Baker III and five members of the Supreme Court, who invented a Constitutional right for the occasion, have usurped from the people the right to choose the President of the United States. The judges overthrew the government by selecting the President themselves, 5-4, rather than let events take their constitutional course."
"When Governor Bush was sworn in by Chief Justice Renquist of the court that had stolen it for him, the government itself was seized in a judicial and presidential coup de'tat."
"Congress and the presidency had already been de-legitimized across the past 20 years by the triumph of uncontrolled campaign finance corruption over the common good. Now, in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court de-legitimized itself and the court system arrayed below it. This is no longer a respectable government, because we've lost the only three branches of government we've got. We've lost our entire government to a corporate oligarchy that now governs us without our permission."
"The only basis for democratic legitimacy is the consent of the governed. The presidency has been seized, therefore the government has been seized. What does it mean to realize that your government is illegitimate? What does it mean? What do we do? We have lost the very authority of law for our everyday lives. What Bush damaged when he accepted the presidency was much more than our politics, much more than our democratic self-esteem. He made a mockery of our most fundamental agreement to respect and obey the law the government passes, to co-operate with the government, because it is ours."
"We will label these four years of Bush illegitimacy as the Lawless Years, the tyranny in American history, the Tyrannical Interlude. We trust that George II will not be succeeded by George III, throwing us right back to where we were in 1775, because we are men and women and students on fire with controlled anger and we refuse to consent!"
Mr. Duggar went on in this vein for some time, his voice quivering with rage as he lashed the crowd with his words. The cheering swelled to a roar as he called upon us never to name Bush president. Call him Governor among friends and family, at the bar or at work, Duggar asked, and in this daily act of dissent spread the word that the fight is not over, will never be over, until the man not duly elected is cast from the White House like so much refuse. Duggar called for the organization of a multi-faceted group, based upon the framework of the old Rainbow Coalition, whose cause will be the re-invigoration of democracy and the reformation of American voting rights.
Duggar concluded his remarks quietly with a solemn invocation: "When we're ready, we'll start things up again as the new American Democracy, the new American Revolution, democracy and justice at last more nearly realized among us. And then we can whisper to each other, and to ourselves, 'Yes...the new American Democracy.'"
The speeches and music went on into the afternoon. I worked my way through the crowds, meeting, networking, getting and giving information. As the sun got lower in the sky I felt the quakings of exhaustion in my legs, and shouldered my pack to leave. As I made my way back to Union Station, I considered everything I had seen and heard.
I was reminded of an interview I had seen on television once. A musician was talking about the first Velvet Underground album ever released. The album sold only about 2,000 copies, this musician said, but everyone who bought it went out and started a band. I think this Voter Rights March will have the same effect.
We did not shut down Washington, D.C., and I doubt our number rose above 3,000 people. But each and every person who came, those from New Jersey, California, Alaska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon, New York, Virginia, Kansas, Colorado and Arizona to name a few, will all return home knowing they are not alone. They will become active within their sphere, and if we come back together in a year, our numbers will have certainly grown. Big storms gather around small particles, and there were thunderclouds on the brow of all present on May 19th.
This is only the beginning. I awoke at 12:17am that night to the voice of the conductor announcing the train's arrival in Boston. I had covered some 1,200 miles in just over 24 hours, and my body was at the end of its reserves. I gathered my stuff and reeled into the street to find a taxi.
A 50 year old cabbie who looked like some strange hybrid between Elvis and Johnny Cash let me sit in the front seat. He asked where I was coming from, and I told him D.C. He asked what I was doing there. I feared becoming engaged in an argument about politics in my weakened state, and chose only to tell him I had attended "some protest thing."
He turned his head sharply towards me. "I hope you was protesting Bush," he said. "That bastard is bad news."
Comments? Contact the author at w_pitt@hotmail.com.
code PZS4XEFVQK5X
Sunday, November 21, 2010
ARCHIVES: `Rent-a-Mobs' Descend on D.C. (January 20, 2001)
`Rent-a-Mobs' Descend on D.C
Insight on the News, Feb 12, 2001 by James D. Harder
The throngs of demonstrators at Bush inaugural events were not just students or young adults, but seasoned professionals who make protesting their full-time jobs.While the U.S. Secret Service was setting up sniper posts and checkpoints along Pennsylvania Avenue, Teresa Gutierrez was making posters and arranging housing for the waves of protesters expected to sweep over Washington to harass the inauguration of George W. Bush. Gutierrez, a 50-year-old from New York City, came to Washington two weeks early to help get things ready for well-orchestrated protests.
Today's demonstrators aren't just students and twenty somethings flying by the seats of their pants. Many are seasoned professionals who are part of a fine-tuned, technologically savvy protest machine that is backed by labor unions and individual financial sponsors.
Gutierrez has been a staff member with the New York-based International Action Center (IAC) since its inception in 1992. Coming to Washington early gave her the opportunity to arrange housing, poster-painting venues, bus parking and other necessities for the tens of thousands of protesters who were being recruited to give Bush a black eye. The IAC has had so much practice organizing protests this year that critics have begun calling it "Rent-a-Mob." Two political conventions last summer, and high-profile protests in Prague and Washington state, have helped create a highly professional organization.
And, for Gutierrez, the inauguration was an opportunity to vent what she admits is hatred. "Being originally from Texas, I hate Bush," Gutierrez says, citing his policies on the death penalty and gays and lesbians. "He's not likely to be concerned about most of the stuff the IAC is concerned with," she tells Insight. She admits it is too soon to know what Bush will do as president but, like many of the protesters, she's already made up her mind. "The inauguration protests are not going to be the end of this struggle. January 20 is just the beginning of the fight against the Bush administration."
The IAC had been hard at work setting up 50 organizing sites across the country. Sarah Sloan, an IAC staff organizer, tells Insight that some unions in New York City subsidized bus charters so that low-wage workers could travel to the demonstrations -- including Local 1199 of the National Union of Health Care Workers, the biggest union in the city. "They're subsidizing their members to go on our buses," says Sloan, who added that other unions around the nation had set up similar programs. "There are 450 groups who have endorsed our call to action," Sloan adds.
But not all the protesters who came out on Inauguration Day were in the nation's capital to rain on Bush's parade. Loud Citizen is a Web-based creation of computer programmer Kevin Conner, who in November organized rallies in 300 cities to protest Democratic Party resistance to the Florida election returns favoring Bush. Conner led a "Patriot's March" on Jan. 20. Billed as a rally, not a protest, the marchers convened on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear addresses by David Horowitz, the best-selling author and director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Popular Culture; Isabel Lyman, author of The Homeschooling Revolution; the Rev. Jesse Peterson, a radio talk-show host; and Chuck Muth, president of C-Four Communications.
The Christian Defense Coalition, founded by the Rev. Pat Mahoney, also held an Inauguration Day rally, urging Bush to rescind executive orders favorable to abortion that had been signed by President Clinton almost immediately after taking power from Bush pere.
But conservatives were a relatively small part of the street theatrics. The overwhelming number of signs and banners displayed by protesters and demonstrators at the inaugural ceremonies resembled those seen during the left-wing demonstrations at the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions last summer, protesting everything from the death penalty to environmentalism. However, there was no question the issues that brought out most of the protesters were spun directly from the wheel of Democratic Party politics.
"Initially we came together because we wanted them to count every vote. We felt that people had been disenfranchised down in Florida," says Teresa Ward, a spokeswoman for Democracy March. Like many other protesters, Ward and her group are pushing for campaign-finance reform and complaining about the Electoral College. They also share another characteristic with other protest groups that converged on Washington -- the claim that they sprang full blown from the brow of the Internet.
With political parties, special interests and labor unions spending large sums to organize and communicate over the Internet, it is not surprising that it has become the principal tool for strategic communication and mobilization of protest activism. Ideas are presented in affinity chat rooms until there are enough activists to start an email list. Soon a Webpage appears and the organization is under way. Voter March also claims to have been formed in this way. Lou Posner, a founding member of the group, tells Insight it arose spontaneously on the Web a week after Election Day.
"We were formed as a grass-roots organization in response to election irregularities and problems," says Posner. Voter March played a key role in organizing the main protest rally on Inauguration Day, acting as an umbrella organization for hundreds of smaller groups from across the country. They started at 10 a.m. with a rally at Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington before heading through the city on a three-mile march. Posner claimed his group is more mainstream than many of the others in his penumbra, but assured in the days leading up to the inauguration that marchers would be peaceful. "We're taking a pretty strong position that everything we're going to do is going to be legal and lawful," Posner told Insight.
With more than a dozen law-enforcement agencies committed to maintaining security, the authorities weren't taking any chances. For the first time the inauguration was designated a "national special security event," putting the Secret Service in overall charge. Serving under it for the inauguration were the U.S. Capitol Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Park Police, the Supreme Court Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), and extra forces from Maryland and Virginia.
"We'll have officers in the field and along the parade route, and we've also asked for anywhere from 1,200 to 1,400 officers from other jurisdictions to join us on the parade route," said Sgt. Joseph Gentile, director of public-relations for the MPD. The MPD force was the flagship organization heading into the inauguration, with all of its 3,600 officers on duty.
The Secret Service and other law-enforcement agencies used mountain bikes to keep tabs on the protesters. According to Shaughn Roettele, a mechanic with Revolution Cycle, a Washington bike shop, the most popular police bikes are made by Trek. He and several other mechanics at the shop were busy putting together an order of 15 of the $2,000 bikes for the Secret Service three days before the inauguration. Bikes have been an increasingly popular mode of transportation for law-enforcement agencies and have proved effective in keeping ahead of protesters. Saturday's parade route saw most of the law-enforcement agencies using the two-wheeled machines to cruise the parade route.
Not to be caught off guard by the crowds, the police didn't limit their efforts only to personnel and transportation. To the disappointment of tourists, about five miles of chain-link fencing six-feet high was erected near the Lincoln Memorial for the opening ceremonies and on large portions of The Mall. In a bold move that confirmed the security presence, people were required to pass through security checkpoints to attend the inaugural parade along Pennsylvania Avenue -- yet another sign of the intense security that blanketed the Capitol over the weekend. The Smithsonian and the Archives-Navy Memorial subway stops, both with entrances on The Mall, were shut down for the first time during an inauguration.
In many respects the scene was reminiscent of the police state that gripped Los Angeles during the Democratic National Convention last August. The Los Angeles Police Department also erected chain-link fencing outside the convention center and had a force there that was seen, felt and heard (see "Insight Staffer Shot at L.A. Riot Scene," Sept. 11, 2000). The increased security in the nation's capital was in part a response to protests during the last two years in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Prague and Seattle. According to MPD Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer, there was one officer every 6 to 8 feet along the parade route, as opposed to one officer every 10 to 16 feet, as has been customary for inaugurations. Not that it deterred the protesters. They made sure their message was heard loud and clear.
"The rubric of security will not be falsely used to prevent demonstrating," declared Brian Becker, codirector for the IAC. To make that point as strongly as possible, the IAC filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia only four days before the inauguration. The emergency motion for a preliminary injunction challenged the unprecedented number of checkpoints used, the vagueness of the description of materials allowed to be carried by protesters and various permit restrictions.
"We don't want to be teargassed or create a war zone but, as George Bush proceeds up Pennsylvania Avenue and as the eyes of the world focus on this, the world will see there is a very divided United States," Becker declared.
While the police executed a well-organized plan for keeping the city safe, the protesters worked to maximize their impact. The presence of the Rev. Al Sharpton, the cause-addicted preacher from New York City, drew attention to the alleged disenfranchisement of black voters, a Democratic Party wedge issue. While Bush was taking the oath of office, Sharpton was taking an oath to uphold the Voting Rights Act and to work to federalize voting standards across the country. As Bush gave a brief inaugural address, Sharpton launched a stem-winder for what he dubbed a "shadow inauguration" at Stanton Park on Capitol Hill. Other protests included African-Americans recruited in the city for a "Day of Outrage," protesting an alleged "illegitimate" president, and the Gore Majority and Oral Majority, protesting what they muled was a stolen election.
The Justice Action Movement (JAM) assured Insight it had a large number of demonstrators out protesting everything from labor rights to environmentalism. But Adam Eidinger, a spokesman for the group, said the inauguration protests focused primarily on a package of electoral reforms called the Voters' Bill of Rights.
JAM was another group started two months ago as a coalition front. Many of the professional protesters who do the world circuit are looking for methods of protest that will allow them to avoid getting arrested. Eidinger claims JAM has taken on that project. Maybe -- but according to the Washington City Paper he currently is facing trial on 11 misdemeanor counts -- including criminal conspiracy, mischief and possession of the implements of a crime stemming from an arrest while on route to anti-GOP protests during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia last summer. If convicted, he could face as many as five years in prison.
This sort of thing may help explain why groups such as Voter March made such an effort to distance themselves from the more experienced troupes of protesters. "Our group does not represent the `professional' protesters that you saw at the World Trade Organization [and] World Bank [meetings] and Republican convention," Posner tells Insight.
Several other groups also made a point of striking out on their own, including the National Organization for Women. They staged a demonstration outside the Senate earlier in the week to protest the nomination of former Missouri senator John Ashcroft for U.S. attorney general, and sent members out along the inaugural-parade route to defend abortion.
The AFL-CIO, whose headquarters is on 16th Street in Northwest Washington near the White House reviewing stand, decided to limit its protesting to Florida, according to public-affairs officer Rich Greer. "Our views were pretty clear when the polls closed up through the final Supreme Court decision," Greer tells Insight.
A half-dozen groups received National Park Service permits to protest along the 13-block section of Pennsylvania Avenue through which George W. Bush traveled from the U.S. Capitol to the White House. Permits also were granted for rallies at such prominent Washington landmarks as McPherson Square, The Ellipse, Dupont Circle and near the Supreme Court. In fact, no inauguration has attracted so much protest since 1973, when Richard Nixon was sworn for his second term after a crushing electoral victory over Vietnam War protest candidate George McGovern. An estimated 60,000 showed up on that occasion to march against the war and give McGovern a last hurrah.
Thirty-six days of election chaos proved to be enough to reorganize a "protest left" for a showdown in Washington. With one more spotlighted demonstration under their belts, organizations such as the IAC have expanded their e-mail databases, recruited new enthusiasts and, if they were lucky, found new financial sponsors to help carry them through the coming year.
Ted Hayes contributed to this article.
ARCHIVES: NYC Park Asks $12,500 from Louis Posner of Voter March for Park Use
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ARCHIVES: Voter March Press Release - Grassroots Group to Demand Voting Reform (May 19, 2001)
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ARCHIVES: Louis Posner from Voter March was Insightful Activist
"I began to follow him [Greg Palast] around, residing at the time within New Jersey Transit (oh, grief) distance from Gotham City. I like to think that with all my writing I helped make him famous. I hope so. I published at the time at www.votermarch.org, whose owner, Lou Posner, was among those insightful activists who stood outside the Supreme Court building after the 2000 selection had occurred, protesting."
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
ARCHIVES: Voter March Founder Louis Posner Organized Wash DC Rally for Electoral Reform
Voters Rally for Electoral Reform, CNN Politics, May 19, 2001
Election reform advocates planned to rally in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, California, to push for changes in the nation's voting system and a "full investigation" of the 2000 presidential election.
Despite losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore, George W. Bush won the presidency following a contentious five weeks of court battles and recounts that gave him the necessary electoral votes.
Saturday's demonstrations are organized by Voter March, the same group that brought thousands to Washington to protest Bush's inauguration in January. District police said at the time that the size of the demonstration rivaled those held at the Nixon inaugural in 1973.
Voter March founder Louis Posner said that he expected a diverse crowd at Saturday's rally -- "male, female, old, young, black, white, many of the 'first-time' protesters," he said.
Voter March seeks a reform of the election process -- including possibly scrapping the Electoral College system that allowed Bush to prevail.
The hotly contested election went into overtime after the November 7 vote when Florida's ballots -- and the state's 25 electoral votes that would decide the presidency -- were questioned.
The final blow to Gore's hopes came late on December 12, when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that Florida's attempts to recount by hand ballots that had been ignored on a machine count were unconstitutional.
Although, the court said that the state could remedy the problems, it allotted no time for such action before the midnight, December 12 deadline for the state to choose its electors.
"The indignation over the Supreme Court's highly partisan decision cuts across all social lines," Posner said. "Voter March continues to grow as more and more people commit their energies to ensuring that the rights of voters can never again be trampled."
Election reform advocates planned to rally in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, California, to push for changes in the nation's voting system and a "full investigation" of the 2000 presidential election.
Despite losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore, George W. Bush won the presidency following a contentious five weeks of court battles and recounts that gave him the necessary electoral votes.
Saturday's demonstrations are organized by Voter March, the same group that brought thousands to Washington to protest Bush's inauguration in January. District police said at the time that the size of the demonstration rivaled those held at the Nixon inaugural in 1973.
Voter March founder Louis Posner said that he expected a diverse crowd at Saturday's rally -- "male, female, old, young, black, white, many of the 'first-time' protesters," he said.
Voter March seeks a reform of the election process -- including possibly scrapping the Electoral College system that allowed Bush to prevail.
The hotly contested election went into overtime after the November 7 vote when Florida's ballots -- and the state's 25 electoral votes that would decide the presidency -- were questioned.
The final blow to Gore's hopes came late on December 12, when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that Florida's attempts to recount by hand ballots that had been ignored on a machine count were unconstitutional.
Although, the court said that the state could remedy the problems, it allotted no time for such action before the midnight, December 12 deadline for the state to choose its electors.
"The indignation over the Supreme Court's highly partisan decision cuts across all social lines," Posner said. "Voter March continues to grow as more and more people commit their energies to ensuring that the rights of voters can never again be trampled."
Sunday, October 24, 2010
ARCHIVES: Florida Fights Back - The Film
"Florida Fights Back" Resisting the Stolen Election, was written, produced and directed by Jeannine Ross and Bruce Yarock.
Featuring Greg Palast, Vincent Bugliosi, Bob Kunst and Lou Posner
"Florida Fights Back" shows you how a crime was committed against Democracy in Florida in the year 2000 and how the politicians, from both sides, took the path of least resistance. Through all of this you will see the need to stand up, speak out and take action.
This film is of, by and for the people - not the powerful!
Includes footage of the 2001 Academy Awards Protest and The 2001 Washington D.C. Voter March.
See Florida Fights Back
Featuring Greg Palast, Vincent Bugliosi, Bob Kunst and Lou Posner
"Florida Fights Back" shows you how a crime was committed against Democracy in Florida in the year 2000 and how the politicians, from both sides, took the path of least resistance. Through all of this you will see the need to stand up, speak out and take action.
This film is of, by and for the people - not the powerful!
Includes footage of the 2001 Academy Awards Protest and The 2001 Washington D.C. Voter March.
See Florida Fights Back
Sunday, October 17, 2010
ARCHIVES: Voter Rights March, May 19, 2001, Lou Posner, Voter March Founder and Chair
Speech of Lou Posner, founder and chair of Voter March at the Voter Rights March to Restore Democracy
at the West Capitol Steps in Washington DC on May 19th at 1:00 pm:
What of ELECTION REFORM? The greatest democracy on earth has the most
antiquated and UNEQUAL voting machines in the Western world, and some of the
most unequal and unfair voting practices in the entire world! How can we
fail to address our duty to preserve the tools that ensure the principles of
our founding fathers that are the very bedrock of our democracy, the tools
and principles that make us CITIZENS in this world, citizens of a great
shining democracy and NOT subjects in a dark tyranny.
What of these? How can we fail to address this matter NOW?
For years, experts have decried the antiquated equipment and practices, they
and government agencies recommending reform, but our legislation has not
acted on those recommendations. What are we waiting for that we ignore these
sacred obligations to the constitution's most fundamental guarantee?
Today, let us look at "America," where a government is now disconnected with
its country. Look at what has happened to this so-called democracy, in our
recent presidential race. The high court stopped a legal hand recount and
substituted their own votes to replace those of the electorate, the bedrock
principle of ANY democracy. In other words, they canceled our democracy.
They declared their winner as THE winner, vacating the votes of millions
because of an alleged unfairness to only ONE citizen, who was only ONE
candidate, in a regional state governed with an iron hand by that one
candidate's brother. As a final insult, the Court told the people - not to
worry, this is a one-time only deal - it will not be repeated.
One might ask, if the decision is so good and fine, why can it not be
repeated? Now, the court knows it has created a precedent, yet it pretends
it will NOT be a precedent, as if this election and hand count were "sui
generis," when elections and hand counts go on and have gone on ALL THE TIME
IN THIS COUNTRY IN THE PAST IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR OWN LAWS!
Indeed, the hand count is part of the WHOLE and NO LESS than the whole election. And all
the experts in many states know perfectly well that the hand recount is the
ONLY way to settle these things, being done routinely in the very state the
candidate hails from, signed into law by his own hand. Indeed, this
candidate, under the media radar, demanded and got a hand recount in another
state in the country, in a brazen example of hypocritical "privilege," and
"special rights." But the high court chose to ignore this inconsistency,
this inequality, and by so doing, gave aid and comfort to all the
irregularities and all the lawbreaking that accompanied this state's vote.
People who get away with committing crimes with impunity, passed over by the
highest court in the land, are only further emboldened to repeat them.
Ah, the beauty of possessing no conscience: Lie and then call your opponent
a liar. Demand hand recounts where they favor you and then call your
opponent a criminal for demanding hand recounts where they favor HIM. And
the final slap, GO AWOL and then accuse your opponent of despising the
military.
But the Court seems to ORDAIN that it will not happen again, providing a
balm to the masses, a false sense of security that their democracy is still
alive, unchanged and unmolested. But it is not, my friends. Judges may rule,
but they can never ORDAIN. They cannot project their decisions and their
orders into the future, onto future courts and what they will do. The Court,
comprised of mere mortals, have wrested from the "demos" the one power
granted directly to the people in the government scheme known as democracy.
That is a moral outrage no words can adequately convey.
Oh, but there were such difficulties, some say. It was messy. Yes, democracy
is messy, which is why laws are created to ensure fairness, laws this high
Court criminally ignored. It is not a fast buck made in a bubble economy. It
is, as Winston Churchill said, the worst form of government except for all
the other forms of government. A real democracy is hard work. It is patient
work.
It is NOT, as we have seen with our country, the perfect scam. Where we are
awash in evasions from officials who say, "I can't answer that, I refer you
to another official," and that official refers back to the first official,
or another official, or in the most egregious case, reporters are referred
to an outside, private company, which unilaterally disenfranchised thousands
of citizens of their right to vote, largely wrongly, it is later discovered,
but implemented without question in many areas of this one state. But when
some election supervisors, seeking to uphold their duty to the Constitution,
asked this company for information on their methodology and quality control,
they were told it was proprietary, commercial information and they couldn't
have it.
Think of that, my friends. The constitutional right to vote is outsourced to
a private company with no legal accountability. The privatization of a
citizen's right and duty to vote. It should strike fear in all our hearts at
the ease with which these "officials" dismiss this breach of government
trust and the social contract, as the state government refers you to the
company, but the company refers them back to the state, and in the end all
the accountability that an election is designed to be is lost forever in a
series of "I refer you to, I refer you to, I refer you to. . ." The perfect
scam. No democracy, no accountability, no blame. And all permitted to go
unpunished because of a high court's deliberate running out of an imaginary
and unnecessary clock, for the sake of "fairness" to only ONE of the
candidates, and to appoint that favored candidate a leader in a country
founded upon democratic principles.
WE MUST NEVER let this happen in our country. A statement throwing down the
gauntlet, pledging that we will NOT let this illegality stand. We will be
legitimately governed, but never ruled or overruled in this most important
of rights. I used to fear the enemy, but today I fear my own corrupt
countrymen and their greed for power at the expense of people and democracy.
Elections are not merely a substitution of ballots for bullets, of this
candidate or that. An election in a Republic is the expression of the will
of it citizens; it is our franchise, our birthright, a viewpoint that is as
conservative as the Constitution itself. But in our country, it has been
trampled upon with mob actions by a party and pistol-whipped into
meaninglessness by a partisan court.
We must NEVER let this happen here. We cannot look away from our duty, in
constant need of recharging, to preserve the tools that ensure the
principles of our founding fathers that are the very bedrock of our
democracy and our republic, the tools and principles that make us CITIZENS
in this mortal world, citizens of a great shining democracy and NOT subjects
in a dark tyranny.
at the West Capitol Steps in Washington DC on May 19th at 1:00 pm:
What of ELECTION REFORM? The greatest democracy on earth has the most
antiquated and UNEQUAL voting machines in the Western world, and some of the
most unequal and unfair voting practices in the entire world! How can we
fail to address our duty to preserve the tools that ensure the principles of
our founding fathers that are the very bedrock of our democracy, the tools
and principles that make us CITIZENS in this world, citizens of a great
shining democracy and NOT subjects in a dark tyranny.
What of these? How can we fail to address this matter NOW?
For years, experts have decried the antiquated equipment and practices, they
and government agencies recommending reform, but our legislation has not
acted on those recommendations. What are we waiting for that we ignore these
sacred obligations to the constitution's most fundamental guarantee?
Today, let us look at "America," where a government is now disconnected with
its country. Look at what has happened to this so-called democracy, in our
recent presidential race. The high court stopped a legal hand recount and
substituted their own votes to replace those of the electorate, the bedrock
principle of ANY democracy. In other words, they canceled our democracy.
They declared their winner as THE winner, vacating the votes of millions
because of an alleged unfairness to only ONE citizen, who was only ONE
candidate, in a regional state governed with an iron hand by that one
candidate's brother. As a final insult, the Court told the people - not to
worry, this is a one-time only deal - it will not be repeated.
One might ask, if the decision is so good and fine, why can it not be
repeated? Now, the court knows it has created a precedent, yet it pretends
it will NOT be a precedent, as if this election and hand count were "sui
generis," when elections and hand counts go on and have gone on ALL THE TIME
IN THIS COUNTRY IN THE PAST IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR OWN LAWS!
Indeed, the hand count is part of the WHOLE and NO LESS than the whole election. And all
the experts in many states know perfectly well that the hand recount is the
ONLY way to settle these things, being done routinely in the very state the
candidate hails from, signed into law by his own hand. Indeed, this
candidate, under the media radar, demanded and got a hand recount in another
state in the country, in a brazen example of hypocritical "privilege," and
"special rights." But the high court chose to ignore this inconsistency,
this inequality, and by so doing, gave aid and comfort to all the
irregularities and all the lawbreaking that accompanied this state's vote.
People who get away with committing crimes with impunity, passed over by the
highest court in the land, are only further emboldened to repeat them.
Ah, the beauty of possessing no conscience: Lie and then call your opponent
a liar. Demand hand recounts where they favor you and then call your
opponent a criminal for demanding hand recounts where they favor HIM. And
the final slap, GO AWOL and then accuse your opponent of despising the
military.
But the Court seems to ORDAIN that it will not happen again, providing a
balm to the masses, a false sense of security that their democracy is still
alive, unchanged and unmolested. But it is not, my friends. Judges may rule,
but they can never ORDAIN. They cannot project their decisions and their
orders into the future, onto future courts and what they will do. The Court,
comprised of mere mortals, have wrested from the "demos" the one power
granted directly to the people in the government scheme known as democracy.
That is a moral outrage no words can adequately convey.
Oh, but there were such difficulties, some say. It was messy. Yes, democracy
is messy, which is why laws are created to ensure fairness, laws this high
Court criminally ignored. It is not a fast buck made in a bubble economy. It
is, as Winston Churchill said, the worst form of government except for all
the other forms of government. A real democracy is hard work. It is patient
work.
It is NOT, as we have seen with our country, the perfect scam. Where we are
awash in evasions from officials who say, "I can't answer that, I refer you
to another official," and that official refers back to the first official,
or another official, or in the most egregious case, reporters are referred
to an outside, private company, which unilaterally disenfranchised thousands
of citizens of their right to vote, largely wrongly, it is later discovered,
but implemented without question in many areas of this one state. But when
some election supervisors, seeking to uphold their duty to the Constitution,
asked this company for information on their methodology and quality control,
they were told it was proprietary, commercial information and they couldn't
have it.
Think of that, my friends. The constitutional right to vote is outsourced to
a private company with no legal accountability. The privatization of a
citizen's right and duty to vote. It should strike fear in all our hearts at
the ease with which these "officials" dismiss this breach of government
trust and the social contract, as the state government refers you to the
company, but the company refers them back to the state, and in the end all
the accountability that an election is designed to be is lost forever in a
series of "I refer you to, I refer you to, I refer you to. . ." The perfect
scam. No democracy, no accountability, no blame. And all permitted to go
unpunished because of a high court's deliberate running out of an imaginary
and unnecessary clock, for the sake of "fairness" to only ONE of the
candidates, and to appoint that favored candidate a leader in a country
founded upon democratic principles.
WE MUST NEVER let this happen in our country. A statement throwing down the
gauntlet, pledging that we will NOT let this illegality stand. We will be
legitimately governed, but never ruled or overruled in this most important
of rights. I used to fear the enemy, but today I fear my own corrupt
countrymen and their greed for power at the expense of people and democracy.
Elections are not merely a substitution of ballots for bullets, of this
candidate or that. An election in a Republic is the expression of the will
of it citizens; it is our franchise, our birthright, a viewpoint that is as
conservative as the Constitution itself. But in our country, it has been
trampled upon with mob actions by a party and pistol-whipped into
meaninglessness by a partisan court.
We must NEVER let this happen here. We cannot look away from our duty, in
constant need of recharging, to preserve the tools that ensure the
principles of our founding fathers that are the very bedrock of our
democracy and our republic, the tools and principles that make us CITIZENS
in this mortal world, citizens of a great shining democracy and NOT subjects
in a dark tyranny.
ARCHIVES: Voter Rights March, 5/19.2001, Speech by World War II Veteran
WORLD WAR II VET FIGHTING FOR VOTER RIGHTS
By Sergeant Joe Crisalli
"In World War II, to preserve our freedom, we had to hold back fascism from our shores. We had to crush tyranny at the source in Germany and Italy. In the Pacific, we had to fight to guarantee that there would never be another Pearl Harbor attack. Now, there is a new attack of tyranny and fascism – from within. And it is time to fight again, a fight against the right-wing Republicans who attacked our freedom in their stifling of a fair election in Florida.
I am a veteran of World War II and proud to have served my country, and now I am part of a voters rights group in order to serve my country once again by insuring that our freedoms are not infringed.
A government ‘of, by and for the people’ is what America is all about. We are now concerned with the ‘by the people.’ The right to vote and be counted is the way the people’s voice is heard. The disenfranchisement of thousands of voters and the debacle in Florida proves that we must be vigilant. The Battle for Freedom for a government BY the people must continue with the Voters March."
World War II veterans like Joe Crisalli lead the Voter Rights March in Washington DC on May 19th, Armed Forces Day, to restore the democracy they fought and died for.
By Sergeant Joe Crisalli
"In World War II, to preserve our freedom, we had to hold back fascism from our shores. We had to crush tyranny at the source in Germany and Italy. In the Pacific, we had to fight to guarantee that there would never be another Pearl Harbor attack. Now, there is a new attack of tyranny and fascism – from within. And it is time to fight again, a fight against the right-wing Republicans who attacked our freedom in their stifling of a fair election in Florida.
I am a veteran of World War II and proud to have served my country, and now I am part of a voters rights group in order to serve my country once again by insuring that our freedoms are not infringed.
A government ‘of, by and for the people’ is what America is all about. We are now concerned with the ‘by the people.’ The right to vote and be counted is the way the people’s voice is heard. The disenfranchisement of thousands of voters and the debacle in Florida proves that we must be vigilant. The Battle for Freedom for a government BY the people must continue with the Voters March."
World War II veterans like Joe Crisalli lead the Voter Rights March in Washington DC on May 19th, Armed Forces Day, to restore the democracy they fought and died for.
ARCHIVES: Voter Rights March, May 19, 2001, Speech by Michael Rectenwald, Citizens for Legitimate Government
SPEECH OF MICHAEL D. RECTENWALD
Thank you. And thank you, Louis and the Voter March organization, for allowing me to speak today on behalf of Citizens for Legitimate Government.
“Election” 2000, in Historical ContextI have been asked why our group is called "Citizens For Legitimate Government." “Isn't the government already legitimate?" enquiring minds, most of them Republican, want to know. The question led me to consider what makes a government legitimate in the first place. Legitimacy of government, I reasoned, is judged by the fit between the existing government and the declared principles of that government. To understand a nation’s principles, one would turn to its founding charter, its written laws, and its political history.
If one does this review, the short answer to the question becomes quite obvious. The U.S. government has been rendered illegitimate by its own standards, the standards of electoral democracy.
The standard of electoral democracy was eliminated when the vote counting for the Florida electorate was abandoned, and judges selected a president. Contrary to the Constitution, Dale Reynolds writes in his poem, “These Five Against Us All,”
The standard for electoral democracy was violated by the takeover of government by corporate interests--and we now have the epitome of that takeover in the white-collar criminal who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In terms of the letter and the spirit of the law, then, our current government is illegitimate--its establishment runs contrary to our nation's constitution, which expresses our dearest principles of representative, democratic government, and equal rights.
Against these principles, we saw government officials, party operatives, and a federal judiciary, along with their media mouthpieces, use every means possible to suppress the truth of the voters' expressed will, and to install their own will in its stead. The list of these crimes is long, starting with an illegal purge of tens of thousands of voters, and ending with the Supreme Court Injustices, and I refer you to legitgov.org for the complete record.
The violation of voting rights in the millennial year brings back the long history of struggle for representation against oppression and vote suppression. A complete history might start with suffrage for propertied men in England and the Americas from the 15th century; continue with a centuries-long battle for lowered property requirements for adult male voters; go on to the eventual inclusion of most white working men by the late 19th century; detail the exclusion of African Americans from voting until the late 19th century, along with a series of reversals and victories thereafter, including the Civil Rights movement; entail the exclusion of women from the franchise until the early 20th century; and include the barriers of racial profiling, property ownership, voting tolls, and literacy requirements lasting well into the 20th century, especially in the southern states.
The long battle for voting rights brings us to Selection 2000, when the United States was driven far afield of its historical goal--universal adult suffrage. In the year 2000, we were set back to a fate worse than that of pre-1832 Britain, when, before the first Reform Bill, only thousands of propertied men out of millions of British subjects could vote. In 2000, we were reduced to having three white patriarchs, one token black male, and one white woman determine the outcome of a presidential election--by, as Dale Reynolds puts it, a “majority of one.”
The millennial election brings back the 1940s in Florida, when the votes of African Americans were called “little jokers." Made of tissue paper, these ballots fell apart and were thrown away by laughing vote-counters; the ballot was a "little joker" played on the African American "voter." In election 2000, over 180 thousand little jokers were dealt in Florida. At least 20,000 voters were purged in advance in a Jim Crow-like manner, never even making it to little joker status. Six million Floridian votes were thus rendered little jokers as well. One hundred million votes thus turned to little jokers. These were considered by a Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice laughed scornfully and dismissed as ludicrous the idea of counting all the little jokers--in Florida, or anywhere else for that matter! The whole idea of an election had been an expensive joke played on the country--the vote wasn't required at all, the Chief Justice scoffed, it was always already a little joker!
The Selection and its aftermath is a nightmare of history come back to haunt us, in new, monstrous proportions. Our little jokers cast, the punch line of the bad joke was delivered: GW Bush, that Big Joker's face and his policies mock our expressed will. Bush's policies are an extension of the antidemocratic grab for power by which he seized office. The litany of these policies is familiar by now, so I will not repeat it. But a few adjectives will do: anti-women, anti-labor, anti-worker safety, anti-affirmative action, anti-public-health, anti-public education, anti-separation-of-Church-and-State, anti-consumer, anti-child, anti-environment, anti-end-of-the-Cold-War, anti-human, anti-other-species; Polices that benefit only one species--that species of Big Business Animal that wrecks the habitats of other species, like Exxon-Mobil, who junks Global-warming science while raising the Global temperature. Bush raids the national treasury and the national forests for one group only: Big Business Owners. He throws a few crumbs to the reactionary religious ideologues that delivered their lambs for the slaughter.
In light of this fraudulent and dangerous outcome, we say "Nevermore." Nevermore can our votes be little jokers. Nevermore can we be purged from the voting rolls--under the guise of justice, under the pretense of “equal protection,” to “protect the interests” of the heir apparent!
At this point, what do we do? We say “Nevermore.” But when complicity is tantamount to treason, and the consequences are literally world threatening, true patriots must say, too, “NOT NOW, NOT EVER!” We must explore every avenue for exposing and prosecuting the election theft, and for countering the Bush Occupation. We must continue to protest Bush's every appearance. We must oppose his every executive act with activism. We must boycott Bush's contributors, starting with Exxon-Mobil, the biggest polluter in Texas, the second biggest energy industry GOP contributor, and the force driving US policy against the Kyoto Treaty. We must register voters, starting with our neighbors. We must vote into Congress representatives and senators expressly opposed to the Bush coup and Occupation. (This expressed opposition should be a litmus test for their election). We must call for investigations! We must work for impeachment! We must turn these jokers into wildcards to trump the kings. We must work to bring democracy to this stacked deck. We must work to bring down this precarious house of cards called the Bush presidency. We must undo the coup! That is what we must do.
Join us at legitgov.org or any of the other activist groups you find here -- join all Citizens for Legitimate Government, in our long haul quest to undo the coup, and redo democracy.
We must undo the coup!!
Thank you!!!
Michael Rectenwald, CLG
“Election” 2000, in Historical ContextI have been asked why our group is called "Citizens For Legitimate Government." “Isn't the government already legitimate?" enquiring minds, most of them Republican, want to know. The question led me to consider what makes a government legitimate in the first place. Legitimacy of government, I reasoned, is judged by the fit between the existing government and the declared principles of that government. To understand a nation’s principles, one would turn to its founding charter, its written laws, and its political history.
If one does this review, the short answer to the question becomes quite obvious. The U.S. government has been rendered illegitimate by its own standards, the standards of electoral democracy.
The standard of electoral democracy was eliminated when the vote counting for the Florida electorate was abandoned, and judges selected a president. Contrary to the Constitution, Dale Reynolds writes in his poem, “These Five Against Us All,”
The standard for electoral democracy was eliminated when state officials and party operatives broke laws in key posts, spoiling the real electoral results. Reynolds continues, the Supreme Court “would not hear the protest of black Americans stopped outside the polls, / or stricken, curiously, from the voting rolls.”[They] decided "Republic" meant Republican,
though conflicts of interest they hadn't disclosed
hadn't pre-empted the candidate they chose,
and outside journalists reported it was Bush by a nose.
Bush by 5 to 4, The United States Supreme Court said.
The standard for electoral democracy was violated by the takeover of government by corporate interests--and we now have the epitome of that takeover in the white-collar criminal who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In terms of the letter and the spirit of the law, then, our current government is illegitimate--its establishment runs contrary to our nation's constitution, which expresses our dearest principles of representative, democratic government, and equal rights.
Against these principles, we saw government officials, party operatives, and a federal judiciary, along with their media mouthpieces, use every means possible to suppress the truth of the voters' expressed will, and to install their own will in its stead. The list of these crimes is long, starting with an illegal purge of tens of thousands of voters, and ending with the Supreme Court Injustices, and I refer you to legitgov.org for the complete record.
The violation of voting rights in the millennial year brings back the long history of struggle for representation against oppression and vote suppression. A complete history might start with suffrage for propertied men in England and the Americas from the 15th century; continue with a centuries-long battle for lowered property requirements for adult male voters; go on to the eventual inclusion of most white working men by the late 19th century; detail the exclusion of African Americans from voting until the late 19th century, along with a series of reversals and victories thereafter, including the Civil Rights movement; entail the exclusion of women from the franchise until the early 20th century; and include the barriers of racial profiling, property ownership, voting tolls, and literacy requirements lasting well into the 20th century, especially in the southern states.
The long battle for voting rights brings us to Selection 2000, when the United States was driven far afield of its historical goal--universal adult suffrage. In the year 2000, we were set back to a fate worse than that of pre-1832 Britain, when, before the first Reform Bill, only thousands of propertied men out of millions of British subjects could vote. In 2000, we were reduced to having three white patriarchs, one token black male, and one white woman determine the outcome of a presidential election--by, as Dale Reynolds puts it, a “majority of one.”
The millennial election brings back the 1940s in Florida, when the votes of African Americans were called “little jokers." Made of tissue paper, these ballots fell apart and were thrown away by laughing vote-counters; the ballot was a "little joker" played on the African American "voter." In election 2000, over 180 thousand little jokers were dealt in Florida. At least 20,000 voters were purged in advance in a Jim Crow-like manner, never even making it to little joker status. Six million Floridian votes were thus rendered little jokers as well. One hundred million votes thus turned to little jokers. These were considered by a Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice laughed scornfully and dismissed as ludicrous the idea of counting all the little jokers--in Florida, or anywhere else for that matter! The whole idea of an election had been an expensive joke played on the country--the vote wasn't required at all, the Chief Justice scoffed, it was always already a little joker!
The Selection and its aftermath is a nightmare of history come back to haunt us, in new, monstrous proportions. Our little jokers cast, the punch line of the bad joke was delivered: GW Bush, that Big Joker's face and his policies mock our expressed will. Bush's policies are an extension of the antidemocratic grab for power by which he seized office. The litany of these policies is familiar by now, so I will not repeat it. But a few adjectives will do: anti-women, anti-labor, anti-worker safety, anti-affirmative action, anti-public-health, anti-public education, anti-separation-of-Church-and-State, anti-consumer, anti-child, anti-environment, anti-end-of-the-Cold-War, anti-human, anti-other-species; Polices that benefit only one species--that species of Big Business Animal that wrecks the habitats of other species, like Exxon-Mobil, who junks Global-warming science while raising the Global temperature. Bush raids the national treasury and the national forests for one group only: Big Business Owners. He throws a few crumbs to the reactionary religious ideologues that delivered their lambs for the slaughter.
In light of this fraudulent and dangerous outcome, we say "Nevermore." Nevermore can our votes be little jokers. Nevermore can we be purged from the voting rolls--under the guise of justice, under the pretense of “equal protection,” to “protect the interests” of the heir apparent!
At this point, what do we do? We say “Nevermore.” But when complicity is tantamount to treason, and the consequences are literally world threatening, true patriots must say, too, “NOT NOW, NOT EVER!” We must explore every avenue for exposing and prosecuting the election theft, and for countering the Bush Occupation. We must continue to protest Bush's every appearance. We must oppose his every executive act with activism. We must boycott Bush's contributors, starting with Exxon-Mobil, the biggest polluter in Texas, the second biggest energy industry GOP contributor, and the force driving US policy against the Kyoto Treaty. We must register voters, starting with our neighbors. We must vote into Congress representatives and senators expressly opposed to the Bush coup and Occupation. (This expressed opposition should be a litmus test for their election). We must call for investigations! We must work for impeachment! We must turn these jokers into wildcards to trump the kings. We must work to bring democracy to this stacked deck. We must work to bring down this precarious house of cards called the Bush presidency. We must undo the coup! That is what we must do.
Join us at legitgov.org or any of the other activist groups you find here -- join all Citizens for Legitimate Government, in our long haul quest to undo the coup, and redo democracy.
We must undo the coup!!
Thank you!!!
Michael Rectenwald, CLG
ARCHIVES: Voter Rights March, May 19, 2001, Speech by Ronnie Dugger
The New American Democracy
By Ronnie Dugger
It is an honor to be among you again.
On December 9th and 12th last, as the second millennium was easing to an end, our 212-year-old American Republic was stolen from us.
After the secret four-month constitutional convention in Philadelphia, a matron of the city asked Benjamin Franklin what they had produced. "A Republic, if you can keep it," Franklin said.
Well, we haven't kept it--we've lost it.
George W. Bush, his lawyers led by the crafty James Baker III, Bush's operatives in Florida led by his brother Jeb the Governor and Secretary of State Harris, and five members of the Supreme Court, inventing a new constitutional right for the occasion, usurped from the people the right to choose the President of the United States. The judges overthrew the government by selecting the President themselves, 5 to 4, rather than letting events take their constitutional course. When Governor Bush was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Court that had stolen it for him the government itself was seized in a judicial and presidential coup d'etat. Bush gave James Baker the dog's assignment of seizing the Presidency in
Florida as if it were a bone. The resulting compound crime was one clear line of events, each one pressed for or performed pursuant to a determined and relentlessly prosecuted scheme to abort the voters' will in Florida. Bush was guilty from the outset as an originator and throughout as the principal beneficiary, moving on many fronts to stop the vote recounting in
Florida, refusing to agree to a total manual recount of the entire state, accepting the Presidency from Rehnquist after the Court had stopped that recount, selected him, and thereby stolen the office for him. As James K. Galbraith perceived, by obstructing the election of the President, the Bush people prevented it, causing democracy to miscarry. Taking the oath, Bush
knowingly accepted the keys to the White House from the man giving him the oath and the four of his fellow judges who had stolen them. Together they denied the people of the United States the right to elect our President, whether it would have been Albert Gore or George W. Bush, for the four years 2001 to 2005.
Congress and the Presidency had already been delegitimized across the past 20 years, for most of us, by the triumph over the common good of uncontrolled campaign finance corruption and bribery. Now, in Bush v. Gore,
the Supreme Court delegitimized itself and therefore the court system arrayed
below it. These are the only three branches that we have--this is no longer
a respectable government. We have lost our entire government to a corporate
oligarchy that now governs us without our permission.
Permit me to repeat what I said to you on January 20th. The only basis
for democratic legitimacy is the consent of the governed. That was the deal.
The Presidency has been seized. The government has been seized. The
covenant is broken.
What does it mean, to admit, and to say, that your government is
illegitimate? According to the Oxford English Dictionary it means the
government is "not in accordance with, or authorized by, law." What Bush
ravaged when he accepted the stolen Presidency was much more than our
politics, more even than our self-respect as a democracy--he made a mockery
of our most fundamental agreement to respect and obey the laws the government
passes, to cooperate with the government because it's ours. This is what he
has done to the country that we love, he has undermined the authority of law
here. That is what we have lost, the very authority of law for our everyday
lives.
Going about his first 100 days, he cuts funding for international family
planning groups. He cancels new rules to prevent repetitive-stress injuries
for millions of new workers. He cancels a tightening of the standard for
arsenic in drinking water. He abandons his campaign promise to cut carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants. He reinstates the federal subsidy for
roads into our trackless forests for corporate logging. He moves to
weaponize space, under the cover of star wars, so that we can destroy any
nation's communications from space and thereby dominate all the nations and
peoples of the world. He puts a man over the Energy Department who wanted to
abolish it. He refuses to slap price controls on power and gasoline
profiteers. He shoves through the supine Republican-and-Democratic Congress
an insane $1.3-trillion-dollar tax cut that further enriches the already rich
on a ten-year set of assumptions that nobody, nobody at all, can accurately
make, and which rises in the second decade to a four-trillion cut which will
destroy Social Security and Medicare. He tries to "fast-track"--that is, to
deny Congress the right to amend in any way--the corporations-first trade
agreements, NAFTA, the WTO, the FTAA, that will destroy our local, state, and
national sovereignty over our own environment, commerce, and working
conditions. He calls protecting workers and the environment in these
agreements "protectionism." He and his allies in Congress have crushed all
talk of election reform because of the obvious fact that it insults him for
stealing the Presidency. And everything he's doing, everything, has no color
of law, is illegal, is illegitimate, is done in our names though not we, but
five tyrannical judges gave him the power that he is so tyrannically abusing.
If he had not stolen the Presidency we would have to accept it when he
and the Congress and their corporate paymasters abolish the estate
tax--abolish the tax that curbs, just a bit, the relentless tendency of
hereditary wealth to destroy democracy and economic justice--
But he did steal the Presidency, and when and if the Congress abolishes
the estate tax--or does any of the legions of other things akin to it that he
and the corporate lobbyists he admires are demanding--why, then, the hell we
will accept it. That will be just the action of a gaggle of thugs in our
house at night dressed up as hereditary aristocrats.
How, now, with a straight face, without provoking outcries of contempt,
can the man in the White House, trying perhaps to deal with some crisis of
order or rebellion here or abroad, invoke respect for the law having himself
stolen the Presidency?
He is no President of ours. Our Presidents in this free country are
only elected, they are never selected, never appointed. Only we elect our
Presidents and George W. Bush is not one of them.
I see from the signs among you that you know this next: Having seized
the awesome power of the Presidency to which he is not entitled, he uses that
power only as a tyrant. He feigns law-abidingness as did the tyrant
Peisistratus in sixth-century B.C. Athens, who won over the lawgiver Solon by
"shows of obedience" to Solon's laws except, of course, to the one against
tyranny. Although the President of the United States has absolute power only
in some momentous areas, such as control of our foreign policy and the use of
our military might, including our hydrogen bombs, Bush, having seized the
office, fairly well fits the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a
tyrant, "One who seizes upon the sovereign power in a state without legal
right; an absolute ruler; a usurper."
Looking back we should, and at least some of us will, label this four
years of the Bush illegitimacy as the Lawless Years, the Tyranny in American
history, the Tyrannical Interlude.
We trust that George the Second will not be succeeded by George the
Third--throwing us right back where we were in 1775--because we are men and
women and students on fire with controlled anger and we refuse to consent.
We refuse to cooperate.
We refuse to accept.
We reject the Bush Presidency totally, altogether, in every
particular--we will not forgive the theft it rests on, we will not forget
that all its acts are "not in accordance with, or authorized by, law," and we
will work to turn back on these four years and all the preparatory associated
betrayals of the people's good since the early 1970's and cancel the damage
to the extent we can.
One idea for something that can be done now to limit that damage--an
idea from Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School--is a firm resolve among the
Senate Democrats to confirm none--none--of Bush's Supreme Court nominations,
just letting the high court drop low to seven justices, or six, leaving those
remaining to ruminate on the trust which their institution has forfeited.
The Senate Democratic leaders shy, of course, from this, as from any bold
idea, but Professor Ackerman has proposed an appropriate remedy.
The Constitution permits impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Seizing the Presidency ranks among the highest crimes ever committed in the
United States. Bush should be impeached, but it's not going to happen in
such a Congress as this one.
A milder, but equally effective remedy is available, however, for the
crime committed by Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O'Connor. Scalia
told us all about Article II of the Constitution, that the people don't have
the right to elect the President, but he failed to tell us about Article III.
Article III provides that "the judges, both of the Supreme Court and the
inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior." The five
judges who stopped the election and chose the President they preferred should
be removed under this clause in Article III. Resolutions should be
introduced in Congress to remove them; perhaps we will elect a President and
Senate who will throw out as many of the five as still dare to sit up there
in 2005.
Obviously this is a time, these are four years, when we citizens must
stand forth as citizens. How about some citizens' indictments? For purposes
of discussion, I propose that we draw up and inscribe our names en masse, on
the Internet, to a citizens' indictment of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney,
James Baker III, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, William Rehnquist, Antonin
Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Anthony Kennedy for the
high crime of acting together to steal the people's right to elect the
President.
Democracy without the people controlling the counting of their own votes
is no democracy. Yet it goes unremarked in American elections that in most
of the precincts of the country the votecounting is done invisibly in
computers. Computers are not adding machines, they are machines that obey
orders. Computer votecounting codes are prepared by computer programmers in
the pay of the private election-business companies, which jealously guard the
codes as "trade secrets." Elections can be stolen by the computer
programmers, for themselves or for their companies, without leaving a trace.
Democracy itself has been privatized--that is, corporatized--and our
elections are subject to the tyranny of machines that conceal the counting of
our votes from us. As votecounting specialist Dr. Rebecca Mercuri wrote
recently, "a government that is by the machines, of the machines, and for the
machines can scarcely be called a democracy."
To get our country back into our possession I believe that we should
count our own votes again with our own hands and eyes in our own precincts on
election night across the country--we are dumb to trust the election
corporations' computerized systems, run by often computer-illiterate local
election officials relying heavily on assistance from the companies, to count
our votes in secret.
I believe, and challenge you to consider deep in your soul and in your
body, that we should now go into nonviolent rebellion against the theft of
our democracy last December in all its forms and manifestations--
And that the first step in this revolt is to agree that we will not call
Bush President.
Don't Call Him President.
Although I am fond of the idea of calling him George the Second, most
people will probably feel better just calling him Governor Bush. That's OK.
It's civil, and acknowledges he was a governor.
But can we agree never, in any context, written, spoken, or even in our
thoughts, to call him President Bush unless and until we elect him? In all
our references to him let's call him, civilly but noncooperatively, Governor
Bush. Let's write letters challenging reporters and TV for calling him
President. Let's amiably, but seriously tweak our friends over a cup of
coffee or at dinner if they call him President.
This is one unmistakable symbolic way we can nod to each other across
political parties, recognize each other across colors, and join together
across this beautiful continent as the free Americans who will not accept an
appointed President of the United States.
Second, how about a Back to Texas Movement? Bush and Cheney, Back to
Texas. Rove, Armey, and Delay, too-Back to Texas.
We should refuse to acknowledge the authority of any judge whom Governor
Bush appoints and the Senate confirms. Every federal judge he appoints is
illegitimate, whether confirmed or not, and can have no lawful authority to
sit in judgment looking down on us from those high federal benches. On the
door of any judge Governor Bush gets confirmed should appear the word,
"Illegitimate." And when we get a President and a Congress with the courage
to do right by the United States every one of them, including especially any
of his people who may make it onto the Supreme Court, should be impeached as
unlawfully appointed by an unlawfully appointed President. When you steal
our country, "Let bygones be bygones" is out, and out for life.
Unless the Democrats in Congress stand tough against the illegitimate
President all of us must demand to know, Why not? One main reason the
American Republic is in terminal trouble is the fact that most of the
officeholders of the Democratic Party, up at this level, have sold their
souls to the major corporations and the very rich. Now our collective civic
disaster has gone far beyond the tumults of party politics. This is the
country we love and would die for and millions of our fellow citizens have.
We must, I believe, ask Al Gore, too, why, when the Supreme Court announced
that it had stolen the Presidency from him by a 5 to 4 vote, he said that he
accepted it. This was his moment as a leader to say, "No--this is our
country--we love it--you cannot have it--I am not the issue here, the United
States is, and your decision is judicial tyranny." I believe Gore has to get
right on this if he wants to continue to lead.
When the world's superpower ceases to be democratic it's the world's
business, too. We should get together into a movement in order to invite a
small group of distinguished former officials abroad, comparable in stature
to our former President Jimmy Carter, to form a small international
commission to investigate the 2000 presidential election--the outrages
against African-American voters in Florida, the standing of an election when
the Supreme Court aborts the votecounting, what we Americans are supposed to
do about the fact that the President of our country was appointed by five
judges who preferred his election, how we have come to let private
corporations take over our votecounting and do it secretly, invisibly, in
computers.
Governor Bush's people become indignant when the United States gets
thrown off the UN body on human rights--as if his seizing the most powerful
and the most dangerous office and military in the world leaves our government
with the same standing we had before that happened, in the eyes of democratic
civilization. --As if when the people in the rest of the world, told that
he, himself, has decided that we will violate the ABM ballistic missiles
treaty and the Kyoto treaty on global warming, should meekly accept this
world-convulsing tyranny with what Governor Bush calls civility.
We citizens fighting to save our country not only from injustice,
but now from illegitimate injustice, should demand that the Senate ratify the treaty
establishing the proposed international criminal court not despite the fact
that some Americans might get indicted, but because they might.
Finally, it is time, oh, it is time, for us to form now, among all our
organizations, with all the sad, drifting citizens looking for hope for our
country--it is time for us to form one national people's movement,
independent of any political party, the Independent Allies, to demand and
fight, for example, for--
Public funding of our elections.
Single-payer national health insurance.
The restoration of the corporate taxation system and the
progressivity of the income tax, replacing the Social Security payroll tax with the increased
revenues.
Limits on the size of corporations, the cancellation of their alleged
"personhood" and their alleged personal constitutional rights, a stiff
criminal law taking them completely out of our politics, and the confirmation
of their original nature as our artificial creations totally answerable to
and totally subordinate to democracy.
Limits on personal wealth, and a guaranteed annual family income.
Free education as high as any student can make the grades.
First-home building subsidies and the opening of some public lands as
trust lands for homesteading to redeem the American dream of a home for every
family.
Equal rights and equal pay for women.
A living wage by law for every working person.
Repeal of the Taft-Hartley law and criminal prosecution of corporations
that bedevil union organizers.
That's just for starters.
And it is far past time that such a new national people's movement
should link up with the citizens' movements abroad that are in nonviolent rebellion
against the corporatization of human life, to work together worldwide for
such attainable goals as--
Clean energy, wind and solar, and the as-rapid-as-possible phasing down
and out of oil, coal, and nuclear power.
For international trade for people and the environment everywhere, not
just for the rampaging transnational corporations.
And for world citizenship, and an international democracy with a
constitution worthy of the human race.
None of this can we get just because our government has been stolen.
Some of this we can get fairly soon only if we rebel and organize and
mobilize, as independent allies for communication, education, and action, in
coalitions of coalitions, and then in one confederal, interacting coalition
of independent organizations, all together.
Let's start with a bumper-sticker rebellion.
Don't Call Him President.
Governor Bush/Is Not the President.
The Supreme Court/Is Not Supreme.
Bush and Cheney-Back to Texas!
Much of the work of building the movement is not high-profile--it's
demonstrating, registering voters, teaching people about instant runoff
voting and proportional representation, marching and rallying as we are
today, confronting our representatives, getting out the vote--it's day-in,
day-out dutifulness.
More and more of us will move gravely into nonviolent civil
disobedience, too, as history requires--direct civil revolt--risking ourselves, peacefully
putting our bodies where our patriotism is, facing handcuffs, locked doors,
frozen faces, tear gas, police phalanxes.
The time has probably come to quit going where they go, Seattle,
Washington, Davos, Quebec City, Qatar--and to go where we want to go to do
what we want to do. To mobilize and to go meet in small numbers and large,
to act for and plan the society we want and organize to get it.
Whatever we do, let's do it nonviolently. Only nonviolently.
Let's have a rule among all the people we agree to work with that we are
against violence against persons and will not enter into coalition or
cooperate with anyone who reserves the right to engage in any kind of
violence.
At Seattle, the only people who committed violence against people were
the police. But at Washington last year, as policemen charged crowds on
horseback and idly knocked over young people armlocked together blocking
streets, demonstrators threw rocks and other objects at police--I saw them do
it. At Quebec City last month, the police gassed the protesters, and people
from the Alliance saw some in the crowd throw rocks and other heavy objects
at the police.
Learning from Gandhi and King, if the police attack us we will not
respond physically--we will not oppose them--we will not touch them.
Violence against people? No. Violence against the police? No.
Violence against property? No.
You won't pledge not to be violent? Then you're off on your own.
Learning since Seattle that the municipal police forces in major U.S.
cities and in Canada are trying to repeal the freedom of assembly, we will
assemble when and where we wish in crowds as large as we wish--always
nonviolently, anti-violently--and we will morally overpower the marching,
militarized, pepper-gas-firing police by the simple fact that we are the
peaceable people.
We need the leader for all this. God, we all know, we need her or him.
We don't have this yet.
So I have a proposal.
Let's bring back Martin Luther King.
Let's join our African-American brothers and sisters in their just call
for reparations for slavery. Slaves worked to build this nation. They
helped build this Capitol in front of you. They hoisted Lady Liberty up to
the top of that dome. For this their pay rate was $5 a day. The United
States government cut the checks for their work not to them, but to their
owners.
Let's go with the slaves' descendants and with every other oppressed
group to renew, to revive, Dr. King's great project, which he was raising
money for just before he was murdered, to have a vast encampment for peace
and economic justice in Washington, to end poverty, and stop the Vietnam war.
It was bad then, people in poverty, blood in the streets, people
dying on TV every night. But it's bad now--we know the world's great misery is within
our reach to ease--the corporate oligarchy has stolen our government from
us--and they are blowing up the ABM and Kyoto treaties and reaching to
control the world from space.
We are not going to just stand quiet for this.
We are, after all, Americans.
Let us declare ourselves, here and now together, the Democracy and
Justice Movement.
We are Democrats, we are Republicans, we are Greens, we are
independents,
we are progressives, conservatives, populists, moderates, libertarians,
everyday Americans, we are whites, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans,
Asian-Americans, men, women, workers, students, we are straight, gay, bi, and
God knows what else, and what we are all is free, standing whole in the same
dignity, self-respect, and power of being persons, just as our forebears did
when they launched the American Revolution.
We are patriots--we are patriots--we all want to be just, we all want to
participate in governing our own town and our city and our country and our
world, and we will not be cooperative and obedient as usurpers make over the
United States into dominator of the world.
Let's pay more heed to the likes of Scalia, William Buckley, Tom Delay,
and George Will when they instruct us that the American Republic is no
democracy and we should be grateful for the chance to serve our betters.
Through the past two centuries by our many struggles we have been
realizing the promise of the American Revolution, step by step. We have
added, to the Republic, with one citizens' uprising and movement after
another, freedom from slavery (though not yet from penury) for blacks--the
legal right to form labor unions--an effective revulsion and rebellion
against an unjust war that we were waging smack dab in the middle of that
war--the vote and legal equality for blacks and women--equal treatment for
gays.
But our persecuted labor unions are still ravaged by laws written
for the corporations that are now exporting our industries and raging out of control
all over the world, and the disparities of wealth and poverty among us, and
between us and the rest of the human race, are becoming morally unbearable.
If Bill Gates stopped to pick up $100 bills all over the street, he'd
lose money. The assets of the 450 billionaires in the world are equal to
the assets of half of humanity. Two billion people have no toilets, and no
schools, but they do have anemia. The sales of the 200 largest corporations
are 18 times the combined annual income of the 1,200,000,000 people, one in
every four of us on earth, who live in absolute poverty on $1, or less, a day.
Perhaps finally now, taking all this and the theft of the Presidency
into account, we have to square our shoulders a bit and just let the old American
Republic go, they've ruptured it, so let's just let it go, and get about the
work of forming, how we don't yet know, but together, and sooner, not later,
a new American democracy,--
--wherein we accept each other in deepest equality,
--where everybody's vote is counted and every material body of
opinion is represented proportionally in the government,
--where our President is the one who gets the most votes,
--where the members of the Supreme Court must stand in a contested
election every eight years,
--where the fairness of democracy has come to mean, also, a democratic
distribution of the goods and services that everyone has a right to in order
to have a fair chance to realize his or her best self.
Let's come together here in Washington--next fall?--next spring?--let's
decide when and how together--and occupy the place, after all it's ours, and
stop the government. Just stop it. Make the Capital the epicenter of a
national nonviolent revolt, for full citizenship for the citizens of the
District and full citizenship for us all. Stop the crimes against democracy
here in the Capitol, and over there at the White House, and over there at the
Supreme Court, stop them just by being here, peacefully, eloquently,
honoring, remembering, and reciting from, Martin Luther King. An encampment,
speaking out, picnics, singing, dancing, sleeping on the grass! And, when
we're ready, we'll start things up again as the New American Democracy--the
American Revolution--Democracy, and Justice--at last more nearly realized
among us,
And then, we whisper, to each other, and to ourselves,
Yes,
The New American Democracy.
To communicate with Dugger or for further information about the Alliance for Democracy, email him at rdugger123@aol.com.
________________________________________________________________
Afternote: In this speech Dugger was expressing his own opinions and was not
speaking for an organization. He wishes to thank, for ideas which one way or
another are included in this speech, Marcus Raskin of the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., Professor Steve Russell of San Antonio,
TX., Nick Seidita, Northridge, Ca., and colleagues of Dugger's on the Council
of the Alliance, especially Ted Dooley, St. Paul, Minn.; Nancy Price, Davis,
Ca.; Sue Wheaton, Tacoma Park, Md.; Stefanie Miller, Indianapolis, Ind.;
Vikki Savee, Sacramento, Ca.; and Dolly Arond, Northridge, Ca.
By Ronnie Dugger
It is an honor to be among you again.
On December 9th and 12th last, as the second millennium was easing to an end, our 212-year-old American Republic was stolen from us.
After the secret four-month constitutional convention in Philadelphia, a matron of the city asked Benjamin Franklin what they had produced. "A Republic, if you can keep it," Franklin said.
Well, we haven't kept it--we've lost it.
George W. Bush, his lawyers led by the crafty James Baker III, Bush's operatives in Florida led by his brother Jeb the Governor and Secretary of State Harris, and five members of the Supreme Court, inventing a new constitutional right for the occasion, usurped from the people the right to choose the President of the United States. The judges overthrew the government by selecting the President themselves, 5 to 4, rather than letting events take their constitutional course. When Governor Bush was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Court that had stolen it for him the government itself was seized in a judicial and presidential coup d'etat. Bush gave James Baker the dog's assignment of seizing the Presidency in
Florida as if it were a bone. The resulting compound crime was one clear line of events, each one pressed for or performed pursuant to a determined and relentlessly prosecuted scheme to abort the voters' will in Florida. Bush was guilty from the outset as an originator and throughout as the principal beneficiary, moving on many fronts to stop the vote recounting in
Florida, refusing to agree to a total manual recount of the entire state, accepting the Presidency from Rehnquist after the Court had stopped that recount, selected him, and thereby stolen the office for him. As James K. Galbraith perceived, by obstructing the election of the President, the Bush people prevented it, causing democracy to miscarry. Taking the oath, Bush
knowingly accepted the keys to the White House from the man giving him the oath and the four of his fellow judges who had stolen them. Together they denied the people of the United States the right to elect our President, whether it would have been Albert Gore or George W. Bush, for the four years 2001 to 2005.
Congress and the Presidency had already been delegitimized across the past 20 years, for most of us, by the triumph over the common good of uncontrolled campaign finance corruption and bribery. Now, in Bush v. Gore,
the Supreme Court delegitimized itself and therefore the court system arrayed
below it. These are the only three branches that we have--this is no longer
a respectable government. We have lost our entire government to a corporate
oligarchy that now governs us without our permission.
Permit me to repeat what I said to you on January 20th. The only basis
for democratic legitimacy is the consent of the governed. That was the deal.
The Presidency has been seized. The government has been seized. The
covenant is broken.
What does it mean, to admit, and to say, that your government is
illegitimate? According to the Oxford English Dictionary it means the
government is "not in accordance with, or authorized by, law." What Bush
ravaged when he accepted the stolen Presidency was much more than our
politics, more even than our self-respect as a democracy--he made a mockery
of our most fundamental agreement to respect and obey the laws the government
passes, to cooperate with the government because it's ours. This is what he
has done to the country that we love, he has undermined the authority of law
here. That is what we have lost, the very authority of law for our everyday
lives.
Going about his first 100 days, he cuts funding for international family
planning groups. He cancels new rules to prevent repetitive-stress injuries
for millions of new workers. He cancels a tightening of the standard for
arsenic in drinking water. He abandons his campaign promise to cut carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants. He reinstates the federal subsidy for
roads into our trackless forests for corporate logging. He moves to
weaponize space, under the cover of star wars, so that we can destroy any
nation's communications from space and thereby dominate all the nations and
peoples of the world. He puts a man over the Energy Department who wanted to
abolish it. He refuses to slap price controls on power and gasoline
profiteers. He shoves through the supine Republican-and-Democratic Congress
an insane $1.3-trillion-dollar tax cut that further enriches the already rich
on a ten-year set of assumptions that nobody, nobody at all, can accurately
make, and which rises in the second decade to a four-trillion cut which will
destroy Social Security and Medicare. He tries to "fast-track"--that is, to
deny Congress the right to amend in any way--the corporations-first trade
agreements, NAFTA, the WTO, the FTAA, that will destroy our local, state, and
national sovereignty over our own environment, commerce, and working
conditions. He calls protecting workers and the environment in these
agreements "protectionism." He and his allies in Congress have crushed all
talk of election reform because of the obvious fact that it insults him for
stealing the Presidency. And everything he's doing, everything, has no color
of law, is illegal, is illegitimate, is done in our names though not we, but
five tyrannical judges gave him the power that he is so tyrannically abusing.
If he had not stolen the Presidency we would have to accept it when he
and the Congress and their corporate paymasters abolish the estate
tax--abolish the tax that curbs, just a bit, the relentless tendency of
hereditary wealth to destroy democracy and economic justice--
But he did steal the Presidency, and when and if the Congress abolishes
the estate tax--or does any of the legions of other things akin to it that he
and the corporate lobbyists he admires are demanding--why, then, the hell we
will accept it. That will be just the action of a gaggle of thugs in our
house at night dressed up as hereditary aristocrats.
How, now, with a straight face, without provoking outcries of contempt,
can the man in the White House, trying perhaps to deal with some crisis of
order or rebellion here or abroad, invoke respect for the law having himself
stolen the Presidency?
He is no President of ours. Our Presidents in this free country are
only elected, they are never selected, never appointed. Only we elect our
Presidents and George W. Bush is not one of them.
I see from the signs among you that you know this next: Having seized
the awesome power of the Presidency to which he is not entitled, he uses that
power only as a tyrant. He feigns law-abidingness as did the tyrant
Peisistratus in sixth-century B.C. Athens, who won over the lawgiver Solon by
"shows of obedience" to Solon's laws except, of course, to the one against
tyranny. Although the President of the United States has absolute power only
in some momentous areas, such as control of our foreign policy and the use of
our military might, including our hydrogen bombs, Bush, having seized the
office, fairly well fits the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a
tyrant, "One who seizes upon the sovereign power in a state without legal
right; an absolute ruler; a usurper."
Looking back we should, and at least some of us will, label this four
years of the Bush illegitimacy as the Lawless Years, the Tyranny in American
history, the Tyrannical Interlude.
We trust that George the Second will not be succeeded by George the
Third--throwing us right back where we were in 1775--because we are men and
women and students on fire with controlled anger and we refuse to consent.
We refuse to cooperate.
We refuse to accept.
We reject the Bush Presidency totally, altogether, in every
particular--we will not forgive the theft it rests on, we will not forget
that all its acts are "not in accordance with, or authorized by, law," and we
will work to turn back on these four years and all the preparatory associated
betrayals of the people's good since the early 1970's and cancel the damage
to the extent we can.
One idea for something that can be done now to limit that damage--an
idea from Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School--is a firm resolve among the
Senate Democrats to confirm none--none--of Bush's Supreme Court nominations,
just letting the high court drop low to seven justices, or six, leaving those
remaining to ruminate on the trust which their institution has forfeited.
The Senate Democratic leaders shy, of course, from this, as from any bold
idea, but Professor Ackerman has proposed an appropriate remedy.
The Constitution permits impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Seizing the Presidency ranks among the highest crimes ever committed in the
United States. Bush should be impeached, but it's not going to happen in
such a Congress as this one.
A milder, but equally effective remedy is available, however, for the
crime committed by Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O'Connor. Scalia
told us all about Article II of the Constitution, that the people don't have
the right to elect the President, but he failed to tell us about Article III.
Article III provides that "the judges, both of the Supreme Court and the
inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior." The five
judges who stopped the election and chose the President they preferred should
be removed under this clause in Article III. Resolutions should be
introduced in Congress to remove them; perhaps we will elect a President and
Senate who will throw out as many of the five as still dare to sit up there
in 2005.
Obviously this is a time, these are four years, when we citizens must
stand forth as citizens. How about some citizens' indictments? For purposes
of discussion, I propose that we draw up and inscribe our names en masse, on
the Internet, to a citizens' indictment of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney,
James Baker III, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, William Rehnquist, Antonin
Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Anthony Kennedy for the
high crime of acting together to steal the people's right to elect the
President.
Democracy without the people controlling the counting of their own votes
is no democracy. Yet it goes unremarked in American elections that in most
of the precincts of the country the votecounting is done invisibly in
computers. Computers are not adding machines, they are machines that obey
orders. Computer votecounting codes are prepared by computer programmers in
the pay of the private election-business companies, which jealously guard the
codes as "trade secrets." Elections can be stolen by the computer
programmers, for themselves or for their companies, without leaving a trace.
Democracy itself has been privatized--that is, corporatized--and our
elections are subject to the tyranny of machines that conceal the counting of
our votes from us. As votecounting specialist Dr. Rebecca Mercuri wrote
recently, "a government that is by the machines, of the machines, and for the
machines can scarcely be called a democracy."
To get our country back into our possession I believe that we should
count our own votes again with our own hands and eyes in our own precincts on
election night across the country--we are dumb to trust the election
corporations' computerized systems, run by often computer-illiterate local
election officials relying heavily on assistance from the companies, to count
our votes in secret.
I believe, and challenge you to consider deep in your soul and in your
body, that we should now go into nonviolent rebellion against the theft of
our democracy last December in all its forms and manifestations--
And that the first step in this revolt is to agree that we will not call
Bush President.
Don't Call Him President.
Although I am fond of the idea of calling him George the Second, most
people will probably feel better just calling him Governor Bush. That's OK.
It's civil, and acknowledges he was a governor.
But can we agree never, in any context, written, spoken, or even in our
thoughts, to call him President Bush unless and until we elect him? In all
our references to him let's call him, civilly but noncooperatively, Governor
Bush. Let's write letters challenging reporters and TV for calling him
President. Let's amiably, but seriously tweak our friends over a cup of
coffee or at dinner if they call him President.
This is one unmistakable symbolic way we can nod to each other across
political parties, recognize each other across colors, and join together
across this beautiful continent as the free Americans who will not accept an
appointed President of the United States.
Second, how about a Back to Texas Movement? Bush and Cheney, Back to
Texas. Rove, Armey, and Delay, too-Back to Texas.
We should refuse to acknowledge the authority of any judge whom Governor
Bush appoints and the Senate confirms. Every federal judge he appoints is
illegitimate, whether confirmed or not, and can have no lawful authority to
sit in judgment looking down on us from those high federal benches. On the
door of any judge Governor Bush gets confirmed should appear the word,
"Illegitimate." And when we get a President and a Congress with the courage
to do right by the United States every one of them, including especially any
of his people who may make it onto the Supreme Court, should be impeached as
unlawfully appointed by an unlawfully appointed President. When you steal
our country, "Let bygones be bygones" is out, and out for life.
Unless the Democrats in Congress stand tough against the illegitimate
President all of us must demand to know, Why not? One main reason the
American Republic is in terminal trouble is the fact that most of the
officeholders of the Democratic Party, up at this level, have sold their
souls to the major corporations and the very rich. Now our collective civic
disaster has gone far beyond the tumults of party politics. This is the
country we love and would die for and millions of our fellow citizens have.
We must, I believe, ask Al Gore, too, why, when the Supreme Court announced
that it had stolen the Presidency from him by a 5 to 4 vote, he said that he
accepted it. This was his moment as a leader to say, "No--this is our
country--we love it--you cannot have it--I am not the issue here, the United
States is, and your decision is judicial tyranny." I believe Gore has to get
right on this if he wants to continue to lead.
When the world's superpower ceases to be democratic it's the world's
business, too. We should get together into a movement in order to invite a
small group of distinguished former officials abroad, comparable in stature
to our former President Jimmy Carter, to form a small international
commission to investigate the 2000 presidential election--the outrages
against African-American voters in Florida, the standing of an election when
the Supreme Court aborts the votecounting, what we Americans are supposed to
do about the fact that the President of our country was appointed by five
judges who preferred his election, how we have come to let private
corporations take over our votecounting and do it secretly, invisibly, in
computers.
Governor Bush's people become indignant when the United States gets
thrown off the UN body on human rights--as if his seizing the most powerful
and the most dangerous office and military in the world leaves our government
with the same standing we had before that happened, in the eyes of democratic
civilization. --As if when the people in the rest of the world, told that
he, himself, has decided that we will violate the ABM ballistic missiles
treaty and the Kyoto treaty on global warming, should meekly accept this
world-convulsing tyranny with what Governor Bush calls civility.
We citizens fighting to save our country not only from injustice,
but now from illegitimate injustice, should demand that the Senate ratify the treaty
establishing the proposed international criminal court not despite the fact
that some Americans might get indicted, but because they might.
Finally, it is time, oh, it is time, for us to form now, among all our
organizations, with all the sad, drifting citizens looking for hope for our
country--it is time for us to form one national people's movement,
independent of any political party, the Independent Allies, to demand and
fight, for example, for--
Public funding of our elections.
Single-payer national health insurance.
The restoration of the corporate taxation system and the
progressivity of the income tax, replacing the Social Security payroll tax with the increased
revenues.
Limits on the size of corporations, the cancellation of their alleged
"personhood" and their alleged personal constitutional rights, a stiff
criminal law taking them completely out of our politics, and the confirmation
of their original nature as our artificial creations totally answerable to
and totally subordinate to democracy.
Limits on personal wealth, and a guaranteed annual family income.
Free education as high as any student can make the grades.
First-home building subsidies and the opening of some public lands as
trust lands for homesteading to redeem the American dream of a home for every
family.
Equal rights and equal pay for women.
A living wage by law for every working person.
Repeal of the Taft-Hartley law and criminal prosecution of corporations
that bedevil union organizers.
That's just for starters.
And it is far past time that such a new national people's movement
should link up with the citizens' movements abroad that are in nonviolent rebellion
against the corporatization of human life, to work together worldwide for
such attainable goals as--
Clean energy, wind and solar, and the as-rapid-as-possible phasing down
and out of oil, coal, and nuclear power.
For international trade for people and the environment everywhere, not
just for the rampaging transnational corporations.
And for world citizenship, and an international democracy with a
constitution worthy of the human race.
None of this can we get just because our government has been stolen.
Some of this we can get fairly soon only if we rebel and organize and
mobilize, as independent allies for communication, education, and action, in
coalitions of coalitions, and then in one confederal, interacting coalition
of independent organizations, all together.
Let's start with a bumper-sticker rebellion.
Don't Call Him President.
Governor Bush/Is Not the President.
The Supreme Court/Is Not Supreme.
Bush and Cheney-Back to Texas!
Much of the work of building the movement is not high-profile--it's
demonstrating, registering voters, teaching people about instant runoff
voting and proportional representation, marching and rallying as we are
today, confronting our representatives, getting out the vote--it's day-in,
day-out dutifulness.
More and more of us will move gravely into nonviolent civil
disobedience, too, as history requires--direct civil revolt--risking ourselves, peacefully
putting our bodies where our patriotism is, facing handcuffs, locked doors,
frozen faces, tear gas, police phalanxes.
The time has probably come to quit going where they go, Seattle,
Washington, Davos, Quebec City, Qatar--and to go where we want to go to do
what we want to do. To mobilize and to go meet in small numbers and large,
to act for and plan the society we want and organize to get it.
Whatever we do, let's do it nonviolently. Only nonviolently.
Let's have a rule among all the people we agree to work with that we are
against violence against persons and will not enter into coalition or
cooperate with anyone who reserves the right to engage in any kind of
violence.
At Seattle, the only people who committed violence against people were
the police. But at Washington last year, as policemen charged crowds on
horseback and idly knocked over young people armlocked together blocking
streets, demonstrators threw rocks and other objects at police--I saw them do
it. At Quebec City last month, the police gassed the protesters, and people
from the Alliance saw some in the crowd throw rocks and other heavy objects
at the police.
Learning from Gandhi and King, if the police attack us we will not
respond physically--we will not oppose them--we will not touch them.
Violence against people? No. Violence against the police? No.
Violence against property? No.
You won't pledge not to be violent? Then you're off on your own.
Learning since Seattle that the municipal police forces in major U.S.
cities and in Canada are trying to repeal the freedom of assembly, we will
assemble when and where we wish in crowds as large as we wish--always
nonviolently, anti-violently--and we will morally overpower the marching,
militarized, pepper-gas-firing police by the simple fact that we are the
peaceable people.
We need the leader for all this. God, we all know, we need her or him.
We don't have this yet.
So I have a proposal.
Let's bring back Martin Luther King.
Let's join our African-American brothers and sisters in their just call
for reparations for slavery. Slaves worked to build this nation. They
helped build this Capitol in front of you. They hoisted Lady Liberty up to
the top of that dome. For this their pay rate was $5 a day. The United
States government cut the checks for their work not to them, but to their
owners.
Let's go with the slaves' descendants and with every other oppressed
group to renew, to revive, Dr. King's great project, which he was raising
money for just before he was murdered, to have a vast encampment for peace
and economic justice in Washington, to end poverty, and stop the Vietnam war.
It was bad then, people in poverty, blood in the streets, people
dying on TV every night. But it's bad now--we know the world's great misery is within
our reach to ease--the corporate oligarchy has stolen our government from
us--and they are blowing up the ABM and Kyoto treaties and reaching to
control the world from space.
We are not going to just stand quiet for this.
We are, after all, Americans.
Let us declare ourselves, here and now together, the Democracy and
Justice Movement.
We are Democrats, we are Republicans, we are Greens, we are
independents,
we are progressives, conservatives, populists, moderates, libertarians,
everyday Americans, we are whites, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans,
Asian-Americans, men, women, workers, students, we are straight, gay, bi, and
God knows what else, and what we are all is free, standing whole in the same
dignity, self-respect, and power of being persons, just as our forebears did
when they launched the American Revolution.
We are patriots--we are patriots--we all want to be just, we all want to
participate in governing our own town and our city and our country and our
world, and we will not be cooperative and obedient as usurpers make over the
United States into dominator of the world.
Let's pay more heed to the likes of Scalia, William Buckley, Tom Delay,
and George Will when they instruct us that the American Republic is no
democracy and we should be grateful for the chance to serve our betters.
Through the past two centuries by our many struggles we have been
realizing the promise of the American Revolution, step by step. We have
added, to the Republic, with one citizens' uprising and movement after
another, freedom from slavery (though not yet from penury) for blacks--the
legal right to form labor unions--an effective revulsion and rebellion
against an unjust war that we were waging smack dab in the middle of that
war--the vote and legal equality for blacks and women--equal treatment for
gays.
But our persecuted labor unions are still ravaged by laws written
for the corporations that are now exporting our industries and raging out of control
all over the world, and the disparities of wealth and poverty among us, and
between us and the rest of the human race, are becoming morally unbearable.
If Bill Gates stopped to pick up $100 bills all over the street, he'd
lose money. The assets of the 450 billionaires in the world are equal to
the assets of half of humanity. Two billion people have no toilets, and no
schools, but they do have anemia. The sales of the 200 largest corporations
are 18 times the combined annual income of the 1,200,000,000 people, one in
every four of us on earth, who live in absolute poverty on $1, or less, a day.
Perhaps finally now, taking all this and the theft of the Presidency
into account, we have to square our shoulders a bit and just let the old American
Republic go, they've ruptured it, so let's just let it go, and get about the
work of forming, how we don't yet know, but together, and sooner, not later,
a new American democracy,--
--wherein we accept each other in deepest equality,
--where everybody's vote is counted and every material body of
opinion is represented proportionally in the government,
--where our President is the one who gets the most votes,
--where the members of the Supreme Court must stand in a contested
election every eight years,
--where the fairness of democracy has come to mean, also, a democratic
distribution of the goods and services that everyone has a right to in order
to have a fair chance to realize his or her best self.
Let's come together here in Washington--next fall?--next spring?--let's
decide when and how together--and occupy the place, after all it's ours, and
stop the government. Just stop it. Make the Capital the epicenter of a
national nonviolent revolt, for full citizenship for the citizens of the
District and full citizenship for us all. Stop the crimes against democracy
here in the Capitol, and over there at the White House, and over there at the
Supreme Court, stop them just by being here, peacefully, eloquently,
honoring, remembering, and reciting from, Martin Luther King. An encampment,
speaking out, picnics, singing, dancing, sleeping on the grass! And, when
we're ready, we'll start things up again as the New American Democracy--the
American Revolution--Democracy, and Justice--at last more nearly realized
among us,
And then, we whisper, to each other, and to ourselves,
Yes,
The New American Democracy.
To communicate with Dugger or for further information about the Alliance for Democracy, email him at rdugger123@aol.com.
________________________________________________________________
Afternote: In this speech Dugger was expressing his own opinions and was not
speaking for an organization. He wishes to thank, for ideas which one way or
another are included in this speech, Marcus Raskin of the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., Professor Steve Russell of San Antonio,
TX., Nick Seidita, Northridge, Ca., and colleagues of Dugger's on the Council
of the Alliance, especially Ted Dooley, St. Paul, Minn.; Nancy Price, Davis,
Ca.; Sue Wheaton, Tacoma Park, Md.; Stefanie Miller, Indianapolis, Ind.;
Vikki Savee, Sacramento, Ca.; and Dolly Arond, Northridge, Ca.
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