Category Archives: Activism

MAY DAY – The International Labor Day

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Source: The Anarchist International

May 1st, International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in most countries. The United States of America and Canada are among the exceptions. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the USA, linked to the battle for the eight-hour day, and the Chicago anarchists.

The struggle for the eight-hour day began in the 1860s. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, organized in 1881 (and changing its name in 1886 to American Federation of Labor ) passed a resolution which asserted that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout this district that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution”. The following year the Federation repeated the declaration that an eight-hour system was to go into effect on May 1, 1886. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly. In the months prior to May 1, 1886, thousands of workers, organized and unorganized, members of the organization Knights of Labor and of the federation, were drawn into the struggle. Chicago was the main center of the agitation for a shorter day. The anarchists were in the forefront of the Central Labor Union of Chicago, which consisted of 22 unions in 1886, among them the seven largest in the city.

During the Railroad strikes of 1877, the workers had been violently attacked by the police and the United States Army. A similar tactic of state terrorism was prepared by the bureaucracy to fight the eight-hour movement. The police and National Guard were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago’s Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, killing at least one striker, seriously wounding five or six others, and injuring an undetermined number. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.

The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only about two hundred people remaining. It was then a police column of 180 men marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. At the end of the meeting a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one instantly, six others died later. About seventy police officers were wounded. Police responded by firing into the crowd. How many civilians were wounded or killed from police bullits never was ascertained exactly. Although it was never determined who threw the bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack anarchists and the labor movement in general. Police ransacked the homes and offices of suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. A reign of police terror swept over Chicago. Staging “raids” in the working-class districts, the police rounded up all known anarchists and other socialists. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterward!” publicly counseled the state’s attorney.

Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago’s most active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower, and they were sentenced to die. In October 9, 1886, the weekly journal Knights of Labor published in Chicago, carried on page 1 the following announcement: “Next week we begin the publication of the lives of the anarchists advertised in another column.”

The advertisement, carried on page 14, read: “The story of the anarchists, told by themselves; Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Schwab, Fischer, Lingg, Engle, Neebe. The only true history of the men who claim that they are condemned to suffer death for exercising the right of Free Speech: Their association with Labor, Socialistic and Anarchistic Societies, their views as to the aims and objects of these organizations, and how they expect to accomplish them; also their connection with the Chicago Haymarket Affair. Each man is the author of his own story, which will appear only in the “Knights of Labor” during the next three months, – the great labor paper of the United States, a 16-page weekly paper, containing all the latest foreign and domestic labor news of the day, stories, household hints, etc. A co-operative paper owned and controlled by members of the Knights of Labor, and furnished for the small sum of $1.00 per annum. Adress all communications to Knights of Labor Publishing Company, 163 Washington St., Chicago, Ill.“ Later this journal and the paper Alarm published the autobiographies of the Haymarket men.

Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison. The authorities turned over the bodies to friends for burial, and one of the largest funeral processions in Chicago history was held. It was estimated that between 150,000 to 500,000 persons lined the route taken by the funeral cortege of the Haymarket martyrs. A monument to the executed men was unveiled June 25, 1893 at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago. The remaining three, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab, were finally pardoned in 1893.

On June 26, 1893, the governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, issued the pardon message in which he made it clear that he was not granting the pardon because he believed that the men had suffered enough, but because they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried, and that they and the hanged men had been the victims of hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge. He noted that the defendants were not proven guilty because the state “has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.”

International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the Haymarket Event in Chicago in 1886. In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following an initiative from the American Federation of Labor, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International’s second congress in 1891.

It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be “Law Day”, and gave the workers instead Labor Day, the first Monday of September – a holiday devoid of any historical significance.

Nevertheless, rather than suppressing the labor and anarchist movements, the events of 1886 and the execution of the Chicago anarchists, spokesmen of the movement for the eight-hour day, mobilized many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth. Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of Haymarket.

As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for it’s historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance of today for the working-class broadly defined, i.e. the grassroots – the people seen as a class in contrast to the superiors in income and/or rank – economically and/or political/administrative.

The May Day Manifestos of the International Workers of the World affiliated to the Anarchist International, from the latest years are published on its Webpage, click here!

Baltimore and the Human Right to Resistance: Rejecting the Framework of the Oppressor

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Baltimore-Riots.jpg_23790e32da49a4d09d45db82b7634b69To hear President Obama and Baltimore mayor Rawlings tell it, politeness, nonviolence and respect for law and property are the fundamental obligations of those confronting the brazen and lawless violence of police in Baltimore and beyond. This is a truly upside-down reality.

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: Black Agenda Report

Anti-Black racism, always just beneath the surface of polite racial discourse in the U.S., has exploded in reaction to the resistance of black youth to another brutal murder by the agents of this racist, settler-colonialist state. With the resistance, the focus shifted from the brutal murder of Freddie Gray and the systematic state violence that historically has been deployed to control and contain the black population in the colonized urban zones of North America, to the forms of resistance by African Americans to the trauma of ongoing state violence.

The narrative being advanced by corporate media spokespeople gives the impression that the resistance has no rational basis. The impression being established is that this is just another manifestation of the irrationality of non-European people – in particular, Black people – and how they are prone to violence. This is the classic colonial projection employed by all white supremacist settler states, from the U.S., to South Africa and Israel.

The accompanying narrative is that any kind of resistance that does not fit the narrow definition of “non-violent” resistance is illegitimate violence and, therefore, counter-productive because – “violence doesn’t accomplish anything.”  Not only does this position falsely equate resistance to oppression as being morally equivalent to the violence of the oppressor, it also attempts to erase the role of violence as being fundamental to the U.S. colonial project.

The history of colonial conquest saw the U.S. settler state shoot and murdered its’ way across the land mass of what became the U.S. in the process of stealing indigenous land to expand the racist White republic from “sea to shining sea.”  And the marginalization of the role of violence certainly does not reflect the values of the Obama administration that dutifully implements the bi-partisan dictates of the U.S. strategy of full spectrum dominance that privileges military power and oppressive violence to protect and advance U.S. global supremacy. The destruction of Libya; the reinvasion of Iraq; the civil war in Syria; Obama’s continued war in Afghanistan; the pathological assault by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S. supported attack on Yemen by the Saudi dictatorship, are just a few of the horrific consequences of this criminal doctrine.

Race and oppressive violence has always been at the center of the racist colonial project that is the U.S. It is only when the oppressed resist — when we decide, like Malcolm X said, that we must fight for our human rights — that we are counseled  to be like Dr. King, including by war mongers like Barack Obama. However, resistance to oppression is a right that the oppressed claim for themselves. It does not matter if it is sanctioned by the oppressor state, because that state has no legitimacy.

No rational person exalts violence and the loss of life. But violence is structured into the everyday institutional practices of all oppressive societies. It is the deliberate de-humanization of the person in order to turn them into a ‘thing’ — a process Dr. King called “thing-afication.” It is a necessary process for the oppressor in order to more effectively control and exploit. Resistance, informed by the conscious understanding of the equal humanity of all people, reverses this process of de-humanization. Struggle and resistance are the highest expressions of the collective demand for people-centered human rights – human rights defined and in the service of the people and not governments and middle-class lawyers.

That resistance may look chaotic at this point – spontaneous resistance almost always looks like that. But since the internal logic of neoliberal capital is incapable of resolving the contradiction that it created, expect more repression and more resistance that will eventually take a higher form of organization and permanence. In the meantime, we are watching to see who aligns with us or the racist state.

The contradictions of the colonial/capitalist system in its current expression of neoliberalism have obstructed the creation of decent, humane societies in which all people are valued and have democratic and human rights. What we are witnessing in the U.S. is a confirmation that neoliberal capitalism has created what Chris Hedges called “sacrificial zones” in which large numbers of black and Latino people have been confined and written off as disposable by the system. It is in those zones that we find the escalation of repressive violence by the militarized police forces. And it is in those zones where the people are deciding to fight back and take control of their communities and lives.

These are defining times for all those who give verbal support to anti-racist struggles and transformative politics. For many of our young white comrades, people of color and even some black ones who were too young to have lived through the last period of intensified struggle in the 1960s and ‘70s and have not understood the centrality of African American resistance to the historical social struggles in the U.S., it may be a little disconcerting to see the emergence of resistance that is not dependent on and validated by white folks or anyone else.

The repression will continue, and so will the resistance. The fact that the resistance emerged in a so-called black city provides some complications, but those are rich and welcoming because they provide an opportunity to highlight one of the defining elements that will serve as a line of demarcation in the African American community – the issue of class.  We are going to see a vicious ideological assault by the black middle class, probably led by their champion – Barack Obama – over the next few days. Yet the events over the last year are making it more difficult for these middle-class forces to distort and confuse the issue of their class collaboration with the white supremacist capitalist/colonialist patriarchy. The battle lines are being drawn; the only question that people must ask themselves is which side they’ll be on.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer, geo-political analyst and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves as the Public Intervenor for Human Rights as a member of the Green Shadow Cabinet and coordinates the International Affairs Committee of the Black Left Unity Network. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C.

Why Mumia Must Live, and US imperialism Must Die: The Link Between Political Prisoners and the War on Terror

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The so-called War on Terror and the national security state did not emerge full-blown from the rubble of 9/11. Both are products of previous waves of police repression, mainly targeting Black radicals. “The FBI’s counter insurgency war on the Black Panther Party chapters and leaders like Mumia established for local police departments a direct link to Washington’s war and surveillance arsenal.”

By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“The fear of the Muslim/Arab terrorist rekindles the same fear in white America that the Black liberation movement ignited over four decades ago.”

Political Prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal has been subjected to over three decades of torture from the US prison gulag. His political imprisonment has placed his life in serious danger, this time not from state execution but instead from extra-legal medical neglect. The prison state has continuously failed in its efforts to murder Mumia through official means and has thus decided to refuse the former Black Panther adequate medical treatment for diabetes. Meanwhile, Boston residents of all classes await the verdict of whether the alleged “Boston bomber” Dzokhar Tsarnaev will receive the death penalty or life in prison. The event that faithful day remains shrouded in questions , but most of the city has accepted the dominant narrative put forth by the FBI and Boston Police Department. The War on Terror that produced the “Boston Bombing” and Mumia’s struggle against the prison state are intimately connected. For Mumia to live with freedom and dignity, the US imperial order behind the War on Terror must die.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s existence as a political prisoner has been repressed by the establishment, while the War on Terror is a household name in the US. This is because the War on Terror serves the objectives of imperialism and Mumia does not. Mumia joined the Black Panther Party at fifteen and served as the Philadelphia Chapter’s Ministry of Information. He used his talents in journalism in service of Black people both in the BPP and after. This landed him on J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTEPRO list of Black liberation fighters to watch and suppress. In 1978, Mumia covered the Philadelphia police department’s siege on the MOVE Organization. His critical investigation of the Philly PD’s role in repressing MOVE led to his ouster from the journalism industry. In 1982, Mumia was framed for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death.

“He used his talents in journalism in service of Black people both in the BPP and after.”

The context of Mumia’s imprisonment is at the essence of US imperialism’s War on Terror, which could be better named its war of terror. In the film Manufacturing Guilt​ , Mumia’s frame-up is blatantly exposed through court documents and investigations. Yet, Mumia has lived much of his life in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. What explains this injustice and how does it relate to the current War on Terror? In Still Black, Still Strong, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad explains how the FBI’s counter insurgency war on the Black Panther Party chapters and leaders like Mumia established for local police departments a direct link to Washington’s war and surveillance arsenal. Washington’s war on Black liberation fighters precipitated the first SWAT team operation in 1969 and the FBI’s declaration that the Black Panther Party was the “greatest threat to the internal security” of the US. The war on Black freedom that jailed Mumia created the technical capacity for the War on Terror.

The recent bombing of the 2013 marathon, and 9/11 before that, created the conditions for a massive expansion of the surveillance state and police state throughout the US mainland. The hundreds of illegally detained prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the increased surveillance of Muslims and Black people in the US, and the massive spy program instituted by the Patriot Act and similar legislation are daily reminders of US imperialism’s ever expanding repressive apparatus. Internationally, the US led War on Terror interventions have caused the loss of life of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa alongside the thousands more from US aerial drone strikes and proxy war. All of this has been justified as necessary to “counter” the so-called threat of “terrorism.”

“The war on Black freedom that jailed Mumia created the technical capacity for the War on Terror.”

Mumia’s story, one shared by numerous US political prisoners sentenced to die in the cages of the prison state, contains in it the seeds that sprouted the rise of the massive War on Terror. Russell Maroon Shoatz, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Leonard Peltier and scores more faced trumped up charges from the state as part of US imperialism’s counter insurgency war on dissent generally and the Black liberation movement in particular. This war has been expanded to meet the needs of US imperialism, which in its current form has produced a potentially explosive situation domestically and globally. The sharpening contradictions of never-ending war and increasing poverty and privatization wouldn’t last long if the counter insurgency war on Mumia and the Panthers hadn’t provided the blueprints and technical support for the mass expansion of the War on Terror’s primary tools: war and surveillance state.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and the rest of the Empire’s political prisoners are caught in the cross hairs of US imperialism’s war of survival. Not only has the material basis of the counter insurgency war that murdered and imprisoned the Black liberation movement grown, but so too has the racist logic behind the repression. The War on Terror’s racist logic has permeated so deeply into the minds of the US public that the mere questioning of the agenda’s blatant deceit is subject to dismissal or defense by most people living in the US mainland. These conditions have left political prisoners with few fighters on the outside pressuring their release. The War on Terror has attempted to erase the memory of political prisoners by reframing the racist justifications for political imprisonment as common sense in what George Jackson called the “Amerikan mind.”

“The War on Terror’s racist logic has permeated so deeply into the minds of the US public that the mere questioning of the agenda’s blatant deceit is subject to dismissal.”

So, even though the justification for each and every War on Terror intervention or policy since 2001 are dubious at best, the fear of the Muslim/Arab terrorist rekindles the same fear in white America that the Black liberation movement ignited over four decades ago. The Black Panther Party and their partners in struggle were deemed criminal in every way and many were falsely charged with the murder of police officers, the highest form of offense in the eyes of white America. The War on Terror built off this strategy by throwing the Muslim community into the racist war on the oppressed as a means to control the dissent of the entire population. That the US imperial machinery is complicit in, and a sponsor of, jihadist terror and proxy war matters as little as the innocence of political prisoners when it comes to preserving the Empire and criminalizing all resistance to its rule.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life needs to be saved by any means necessary, but fighting to free him based on his criminal case alone won’t develop the movement we need. One of the primary obstacles to building a concrete movement for the freedom of political prisoners is the privileging of innocence over a movement that links political prisoners to the repression of the imperial state. But Mumia’s innocence teaches us the real purpose of political imprisonment. The War on Terror is a consolidation of the forces that were built by imperialism to suppress the revolutionary ideas of Mumia Abu-Jamal. What we need is a reexamination of those ideas in the service of the freedom of all political prisoners. By studying the War on Terror and the repression of the Black Liberation movement from which it grew, it becomes increasingly clear that imperialism must die for Mumia to truly live.

Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.com.

G.M.O. Resistance

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By Rebel Fagin

Source: The Daily Censored

We don’t have to do what the corporate death state says. We can choose how we’ll live, what media we’ll consume, and what foods we’ll eat.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) have been added to a dozen crops. GMOs are used in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds – the only seeds that will allegedly survive an attack of the herbicide Roundup. Roundup contains glyphosate, a chemical that disrupts photosynthesis and the immune system. It is a civilian off-shoot of Agent Orange, Monsanto’s notorious herbicide made from 2, 4-D and 2, 4, 5-T.

Here’s how the chemical farmer’s cycle goes. A farmer uses Roundup and other glyphosate based chemicals. Most of the weeds die. Those that survive pass on this survival gene to their offspring and the weeds come back stronger. The farmer then uses more chemicals. Ever wonder where those chemicals go?

You are what you eat. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) states, “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM foods.” These include: infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, allergic reactions, gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, heart disease, depression, infertility, cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease.

It’s worse for infants. Their immune systems are still developing and they metabolize food at a much higher rate than adults. This makes them more sensitive to chemical toxins. Independent laboratory tests have found genetically engineered soy in four popular infant formulas: Similac Soy (42%), Gerber Good Start Soy (48%), Enfamil Pro Soybee (49%), and Walmart Soy (66%). The Cornucopia Institute Report found GMO contamination in several cereals including: Mother’s Bumpers (28%), Kix Corn Puffs (56%), Nutritious Living Hi-Lo (85%), and Kashi Go Lean (100%)!

GMOs are common in processed foods. They frequently turn up in the forms of sugar, corn starch, corn syrup, cotton seed oil, and canola oil.

GMOs arrive in meat and meat byproducts as rbGH and rbST. These growth hormones have been banned in Canada.

Another dangerous GMO product is aspartame which is found in Nutrisweet and Equal. Aspartame has been linked to disorders ranging from tumors to seizers.
As of March 2015 we know that soy, cotton, canola, sugar beets (not cane sugar), corn, salmon, Hawaiian papaya, alfalfa used for hay, a small amount of yellow and crookneck squash, and recently Arctic Apples can all contain GMOs.

So what can we do? First look at the label. If it says Federal Organic, Non GMO Project Verified, or rbGH and rbST free then it is GMO free. Web sites like http://www.ocsoco.org/gmo, LabelGMOs.org. NonGMOShoppingGuide.com will keep you up to date. However, looking out only for number one is half steppin’. To do the whole dance, couple these labels with Fair Trade or Fair for Life labels and look out for the people who provide you with your food as well.

Shop at your local farmer’s market and get to know your farmers and their practices. Shop at stores that champion organic foods. You can always raise your own food. D.I.Y.
Here’s how to grow a simple organic garden in 10 easy steps.

1) Build beds and put soil in them. Soil is not dirt. Dirt is what happens when you don’t clean. Soil is interactive biological communities. Beds can be made from wood, bricks, chicken wire, etc. You can build them on the ground or at any convenient height. Build them to last several years. Rake out the rocks and level the ground.

2) Add green vegetable cuttings, animal manure, and rock nutrients to your soil. Mix well and level again.

3) You can plant seeds directly in the ground or start them indoors and then transplant them. Space them according to their mature size. This is a good time to put in a flex line drip irrigation system. Drip irrigation is a good way to conserve water. Many people like to include timers.

4) Lay mulch, such as organic hay, between your beds. It will both help retain water and control pests. Till the mulch into the soil at the end of the season.

5) Water and weed regularly. Spend time in your garden and get to know it well. Your garden will serve you for this. Add organic nutrients only as needed. Usually you need more nitrogen in the beginning. Check with your local organic gardener for what works best in your region.

6) For large pests you’ll need a fence tall enough for deer and deep enough so wild pigs don’t dig under it.

7) For smaller pests good soil preparation and a clean garden is your best foundation. Rotate crops for both pest control and to keep soil healthy.

8) Compost discarded organic, non-meat foods in a compost bin. Mix together green (vegetables) and brown (leaves), stir them up, water them, close the lid, and let ‘em cook. Avoid thick skinned foods like bananas and melon rinds as they take longer to break down. Coffee grounds and egg shells add beneficial nutrients to the soil. Stir and wait. After a year or two you’ll retrieve rich black soil from the bottom of your compost to add to your garden. Good compost is warm and alive with worms and other creatures.

9) Check your plants for color, firmness, and smell before you harvest them. You can either harvest the whole plant or take clippings from it and allow it to grow. It depends on the plant and what you want.

10) Take extra food to your local Food Pantry or contact cropmobsters.com and they will help you with distribution.
We are not slaves to the corporate death state. We can choose how we’ll live. Choose life over death and make conscious choices about food today.

Sources: Monsanto A Corporate Profile © 2013 by Food & Water Watch, ResponsibleTechnology.org, LabelGMOs.org, Herbicide forum in Willits, CA 3/8/15

Rebel can be read at the Sonoma County Peace Press & the Daily Censored.

Saturday Matinee: Mini Doc Double Feature

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“Our False Reality” and “The Lie We Live”: two recent short videos with a thematic connection. The first was produced by Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton of TruthstreamMedia.com and explores how those who seek power and control use technology to manipulate and engineer the masses right down to the perception of reality. The second film, produced by Spencer Cathcart, offers a brief but expansive overview of systems of control with a reminder of the positive potential of communications technology.

FAA investigating Florida mailman’s landing of gyrocopter on U.S. Capitol lawn

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By Ben Montgomery

Source: Tampa Bay Times

Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Ruskin, told his friends he was going to do it. He was going to fly a gyrocopter through protected airspace and put it down on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, then try to deliver 535 letters of protest to 535 members of Congress.

The stunt seemed so outlandish that not even his closest friend thought he would pull it off.

“My biggest fear was he was going to get killed,” said Mike Shanahan, 65, of Apollo Beach, who works with Hughes for the Postal Service.

After 21/2 years of planning, Hughes came hovering low over the buildings of northeast D.C. about 1:20 p.m., like a distant bird. He rounded the Washington Monument a few minutes later, flew straight up the expanse of the National Mall and brought his small craft down right in front of the Capitol, where he was quickly surrounded by police and surrendered without incident.

The flight stunned police, Secret Service and witnesses. Authorities briefly shut down the Capitol as a security measure. The incident brought out dozens of reporters and cameras from national media outlets — exactly what Hughes had hoped for. Hughes, who sees himself as a sort of showman patriot, a mix of Paul Revere and P.T. Barnum, wanted to do something so big and brazen that it would hijack the news cycle and turn America’s attention toward his pet issue: campaign finance reform.

“No sane person would do what I’m doing,” Hughes told the Tampa Bay Times in the weeks before he took flight. He was doing it, he said, because the United States is “heading full-throttle toward a breakdown.”

“There’s no question that we need government, but we don’t have to accept that it’s a corrupt government that sells out to the highest bidder,” Hughes said.

It’s hard to say whether the message got through.

“I don’t think anyone noticed it,” said Sophia Brown, visiting Washington from England. “We noticed it, but nobody made a big deal about it.”

Richard Burns, 27, a worker at a marijuana lobby group in Washington, stood by the Capitol in wonder and solidarity.

“I don’t know whatever it was he was doing, but I support him,” Burns said.

Gil Wheeler, 53, a pilot from Las Vegas, said the biggest problem was how the letter carrier reached restricted airspace in the first place.

“This is just another question for Homeland Security,” Wheeler said. “We still have a lot of questions to ask.”

Late Wednesday, U.S. Capitol Police said Hughes had been arrested, charged under Title 49 of U.S. Code and processed at their headquarters. He was then transferred to the central cellblock in Washington. The FAA was investigating.

News reports said Secret Service agents were investigating at Gettysburg Airport, a small airport in Pennsylvania, where they believe Hughes took off.

Hughes didn’t know whether he would even make it. He imagined being shot down, blown down. Almost every scenario he could imagine involved some type of resistance. Barring that, he said: “They will put the cuffs on me. And they will try to establish who is behind this. . . . The authorities are going to be out to get me.”

His wife could not be reached for comment.

Hughes contacted a Tampa Bay Times reporter last year, saying he wanted to tell someone about his plan and motivation. He said he had no intention of hurting anybody and that he didn’t want to be hurt. By that time, he had already been visited twice by the Secret Service, he said.

The first visit, Hughes told the Times, came one night last spring at about 1 a.m. The agent was accompanied by a Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputy. In a statement issued to media outlets Wednesday, the Secret Service said it interviewed Hughes on Oct. 5, 2013, and that a “complete and thorough investigation was conducted.”

The Secret Service agent asked him questions about his plan, Hughes said, and he said he was honest in his replies, if not totally forthcoming with details. Yes, he did own a gyrocopter. Yes, he kept it in a hangar at the small airport in Wauchula. Yes, he had talked of doing something big to bring attention to the issue of campaign finance reform. No, he was not planning to crash into any buildings or monuments in Washington, D.C.

I’m not a violent person, Hughes remembers saying. All I want to do is draw attention.

Someone inside his circle of secrecy had reported him, telling the Secret Service that Hughes was talking about committing a daring act of civil disobedience that also happened to be a federal crime.

Two days later, Hughes said, the same agent showed up at the post office where Hughes works and asked more questions. One of Hughes’ colleagues told the Tampa Bay Times that he, too, answered questions from the Secret Service.

And then, for months, nothing. That was it, Hughes said. No other questions. No other contact. Hughes put his plan into action.

He bought a burner cell phone and a videocamera and tested a livestream video feed from his gyrocopter. He built a website offline that explained why he was doing this. He bought $250 worth of stamps and stuffed envelopes with his letter:

“I’m demanding reform and declaring a voter’s rebellion in a manner consistent with Jefferson’s description of rights in the Declaration of Independence,” he wrote in his letters. “As a member of Congress, you have three options. 1. You may pretend corruption does not exist. 2. You may pretend to oppose corruption while you sabotage reform. 3. You may actively participate in real reform.”

Late last week, he loaded the gyrocopter onto a trailer and headed for an undisclosed location outside the nation’s capital.

His livestream showed that he took off about 12:10 p.m. Wednesday. He intended to fly about 300 feet high, at 45 mph and wound up landing on the west lawn of the Capitol shortly before 1:30 p.m.

Hughes knew there was a risk he could be shot out of the sky, though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“I don’t believe that the authorities are going to shoot down a 61-year-old mailman in a flying bicycle,” he said. “I don’t have any defense, okay, but I don’t believe that anybody wants to personally take responsibility for the fallout.”

In the end, his flight occurred without incident or escorts. The Times published a story about Hughes’ plans on its website, tampabay.com, shortly after noon when it was clear he had actually taken off and was attempting his flight. His livestream cut in and out but showed his progress. A Times reporter called the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., shortly before 1 p.m. to see if officials were aware of a man in a gyrocopter flying toward the capital. Public information officers there who did not give their names said they had not heard of the protest. They referred a reporter to Capitol Police. A public information officer did not immediately answer.

Sgt. Trina Hamilton in the watch commander’s office said: “He hasn’t notified anybody. We have no information.”

Hughes’ friend, Mike Shanahan, after receiving a call from Hughes early Wednesday, said he contacted a Secret Service agent and left a message but never heard back. Hughes had told his friend he was in Washington, Shanahan recalled. But when Shanahan tried to access the live-streaming website, he could not find it and was unsure if Hughes was really going to take flight.

Before his flight, Hughes said he knew what was at stake. He figured he’ll lose his job of 11 years. And he could lose his tidy little house across from a pond with a fountain. He knew he would lose his freedom. That means losing, at least temporarily, his Russian-born wife and his polite 12-year-old daughter who plays the piano and wins awards at the science fair. He kept them in the dark, he said, for fear they’d be implicated.

Hughes is a slender, soft-spoken, pedantic man, with thinning gray hair and hearing aids. He has no criminal record and it’s rare to hear him curse. But he said he needed the show, the very dramatic public act of civil disobedience, to focus the nation’s attention on campaign finance reform, a topic that in most quarters makes eyes glaze over. Money, he says, has corrupted the democracy.

At the root of Hughes’ disdain is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, in which the court decided campaign contributions were a form of “political speech” and struck down limits on how much corporations and unions could give to political contenders. The decision changed the game. Campaign spending went through the roof. In Hughes’ mind, there was a parallel spike in favor-dealing and the government is now practically owned by the rich. Hughes likes to point out that nearly half the retiring members of Congress from 1998 to 2004 got jobs as lobbyists earning some 14 times their congressional salaries.

But nobody seems to care.

Hughes thinks the answers are out there, and they’re nonpartisan. He points to reform thinkers like political activist Cenk Uygar and Harvard legal theorist Lawrence Lessig, who launched a political action committee to end political action committees. The motto: “Embrace the irony.”

“I’m not promoting myself,” Hughes said a few weeks ago. “I’m trying to direct millions of people to information, to a menu of organizations that are working together to fix Congress.”

His idea began to blossom 2½ years ago, after his son, John Joseph Hughes, 24, committed suicide by driving his car head-on into another man, killing them both. “Police: Suicidal driver caused deadly crash,” read the headline in the Leesburg newspaper. He was crushed by grief, and disappointed that his son had killed himself — and someone else — to make a stupid, worthless point.

“Something changed in me,” Hughes said. With mourning came a realization. The years Hughes spent thinking about and writing about mundane political issues were for naught if he didn’t have a way to make a point. His political frustrations and grief merged. He doesn’t condone what his son did, but it offered a lesson.

“He paid far too high a price for an unimportant issue,” Hughes said. “But if you’re willing to take a risk, the ultimate risk, to draw attention to something that does have significance, it’s worth doing.”

He has always wanted to fly. Growing up in Santa Cruz, Calif., he used to ride his bike to Sky Park and watch the planes come and go, and read books about the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk.

At first he thought about using an ultralight fixed-wing plane, but that felt too threatening. He finally found the gyrocopter, which has unpowered helicopter blades on top for lift but gets its thrust from a propeller on the back. The cockpit, if you can call it that, is wide open. “This is as transparent a vehicle that I could come up with,” Hughes said. “You can literally see through it.” He can land the craft in a space the size of half a basketball court.

Hughes told the Times he planned to set up a delayed email blast to alert as many TV and newspaper breaking news desks as he could find, as well as the Secret Service.

The Secret Service statement said it did not receive notification of the flight. Several reporters told the Times they received the email. The Times reported about Hughes’ flight on Twitter and Facebook as it was happening, but most media attention came after his landing at the Capitol. His website went up as scheduled, which broadcast a choppy livestream of his trip.

His biggest fear all along, he said, was losing his nerve.

“I have thought about walking away from this whole thing because it’s crazy,” he said. “But I have also thought about being 80 years old and watching the collapse of this country and thinking that I had an idea once that might have arrested the fall and I didn’t do it.

“And I will tell you completely honestly: I’d rather die in the flight than live to be 80 years old and see this country fall.”

Times staff writers Zachary T. Sampson and Lauren Carroll and researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

 

This is the text of the letter that Doug Hughes wants to deliver to members of Congress:

Dear ___________,

Consider the following statement by John Kerry in his farewell speech to the Senate —

“The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself. They know it. They know we know it. And yet, Nothing Happens!” — John Kerry, 2-13

In a July 2012 Gallup poll, 87% tagged corruption in the federal government as extremely important or very important, placing this issue just barely behind job creation. According to Gallup, public faith in Congress is at a 41-year record low, 7%. (June 2014) Kerry is correct. The popular perception outside the DC beltway is that the federal government is corrupt and the US Congress is the major problem. As a voter, I’m a member of the only political body with authority over Congress. I’m demanding reform and declaring a voter’s rebellion in a manner consistent with Jefferson’s description of rights in the Declaration of Independence. As a member of Congress, you have three options.

1. You may pretend corruption does not exist.

2. You may pretend to oppose corruption while you sabotage reform.

3. You may actively participate in real reform.

If you’re considering option 1, you may wonder if voters really know what the ‘chase for money’ is. Your dismal and declining popularity documented by Gallup suggests we know, but allow a few examples, by no means a complete list. That these practices are legal does not make them right! Obviously, it is Congress who writes the laws that make corruption legal.

1. Dozens of major and very profitable corporations pay nothing in taxes. Voters know how this is done. Corporations pay millions to lobbyists for special legislation. Many companies on the list of freeloaders are household names — GE, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Verizon, Citigroup, Dow …

2. Almost half of the retiring members of Congress from 1998 to 2004 got jobs as lobbyists earning on average fourteen times their Congressional salary. (50% of the Senate, 42% of the House)

3. The new democratic freshmen to the US House in 2012 were ‘advised’ by the party to schedule 4 hours per day on the phones fund raising at party headquarters (because fund raising is illegal from gov’t offices.) It is the donors with deep pockets who get the calls, but seldom do the priorities of the rich donor help the average citizen.

4. The relevant (rich) donors who command the attention of Congress are only .05% of the public (5 people in a thousand) but these aristocrats of both parties are who Congress really works for. As a member of the US Congress, you should work only for The People.

1. Not yourself.

2. Not your political party.

3. Not the richest donors to your campaign.

4. Not the lobbyist company who will hire you after your leave Congress.

There are several credible groups working to reform Congress. Their evaluations of the problem are remarkably in agreement though the leadership (and membership) may lean conservative or liberal. They see the corrupting effect of money — how the current rules empower special interests through lobbyists and PACs — robbing the average American of any representation on any issue where the connected have a stake. This is not democracy even if the ritual of elections is maintained.

The various mechanisms which funnel money to candidates and congress-persons are complex. It happens before they are elected, while they are in office and after they leave Congress. Fortunately, a solution to corruption is not complicated. All the proposals are built around either reform legislation or a Constitutional Amendment. Actually, we need both — a constitutional amendment and legislation.

There will be discussion about the structure and details of reform. As I see it, campaign finance reform is the cornerstone of building an honest Congress. Erect a wall of separation between our elected officials and big money. This you must do — or your replacement will do. A corporation is not ‘people’ and no individual should be allowed to spend hundreds of millions to ‘influence’ an election. That much money is a megaphone which drowns out the voices of ‘We the People.’ Next, a retired member of Congress has a lifelong obligation to avoid the appearance of impropriety. That almost half the retired members of Congress work as lobbyists and make millions of dollars per year smells like bribery, however legal. It must end. Pass real campaign finance reform and prohibit even the appearance of payola after retirement and you will be part of a Congress I can respect.

The states have the power to pass a Constitutional Amendment without Congress — and we will. You in Congress will likely embrace the change just to survive, because liberals and conservatives won’t settle for less than democracy. The leadership and organization to coordinate a voters revolution exist now! New groups will add their voices because the vast majority of Americans believe in the real democracy we once had, which Congress over time has eroded to the corrupt, dysfunctional plutocracy we have.

The question is where YOU individually stand. You have three options and you must choose.

Sincerely,

Douglas M. Hughes

http://www.TheDemocracyClub.org

When It Becomes Serious, First They Lie–When That Fails, They Arrest You

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” Jean-Claude Juncker simply gave voice to what the world’s leaders practice on a daily basis, because now it’s always serious.

 

And why is it now serious? Persuading tax donkeys and debt serfs that everything is going their way is now impossible without lies. Persuading the populace that the leadership is working on their behalf was jettisoned in the wake of the 2008 bailout of bankers and parasites.

Stripped of the artifice that they care about anything other than preserving the wealth of their cronies, global political leaders now rely on propaganda: narratives designed to manage expectations and perceptions, bolstered by carefully tailored official statistics.

Reliance on lies erodes legitimacy. As the rich get richer and the burdens on tax donkeys and debt serfs increase, the gulf between the official happy-story narrative and reality widens to the breaking point, and faith in the narrative and the leadership espousing it declines.

When 20% of the populace no longer believe the lies and begins questioning the state’s enforcement of the status quo, the government devotes its resources to punishing dissenters and resisters. Whistleblowers are charged with trumped-up crimes; those publicly refuting the status quo’s narrative of lies are harassed and discredited, and those who resist state enforcement of parasitic cronyism are set up, beaten, entrapped, investigated, interrogated and arrested once suitably Kafkaesque charges can be conjured up by the apparatchiks of enforcement.

Why 20%? It’s the Pareto Distribution (the 80/20 rule): the 20% of any populace that accepts a new trend, technology or narrative has an outsized influence over the other 80%.

Governments operate on the premise that propaganda and threats will always be enough to cow their populaces into compliance and bribes will induce complicity. When lies, bribes and threats no long work, the state unleashes its full pathological powers on dissent.

The last mass campaign of political suppression in the U.S. occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when resistance to the war of choice in Vietnam reached mainstream proportions.

The U.S. government was accustomed to manipulating and managing the populace with very simple propaganda: Communism is our deadly enemy, we must fight it everywhere on the planet, etc. But when thousands of American service personnel started coming home in body bags from the latest “we must fight Communism everywhere because it’s dangerous to us” war in East Asia, this simplistic justification made no sense: what existential threat to the U.S. did a Communist Vietnam pose?

The U.S. has faced only two existential threats to its sovereignty since 1860: World War II (1941-45) and the potential for a nation-destroying nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The idea that the U.S. was existentially threatened by falling dominoes in East Asia was always ludicrous, and the U.S. status quo (the political leadership, the Deep State, private industry profiting from war, etc.) soon abandoned the absurd justification.

Vietnam was always more of a domestic-politics issue than a geopolitical one: the Democrats feared being perceived as being “weak on Communism” because that impacted the results of elections. Throwing treasure and American lives away in Vietnam was pure domestic politics from 1961-68 (once mired, Democrats feared being tagged as the party that “lost Vietnam”), and thereafter the treasure and lives were sacrificed on the equally contrived Nixon-Kissinger policy of avoiding losing geopolitical face with a withdrawal that amounted to surrender.

Though it is not well known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was ordered to devote essentially all its resources to suppressing dissent in these years. Teams assigned to organized crime were reassigned to track down draft resisters and other political malcontents. COINTELPRO was a vast program devoted to illegally entrapping, beating up and undermining any and all political resistance to the war and the government’s increasingly heavy-handed oppression of dissent.

For more on COINTELPRO, please read War at Home: Covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it.

Simply put: when lies no longer work, governments freak out and devote their resources not to eliminating wars of choice, cronyism and corruption but to suppressing dissent and resistance to those policies.

The U.S. government has always been free to pursue wars of choice with its professional military, with little risk of widespread political blowback. A variety of “splendid little wars” have been waged, generally for conquest or enforcement of hemispheric hegemony. The government’s success in rallying the nation during World War II instilled a false confidence that merely raising the flag of existential threat would be enough to eliminate dissent and elicit compliance in the masses.

Vietnam was the first time the American public went through the process of buying the usual “threat” justification for war, questioning the threat and eventually rejecting the state’s narrative. The government responded by lashing out at its own citizenry, engaging in a full spectrum of illegal and blatantly immoral actions designed not to right wrongs or fix broken policies, but to suppress dissent and resistance to destructive policies and broken systems.

The U.S. government is not unique in this; on the contrary, all governments, by their very nature as concentrations of coercive power, will pursue the same path. Rather than confess the government is operated by cronies, for cronies, the machinery of the state will increasingly be turned on its citizenry.

Rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s is no longer enough; abiding by the laws of the land are no longer enough. What the state demands is not just compliance with its countless laws and regulations, but absolute obedience to its narratives and policies.

 

Anyone who withholds obedience is quickly deemed a traitor–not to the nation or its Constitution, but to the state itself, which is ultimately a collection of cronies and self-serving vested interests protecting their fiefdoms at the expense of the citizenry.

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance. This process is well under way in nation-states around the world.

If I had to pick the two key operative dynamics of the next 20 years, I would choose:

1. The over-expansion and implosion of credit/debt bubbles.

2. The over-reach of the central state as it seeks to win the hearts and minds of its people by ruthlessly suppressing dissent.

The two dynamics are of course causally connected. Central states depend entirely on credit bubbles for their financial survival, and on enforcing increasingly untenable official narratives for their legitimacy.

Both are unraveling, and will continue to unravel, no matter how many state resources are thrown at the symptoms of political illegitimacy, rather than at the root causes of that illegitimacy.

 

Tsarnaev Guilty of 30 Counts in Boston Bombing Show Trial

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show tri·al

noun
noun: show trial; plural noun: show trials

  1. a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice.

Yesterday Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 counts he was charged for in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. For those following the case who think critically, this came as no surprise not because of any hard evidence proving Tsarnaev’s guilt, but because on the second day of the trial Tsarnaev’s attorney Judy Clarke declared Tsarnaev was guilty in her opening statement saving the state the time and effort of having to prove its case and answer numerous glaring unanswered questions such as the ones asked by WhoWhatWhy and 21st Century Wire.

Now that this particular show trial is over, the government and corporate media will attempt to brush all uncomfortable questions under the rug and, as with JFK, WACO, Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, 9/11, Sandy Hook, etc., it will be left to independent researchers and journalists to search for the truth.

For more information about the Boston bombing that the government/corporate-stream media has largely ignored, read this compendium of research and analysis from the Memory Hole blog: http://memoryholeblog.com/2014/04/13/boston-marathon-bombing-a-compendium-of-research-and-analysis/