Bill Ayers to Endorse McCain and Palin

October 13, 2008 (Chicago, Illinoize) William Ayers, former sixties radical associated with the organization “Weather Underground,” announced today that he is formally endorsing the candidacy of Republican John McCain for President. Ayer’s brief association with Democratic candidate Barack Obama has been at the center of a conservative allegations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists”.

“At this point, no one can fuck up the U.S.A. better than four to eight years more of Republican rule,” Ayers said at a press conference in Chicago “Weather in our heyday couldn’t have done such a good job. Obama is not prepared to fuck shit up, and Biden certainly is ill-qualified to do so as well.”

Speaking at a Indigenous People’s Day party in the backyard of his suburban Chicago home, Ayers remarked “You know, it only takes a single spark to start a barbecue, I really believe that. OK, maybe not just a single spark, but some lighter fluid, and some good starter coals too.”

McCain had this to say “This really touches me deeply. In some ways, Ayers and I are both war veterans. Did I tell you that I served my country bravely in Vietnam? That I was captured by the Vietcong and tortured? I’m a goddamn war hero, bitches! If you ever forget, ask Obama who always reminds people how much he respects my service to this country, you motherfuckers!”

Asked to comment, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin remarked “John and I are sincerely surprised to receive Ayer’s endorsement. It is a sign of the depth of support in America for our campaign.”

And in other hot San Francisco political news:

No and Yes

This week, debate about kicking the ROTC off of campuses has reached an interesting fever pitch. Here in San Francisco. As my friend, Marc Norton reports in Beyond Chron:

The San Francisco school board voted in November 2006 to end JROTC in San Francisco schools this June. Last December, the school board extended JROTC for another year, until June 2009. However, the JROTC Must Go! Coalition continues to press the board to end JROTC now. (See “JROTC Must Go Now” in the May 14 Bay Guardian

The JROTC Must Go! Coalition represents a shift in strategy for many in the anti-war left. Discouraged by large mobilizations, groups such as these have focused on the local arena: bringing creative tactics to challenge military recruiting at ROTC programs nationwide. These groups succeed in bringing essential information recruiters aren’t going to tell your kids before they sign up. Little details such as the real limits on accessing college funds, fiscal hardships, and of course risks. I have known many an ex-service person who wished they were gotten the other side of the story.

Any sports fan can tell you that any strategy only has a limited life-time. Unless it is remixed and revised, the play just dies. The other side runs interference, having studied its opponents strengths, and learning how to beat back its advances.

This well could be happening to the counter-recruitment movement in the near future. The problem is that every single ROTC program could be shut down, and kids would still turn to the military out of sheer economic necessity.

The ways in which race, class and now gender are intertwined are extremely clear in the case of military service. Approximately two-thirds of service people are working-class white people from rural areas. This is a reversal of the Vietnam-era statistics where working-class people of color from urban areas dominated. Movements such as the Chicano Moratorium and the massive GI Resistance efforts helped to reverse this, which held for many years. As the War on Terror became a disaster even by terms of US Imperial interests, the military has had to ramp up its efforts to recruit in cities, and in communities of color. Young women are being recruited into the military like never before.

So I’m wondering, if cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, and others are really interested in curbing military recruitment–why stop just saying no? What are economic strategies that would provide life-changing alternatives for young people considering military service? Should they create Urban Peace Corps where participants are paid as well, or better than soldiers? Should the anti-war movement be pushing for universal access to four-year education? Programs such as these probably would only put a dent in the conditions caused by the global economy, yet should be explored fully.

One popular left-wing slogan is “One No, Many Yesses,” yet sometimes the demands and complexity of organizing leaves us in the “no” gear for a long-time. This November, it is very possible the liberal president will be elected. This president will be able to sell incursions into Iran and other countries, even as s/he nominally ends a war in Iraq. With this at stake, it is time for us to start figuring out what we’re going to say yes to.

This May Day–The Strike!

I’m honored to be invited to read at City Lights’ grand May Day event, The Strike! It is a sequel of sorts to a reading which happened during the last Presidential election year, entitled Manifesto. Like last time, thirty poets are going to sound-off (three minutes at a time) on the subject of empire, only now we’re supposed to answer the question So what are we gonna do about it? Obviously, the “surge” of poetry isn’t likely to stop the war, but hopefully it might just put a spring in your activist step, and maybe, provide some inspiration to delete the empire once and for all!

A City Lights May Day event
@ First Unitarian Universalist Church 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, CA
Doors open 7 pm; performance begins 7:30 pm
Admission: $12.00 @ door

Join City Lights and friends for an evening of narratives that cut through the core of the neo-liberal agenda

30 local poets, performers, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians deliver 3 minute pieces offering imaginative responses to the hunger of global capital and its effects upon community

STRIKE addresses strategies of resistance. We pose the question: what serves as meaningful resistance in an age of disaster capitalism? We shall explore the liberation of the commons- through poetry, performance, music, and magic.

Participants:
Charlie Anders
Maxine Chernoff
Justin Chin
Diane di Prima
Camille Dungy
Ananda Esteva
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Lisa Gray-Garcia
Jack Hirschman
Paul Hoover
Kevin Killian
Joseph Lease
Jon Longhi
Michael McClure
Cameron McHenry
Annalee Newitz
Barbara Jane Reyes
Al Robles
Leslie Scalapino
Matthew Shenoda
Bucky Sinister
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Amber Tamblyn
James Tracy
Roberto Vargas
Youth Speaks
more to come..

All Silent on the Democratic Front

This past weekend at the National Labor College, in Silver Springs Maryland, Iraq Veterans Against the War, VFP (Veterans for Peace), VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), MFSO (Military Families Speak Out), held this generation’s “Winter Soldier” hearings. The testimony was from service people whose tours of duty had taken them to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I won’t go into detail about the testimony. You can see plenty of that at the IVAW website. Where you can’t see it is most of the mainstream media.  The SF Chronicle, Washington Post, New York Times all seem to have a media blackout on the proceedings. They are always quick to dismiss civilian anti-war activists as kooks, ideologues, and out of touch with the mainstream. When current and former service people speak-up–they are largely just ignored.

Of course, there is some very good coverage of the event in the mainstream media–but you’ll have to find that in websites originating the the Philipines, Italy, and the UK.

The Democrats were largely silent on this as well. John Kerry said not a peep. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well. The message is: vote us in, let us take care of getting the nation out of Iraq. It ain’t gonna work that way. Remember, the Vietnam War ended under a Republican Administration. That was because of the resistance of soldiers and the Vietnamnese people, and the anti-war movement.

Dogs of War

(Picture of Mr. Noam Chompsky)

Last Wednesday, Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury for illegal dogfighting. The pictures weren’t for the faint of heart. It seems as if in the games Vick refereed, the loosing dogs were hung by trees. That is, if they managed to live that long.

If the allegations are true, this of course is disgusting. Truth in advocacy here: I’m a pushover for dogs, and I have two of them at home. The thought of one of their cute loving faces mangled by Pitbull or Rotweiler boils my blood. You don’t need to be a robe-wearing pacifist to concur with Ghandi on the subject: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

However, something even more disgusting is at foot here; truly an even greater marker of the moral progress of the nation: the continuing appeal of racism.

Talk-radio and the blogosphere practically exploded with calls for Vick to hang from a tree himself. A sample culled from a simple Google search last Friday:

• “Someone should take him and hang him from a tree.”
• “If it were up to me, I would put Michael Vick in a pit with some dogs and see how he mother fucking likes it.”
• What if we hung the Atlanta Falcons the next time they loose a game?”
• “Well, he is from the South after all.”

These are just some of the more printable reactions. Needless to say, such comments can only be taken in context.

The context of advocating hanging a black man from a tree.

The context of sicking dogs on a black person.

The context of the south.

The context of war. What does war have to do with it?

On the same day Vick was indicted at least 103 Iraqis were killed by American forces in Iraq and the death toll for American service mean reached 3,632. Beyond the normal alternative media outlets that note these things, discussion was scarce.

Vick creates reprehensible deed against man’s best friends. The cyber gloves come off and suddenly thousands of people have a pass to advocate lynching. The War Without end take the lives of more Iraqis and Americans and…

You can hear a pin drop in the far corners of cyberspace.

If convicted, Vick may, and should, spend quite a few years in prison. Yet the true dogs of war seem headed towards comfortable retirements at the Bohemian Grove–a quiet indictment of the moral progress of this nation.

A Tale of Two Movements Part I

This beginning of this week marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The end of this week marked the 3,233^rd death of an American soldier and the deaths of at least 59,408 Iraqis. In San Francisco, the anti-war movement marked the occasion in much the same manner it did the invasion—a series of non-violent civil disobediences (“die-ins”) that shut down key intersections of the financial district.

I was one of about five dozen people who were arrested for refusing to move out of the intersection of fifth and Powell when told to do so by the police. At 850 Bryant (SF’s southern police station), protesters were placed into small corrals made out of police barricades and never even saw the inside of the station. All were promptly cited and released by officers who were by the most part, very restrained, professional, and polite.

Non-violent civil disobedience seemed to me the least we could do, at least to send a message that somebody in San Francisco wasn’t waiting for the Democrats to swing low a sweet chariot. The organizers of the event pulled off a disciplined, creative action that momentarily injected some political clarity into the evening news.

Yet I left the police station with a cloud of dissatisfaction over my bald head. I was emotionally prepared to commit a symbolic act of defiance, in hopes that the symbol could give rise to substance. It took me an entire day to fully comprehend what had bothered me so deeply.

That realization hit me on lunch hour the next day. I attended a press conference for the People’s Budget Campaign, at City Hall. The People’s Budget is an ambitious project in which dozens of community groups from all over San Francisco draft a “shadow city budget” based on human needs and unite for a budget that actually increases spending on healthcare, housing, and community safety. The groups represented here are the ones I have worked and struggled with for the past decade and a half. These are the people who fight the good right everyday because their very survival depends on it. (eg PODER, Coalition On Homelessness, SF Organizing Project, CLAER).

Suffice to say that the $410,825,804,723 spent on just the Iraq war could fund every item of the People’s Budget; in fact thousands of People’s Budgets in every city. Very clearly, the cost of US imperialism is exacted both here and abroad. Yet in a time when large populist movements must be built; the word “fractured” doesn’t even begin to describe what it going on.

More like segregated.

Yes, segregation. We have separate movements. One has to find ways just to survive, squeezing little drops of sanity from a municipal budget. The people at this rally represented the rainbow of the urban working-class. There were a quite a few allies, but it was obvious that the People’s Budget was deeply rooted in the neighborhoods. On the other side of the colorline, the classline and the generation line was the anti-war movement. If you think it is possible for one group to stop a war, or to transform a city, then I guess this is no big deal.

I bring this up not to guilt-trip or to point fingers.I would gladly be arrested again and again in the company of these brave people if it could end the war a minute earlier. However, how effective can a “movement” be with this many degrees of separation?

In the next post I’m going to explore tangible ways to bring the domestic fight against empire together with the international fight against empire. I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

 __________________________________________________________

On my reading list this week:

Left Turn Magazine #24

“The War at Home” by Francis Fox Piven

“The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism” by Chip Smith

Interview with Carolyn Ho: Mother of Lt. Ehren Watada

On February 28th, the Chinatown Tenants Association hosted a talk by Carolyn Ho, the mother of Lt. Ehren Watada, who is facing court-martial for his refusal to be deployed to Iraq. I was honored to be invited to this event by Reverend Norman Fong of Chinese Community Development Center, who is one of my personal heroes. I caught up with Ms. Ho following the powerful speech to talk about building a truly grassroots anti-war movement.

JT: You have chosen to speak out not only in support of your son; but against the war in Iraq. What do you see is the state of the anti-war movement in the United States?

CH: I think that the anti-war movement is obviously now part of the mainstream national agenda. It is not just the agenda of the Left anymore. Early on, it was the Left, and some intellectuals sounding out a warning about what this war is about. Now the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the war; that is what the elections showed us. Of course, some Congress people are now trying to tell us the opposite; that the elections really weren’t a statement on the war!

Rooks-Poetry Review

Review originally published in Beyond Chron.

Now that Journalists are finally asking some hard (but basic) questions about what really led the nation into the latest phase in the war in Iraq; questions of how individuals are prepared to fight wars may be better left to the poets. No poet is better qualified to ask these questions than Gil Fagiani. In “Rooks,” his second collection of poetry, Fagiani, take the reader on a bare-knuckled tour of Pennsylvania Military College, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

Fagiani’s work, like the PMC itself, is tightly controlled.. The freshman (rook) year is best thought of as a factory where young civilians are forged into elite officers, eventually to command and pass the abuse onto the next generation of cadets. In Spit Shines, Fagiani recalls the discipline and punish that makes mountains out of molehills:

At the morning muster, Sergeant Kotowski
Swaggers up to me
Points to a speck of dust on one shoe
“Hey, douche bag,
what did you polish your shoes with,
Brillo pads?”