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29.12.2005

Cheap Food and Privilege
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

It is an established fact that we can grow enough food on Earth to
eliminate hunger. The issue is distribution of food, not the production of
food. The issue of distribution is undermined by capitalism and political
power struggles that play out in the economics of the daily life of the
poor via food. I have recently begun to realize that I had a lot of food
issues growing up as a kid, and also as an adult. From institutional food
in protective custody, to foster families’ food, to being told to diet as
a girl, to dry milk at the end of the month, free lunches and food stamps,
I have begun to realize my relationship with food has been different than
most American middle class folks based on class.

I had a friend who went to Russia back in the 1990’s. She told me a story
that amazed me. She said she went into a store in Russia, hungry, and
there was nothing on the shelves but these foil wrapped fish packets. She
didn’t feel like fish in foil, and decided to wait until something else
was available. As she walked around, she said everywhere, on every corner,
people were voraciously eating these foil packets of fish. As hours crept
by, she began to realize that was the only food coming into that village
store that day. The next day she realized she had to buy the fish or go
hungry. That story shocked me. I had never contemplated something like
that. As an American with stocked store shelves, fast food joints and
commercials for food on TV every few minutes, the idea of that kind of
living situation around food shocked me and made me think outside the
perameters I had previously been thinking within. I had seen American
hunger, but that was a new breed of hunger for me to think about.

I saw a statistic quoted to the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently
that said Americans spend 7.4% of their total personal expenditures on
food. Wow. That is crazy. I guess if you made $5000 a month, that would
mean less than $500 a month for food for a family, and I guess that is
believable. But if you make say, $1000 a month, a minimum wage full time
salary, that is less than $100 a month for food. That is ridiculous. That
makes no sense.

I was looking at the statistics because I am sure it is true that
Americans spend less on food than others do due to capitalist and
corporate exploitation. The stats provided said that the percentages of
total expenditures spent on food for different countries were these: India
51.3%, South Africa 24.5%, Norway 19.8%, Italy 17.2%, France 14.8%, Canada
10.3% and US 7.4%. With the exploitation of farm workers, among other
things, the prices for food remain unsustainably low in America. It is
clear that Americans are eating cheap food on the backs of someone else’s
hunger.

But what is up with those stats about Americans spending only 7.4% of
their spending income on food? I have seen the same nonsense with stats
from the government saying that most people spend 30% of their income on
rent. Are they joking? In what world? Let’s take a welfare mom now or any
time in the last 20 years. The welfare payment for a mom and one kid in
the Pacific NW is about $440 a month. There are almost no apartments with
one bedroom available at those price ranges in Seattle, Portland or
Eugene, and two bedrooms is what middle class people have with their kids.
If a welfare mom is lucky enough to find an apartment with one bedroom she
can afford, it usually takes her entire welfare check to pay it. That
leaves nothing for utility payments, bus fare, school lunches, field trips
and club fees, clothing, toilet paper, etc. I can honestly say that in the
entire time I was a low income parent, I never once paid 30% of my income
as rent. The lowest I ever paid in rent as a mom with kid was 75% of my
income, and that was rare. Very often I literally paid 98% of my monthly
income to rent. And food stamps never covered a month’s worth of food. Not
when I was a kid with my mom. Not when I was a mom.

What makes the American government skew its own statistics in such a way
as to make it seem that Americans spend only $7.50 per $100 on food? Going
out to eat at a restaurant with two people once is more than 20%, not 7.5%
and add that into the fast food, lattes, and food at home, and I have
trouble believing those numbers. I guess if you throw in the high rents as
expenses that it ends up that low, but it seems weird to me. I know to
make it seem they have less unemployment the US government just makes it
harder to get unemployment benefits. They base the number of unemployed on
how many get unemployment insurance, not on employment. So if they want
lower numbers of unemployed, they simply pay less people unemployment
insurance benefits. It is actually THAT simple! Knowing that makes me
suspicious of the numbers saying people normally spend 30% of their income
on housing and 7.4% of their income on food. Well, that and having life
experience that says that is not true.

I never thought that much about food, but in the last year, as I wrote
different articles I began to see how many times food was used as a weapon
on me as a kid. When you are in child protection institutions, you are
fed, as innocent children victims of child abuse, in a manner that
resembles prison. You line up, your food is slop, it is served on weird
pastel colored plastic plates that are identical. We were lined up outside
in the cold in the dark for breakfast like prisoners. I did not want to
eat in there and I only remember lining up in the cold and the inside of
the cafeteria, but I do not even remember eating the food in there when I
was in places like that.

I remember one Easter we had no food and only had a bag of jelly beans. My
mom and I ate jelly beans for 3 days, right there in Los Angeles, in 1966.
Yes, we had family. I had aunts, uncles and grandparents and we ate only
jelly beans, in hunger, for days, due to pride and shame on my mom’s part,
I suppose. Or perhaps due to my mom’s family using food as a weapon on her
for getting divorced. I have hated Easter ever since and do not like jelly
beans. Sometimes school hot lunches were my only meal. My mom was a speed
addict and would sleep for days on end at a time, leaving me alone as a
young child often. I hated school lunch because every time, they lined up
those who were getting hot lunches, then made those of us with free lunch
tickets go somewhere else so we stood out as welfare kids and the other
kids knew to shame us. So I got hot food at school from free lunches but
it had a price.

In high school, I lived with a sick stepmother who did all kinds of things
to me around food. It was really weird. I remember having to go away from
home to eat. I remember once I was about 15, and my stepsisters were 13
and about 10. My stepmom came into the kitchen as the three of us were
making hot chocolate one night. You could see the tension in the room as
soon as she entered. Like a classic stepmom, she scolded, “Who is making
this hot chocolate?” And yes, I was the oldest, and I had actually
initiated it, but all of a sudden my youngest stepsister, who was only
about 10, blurts out, “I am making hot chocolate” to which my stepmom
said, “Oh” and left. It was amazing to me that my 10 year old sister knew,
unspokenly, how to stop that situation from getting ugly and it was to say
that she was making food, not Kirsten. That same stepmom used to do really
weird things like shove, grind and smear food into my face in front of
others if I ever dared say I did not prefer some one item of food. I
remember actually sneaking food into my bedroom and hiding it as a teen so
that I would not be hungry as my stepmom guarded the kitchen in a weird
way.

I think food is used in politics a lot. A Rob Brezsny song says, “2-4-6-8,
organize and smash the state, kick the ass of the ruling class, push em
back, push em back, wayyy back! Use the food as a weapon, use the medicine
as a weapon…” Yes, it seems food and medicine ARE used as weapons. It is
really weird to realize how many times food has been used as a political
weapon on me, starting in childhood.

As a kid, we had food stamps, thus had little food at the end of every
month. Most people I knew around us in my preteens were also on food
stamps. The kids got really creative with ways to find edible food from
food bank leftovers, and I remember it would have been too embarrassing to
invite a middle class friend over and have them see our dried milk. But my
poor friends, they also were struggling with hunger at the end of the
month, so we did not have to talk about powdered milk, etc. It was assumed
and understood.

My kid was not free from hunger either. He knows what a food bank is like.
He was punished as a kid for my poverty, as I was punished for my mom's
poverty. He jokes you can find cool things like Teenage Ninja Turtle Fruit
Rolls from 1993 at food banks now. Another person who was poor as a kid
calls food bank food, “vintage food.” I remember I would go to my middle
class friends’ houses and their moms were in the kitchen cooking dinner
and their refrigerator had things like celery sticks in glasses of water
and we were offered French bread with butter, etc. They had actual
scheduled meals, daily. My mom was passed out in the other room and we had
a molding can of Spaghetti-o’s as the only food in the house. It got to be
embarrassing, if not shameful, to ever bring anyone home.

Not until recently have I realized how often food was used as a weapon, a
class weapon, on me as a kid. I was sometimes punished for having a poor
mom, other times I was punished simply for being alive, and needing
someone to feed me in some state institution at age 8. I have rarely been
allowed housing with land for gardening, but I have gardened every place I
was allowed to where I lived. And I did not grow flowers, I grew FOOD.

Last year I tried to have a pea patch/community garden. The other
gardeners were all very well off financially and they did not do things
like plant seeds. Every single plot all of a sudden was filled one day
with starts from local stores. So, when my plot was the only one with
actual dirt, waiting for seeds to sprout, the other gardeners walked over
my seeds, unplanting them. They let their dogs play in my plot. I put up
ropes and even signs, trying to make it clear this was a planted plot. But
even the woman in the plot next to mine just kept walking on my planted
rows of dirt to weed her garden, and nothing I could do would stop it. I
finally gave up after replanting 3 times, and I had given up food money to
buy the seeds. What was most sickening to me is I was trying to grow FOOD.
Most of these folks grew FLOWERS and then even told me they had gardens
and flowerbeds at their homes too! I was there because I was hungry, poor
and lived in an apartment with no garden. I was stunned how mindless these
“gardeners” were. To them, gardening is buying starts and planting them.
To me, gardening is raising seeds in soil. It breaks my heart that food is
such a weird class issue. Kids go hungry all over all the time and there
is no reason for it but political weaponry. It is stunning that by this
time in civilization, people are still so malnourished. It is shameful,
actually, to all humanity, that hunger is still an issue. It could be
eliminated overnight if capitalists gave up their greed.


@ @ @ @ @ @

29.12.2005

The Poor Can’t Play With the Rich
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I really cannot have friends that are not poor. And this seriously limits
my social circles. There is no way to share a life with someone in another
social caste, is my honest life experience. Poor people see the underbelly
of America that privileged white kids in suburbia do not even know about.
And if we harbor any resentment towards those privileged kids and their
parents, WE are negative jerks. We are the problems. If we complain about
homelessness and hunger, we are just lazy assholes. If we complain we
cannot support the bosses’ need for profits off our labor, and the
landlord’s needs and the absent father’s needs and the welfare dept.’s
WorkFirst requirements, as well as the anarchist mag editor’s needs, we
just cannot do it. OUR NEEDS, as poor women, as poor mothers, as women
journalists, are so far down the list as to not even exist. Likewise, most
of my landlords ripping me blind are the PARENTS of the spoiled kids I
deal with in anarchy, activism, etc.

People write me off as just being negative. No, I am being real based on
MY life experience, not some middle class white suburb with a family
experience. I talk from the street as that is my home I return to every
Christmas. That is where my presents, my REAL family is. It pisses the
privileged people off when I harp on the issues of all they took off of
us, the poor, to get their power over us. Anarchists don’t like it when
you remind them that the anarchy movement is mostly funding white middle
class males. The sexist editors of anarchy mags don’t like it when you out
the fact that alt media is really only supporting male writers, and those
male writers are making a good middle class living off of anarchy as well.

Why am I supposed to temper my beliefs and feelings to walk on eggshells
for the very people who oppress me? Why am I supposed to package my revolt
at class and gender inequity in a nice sexy cute nonthreatening way for my
oppressors again? Do I have ANY obligation to make most of the men of
anarchy feel safe and respected when they do not care, in the least, about
returning the favor?

I have already supported the lifestyles of middle class people via my
poverty as a kid. My mom paid the parents of middle class people rent for
her entire life. If you grew up in a house, you probably did so on the
backs of hidden exploited workers and rent payers somewhere else. If your
mommy and daddy paid for your college, they did so through a system that
exploits the poor to give them that extra money. YOUR privilege of living
in your suburban house, was at the cost of my mom and me being homeless,
of me being in state orphanages, basically. And I will not mince words: I
HATE MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE FOR THAT MINDLESS EXPLOITATION.

My mom got nothing, no equity, no property, nothing. I inherited nothing
for her 40+ years paying rent to the middle class, who then paid for
anarchist kids to have nice new laptops and Ipods. The money my mom gave
her landlords and bosses paid for other people’s kids to go to college,
but not her own kid. Throughout history women have worked as maids and
servants giving other people, privileged people, what their own kids were
not allowed to have and it is as sick now as it has been in the past. I
have literally been homeless while cleaning large houses with many rooms
no one sits in, for a living before. I have also wiped the urine from
their elders they will only pay minimum wages for care for. I have served
the middle class my whole life honestly.

I, also, have paid rent to land owners my whole life with nothing to show
for it. And again, that rent I have paid for over 20 years now, went to
pay for the privileged kids to join clubs at school, to have private music
lessons, to buy them vacations and prizes at school fundraisers. I was out
there struggling to eat after my boss and landlord ripped me blind, after
ripping my mom blind. I worried as much as a child about getting food for
my mom as I did about getting food for me. As a child, the normal things
middle class kids did I did not do. I was not allowed to do. Thus, at this
point, I have resentments those kids don’t. It makes sense.

If my anger makes you uncomfortable, welcome to my world. I have been made
uncomfortable by the middle class my entire life. I have been told I am
merely a work unit for those privileged people who live in houses. I have
been told I am lazy if I do not work 24/7. I am shamed and blamed for my
poverty and have been since I was 4 years old. I am degraded as only
having worth as a sex object, I am constantly told how to act and think
from the middle class. I am tired of it. Privilege is quite insulating and
most people I meet in the middle class feel they need to tell the rest of
us how to act for THEIR comfort!

I do not think it is right that those who have been fed as kids, who lived
in houses as kids, should have the NERVE to tell people who lived on
streets as kids, how to protest this class oppression. I see white men
getting paid 100 fold to talk on this manner in third person. The
privileged hire their own to talk about the poor. We are not allowed to
publish, or get paid, for the exact same thing the privileged men do,
speaking in first person. And it is our lives. We are just here for white
middle class men to write about for pay. Like a circus animal.

I have serious mixed emotions about people all the time. I get into being
a recluse at times as I just loose all trust in humans, and rightly so. I
hear all this crap about communal this and that, but they all break down
on class lines. I went to the Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle
recently. They claim to be a cooperative where they share everything. When
I asked how it works, I was told that everyone who comes into the co-op
leaves all their material wealth outside so that all in the collective
supposedly are the same. That is utter nonsense. You cannot say that a
bunch of privileged white kids stashing their money as a safety net for
later is equal IN ANY WAY to a poor person coming in with nothing to stash
like that. My opinion is if these people REALLY wanted equity, they would
not stash material hordes elsewhere for retrieval later. In that scenario,
I give my all and they give part. That is not safe. And they started with
more! When are they going to ever finally share for real?

I asked the people saying how this system made people supposedly feel
equal how the class inequity issues were dealt with. They said they have
never had class diversity there. That they have all been middle class. So,
they have not yet dealt with these issues of class resentment and I sure
do not want to be their teacher on that one. Whoever forges that breach is
in for a loaded nightmare.

It hurts me profoundly that I have to stay so separate in ways due to
class. I cannot do many of the things others can due to class and money.
In school as a kid, I was in orchestra with a school violin but the others
all owned their instrument and got to keep it, and they had private
lessons, I did not. I still was in the first chair violin area but I did
it myself without outside help like the others had. And when the school
year ended, they took my violin back. My son was so sick of classism at a
Eugene high school that I had to hold him back from putting “PRIVILEGED
KIDS ONLY” stickers on the drinking fountains and gym locker room doors.
He gets it. His privileged friends did not.

I was stunned how easily people just came up with money to fly to NYC for
the RNC protests. We had no money for food banks or homelessness but
thousands and thousands were spent by NW activists flying to that trendy
protest. I cannot fly all over the country on vacations like Chuck0 at
Infoshop.org because I am not middle class. I cannot produce magazines
such as Jason McGuinn because I am not middle class. I cannot join an
“anarchist collective” because they have never dealt with people outside
the middle class and are not prepared to deal with that class chasm. I
feel left out very often and then am attacked as a whiner if I say
anything, which is EXACTLY why so few people who are poor talk in first
person re these issues. This leaves me doing a dance where I oscillate
between just leaving and not interacting with people or I have to
constantly temper things to please the middle class for inclusion…which
inevitably leads me back to just hating the oblivious middle class and not
wanting to interact with them.

These are very serious issues I am grappling with. This is not just the
mumblings of a crazy woman. I am saying I do not feel WELCOME in American
society or in anarchist activism, due to CLASS ISSUES. I also have gotten
to a point where I look at every single white male as someone with the
potential to rip me off for their personal profit whether they call
themselves an “anticapitalist” or not. I have been ripped blind by the
middle class for so long now, that I simply do not trust them or their
children. And where does that leave me?

I am sick and tired of the oppressors telling me how to respond to their
oppression. I had 20 year old boys telling me, a 45 year old mother, how
to repackage my revolts at the 95% publication rate of males over women in
most anarchy and alt media this month even. When you tell privileged white
middle class males that they are living off of our oppression, they then
launch into a whole diatribe on how I am not presenting the issue
correctly. Whatever. I am not going to fall for the crap a second time. I
will say what I want, how I want. Those anarchist men are not paying or
supporting women like me anyway. I have nothing to lose.

The class chasm in ACTIVISM is HUGE. I feel as unsafe and untrusting of
anarchists and activists as I do of Bush. Their parents ripped off my mom
and me as landlords. We did not eat so that these white kids could have
electric toy cars in their backyards. Some kids had forts in their
backyards. I would have been happy to have a backyard fort to LIVE in as a
kid. I am sick and tired of spoiled middle class white kids telling me how
to protest class inequity so they don’t feel bad. No one seems to care how
the poor feel, or how we need things phrased for our comfort. Even in
anarchy press, it feels the poor are just another thing for men to get
paid to write about. These men have no interest in sharing their
ill-begotten inherited wealth and class privilege, that is for sure.
Chuck0 chooses funding his vacations to paying welfare moms who headline
for him weekly. We all make our choices.

I am not interested in tempering my ways to make the middle class
comfortable. I see absolutely no effort at all being made by the middle
class to include the poor and to share with us. I see the middle class,
whether you are a peace activist, an anarchist or a Republican, all
hording their money and leaving the poor homeless as a news story, not
comrades suffering. I see “collectives” which say equality is the
privileged stash their money away and then PLAY poor with the REAL poor
folk for a while. I see anarchist children telling elder women how to
package their activism for the benefit of the privileged young white men!
Look, when anarchist men do the tinkering with their ways to include women
and the poor, that is when I will change my ways for the anarchist men.
Most anarchist men, like all privileged people, think their way is
dominant and deserved. The rest of us are pee-ons. So it is not surprising
that men in anarchy are still oppressing women regularly and publicly. But
spare me your advice. I am not from the middle class world. I RESENT that
world for its greed. It doesn’t matter if you are an anarchist if your
parents ripped the poor for your material comforts. Anarchist spoiled kids
are the same as middle class conservative spoiled kids. My experiences in
life, in child protection institutions and foster care, on the street
homeless as a hungry teen, at food banks as a single mom are not the
experiences I am seeing in the past of most of my peers. And it is
alienating. Most activists do not even understand or acknowledge their
class privileges to be honest. The longer I live, the more it seems it is
useless to affiliate with anyone from the middle class as they are too
dangerous. They will always make a profit and you will be their exploit if
you are not in their class. So, I avoid the middle class with sincere
distrust, whether those middle class are activists or not.

I am blamed and named as divisive for this stand. Yet the true
divisiveness is in the middle class and up. If and when they want to
include the poor, they can. The opposite is not possible. It is very
manipulative to target the oppressed when they stand up and speak out.
Anyone saying I am divisive for poverty activism, who is not from poverty,
needs to get a mirror. Men who are angered at me outing their privileged
take over of alt press also can get out of the way if they are not women.
Young men who feel a need to tell elder women how to package their
protests of sexism can kiss my ass. I am not here to make friends, I am
here to survive. I find popularity contests to be fleeting, artificial and
shallow. I know many a famous, popular person who is living in a depressed
hell that few know about. Popularity is simply not my goal.

So I am proceeding with my path, regardless of the sticks and stones
thrown at me by the middle class. I am effective at poverty activism and
feminism or there would not be so much trash on me on the internet. I am
not changing to please white middle class male activists and I am not
kissing the butts of even the OFFSPRING of the elite. At this point, I am
not sure who I want to associate with on a daily basis because I know so
few poor people who are not in serious depression and survival mode, with
no time or energy for things like fun. To judge the people who have been
through hell on their reactions to the oppressor is very shallow. And
makes me want to spend more time alone.

I offer no solutions. I have no answers. But I at least have the right
questions which is more than I can say for most men published in alt and
anarchy press. I am not regurgitating dead male anarchy theory, I am
living and breathing change against the tide. I have seen America’s
underbelly as a kid. And I still see it now. And the enemy has not
changed. The enemy is capitalism and yes, the middle class. Not just the
rich. The MIDDLE CLASS RIP OFF THE POOR AS MUCH AS ANYONE. THEY are the
ones most capable, right now, of sharing with the poor, and they are the
ones who will not share. And their anarchist male kid writers are doing
the same thing their parents did, just with fancy monikers such as
“capitalist anticapitalists” as Chuck0 calls himself. You can blame the
poor for their reactions to elite greed, but reality is, we were not the
gluttons. Not as kids, not as adults. And thus there is no reason for us
to temper our words for the gluttons. It is time the gluttons and the kids
of gluttons tempered their shit for us, those they have oppressed via
their social class.


@ @ @ @ @ @

22.12.2005

“American Taliban” Vs. “Eco-Terrorist” Sentencing Guidelines
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

America touts a pride in the concept of “blind justice.” America makes an
attempt, at least on the surface, to offer the accused a defense lawyer, a
public defender, to thwart claims of unfairness due to lack of access to
equal legal representation for the accused in courtrooms. To have “blind
justice,” you need standards. Both parties need to be allowed access to
defense lawyers, but without sentencing standards and precedents, you have
random judges doing whatever they want on whim, which sets a stage for
corruption and chaos and something that does not resemble a country.
Federal sentencing is nearly impossible if every state varies wildly on
its sentencing patterns. The cases of extreme blatant racism in America’s
Southern courtrooms show how that can be a societal fault line. In the
case of John Walker Lindh, the man dubbed the “American Taliban,” he was
found hiding with a group of Taliban fighters, in a fight against U.S.
military that killed a CIA agent in Afghanistan. In 2002, he was sentenced
to 20 years in jail for his part in that fight. His attorney is now
arguing that sentencing is excessive because “another American citizen
Yaser Hamdi who was also captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, taken
into American custody at the same time under the same conditions” was
“freed after less than three years.” Compare that to the sentencing of an
environmental activist labeled an “eco-terrorist” by the government, Jeff
Luers. Jeff is accused of and sentenced to prison for destroying property,
3 SUVs. No human life was threatened. The property damage was not even
that great. He was sentenced to 22 years.

How did we get to this sentencing pattern where federal judges in Eugene,
Oregon are sending environmental activists to jail for periods far longer
than people fighting with armed enclaves of Taliban against American
troops on the ground abroad? It is impossible to not look at this as
extremism within our courts. Have you ever been to Eugene? It is a very
small town. The idea that the federal courts in Eugene, Or. have just sent
out arrest warrants for at least 6 environmental activists across the
country, charging them with lavish accusations, labeling them
“eco-terrorists” in the press releases, and most of this based on
frightened “informants,” by the way, reminds me of Deputy Barney Fife in
Mayberry. I imagine they are really excited about something like this,
that will bring them national attention, going on in Eugene. Right now
environmental activists who do NO DAMAGE TO LIFE are being associated with
armed fighters, as “terrorists,” and threatened with things like life in
prison, while “American Taliban” get 3 years. We need to seriously look at
that.

The Green River Murderer in the Seattle, Wa. area confessed to the rapes,
torture and murder of over 40 women. HE got life in prison. In a posting
on the internet attributed to a 12/09/05 article by Bryan Denson in The
Oregonian, it says, “Meyerhoff and McGowan were both charged” with arsons,
one of which was at a poplar farm, and “the two face life imprisonment if
convicted of using destructive devices to perform both arsons.” McGowan
and Meyerhoff are two of the people arrested this month in the sweep of
environmental activists. But, Meyerhoff turned state’s evidence as soon as
he was arrested and is now being brought up in other cases for these
accused, as one of the “informants” that these arrests are hinged upon. So
in that case, we have 2 people who were threatened with life in prison,
one goes state’s evidence trying to reduce his own sentence on the back of
others’ skin, and you throw in a little inflammatory language, such as
“eco-terrorism,” and we have a full blown judicial mess on our hands.

Let us do a review up to this point in this article. If we look at
sentencing standards, the American government wants us to believe that
environmental activists who have sworn to a pact of no damage to life in
their actions, and have stuck to that, are more of a danger to the world,
and are more dangerous “terrorists” than armed Taliban in the field. And
American courts have also decided to sentence people who are accused of
property damage and arsons on a level equal to raping, torturing and
killing over 40 women. So women’s lives are not worth much more than oh, a
poplar farm. And even more controversial, perhaps, 3 SUVs in Eugene had
more worth than that CIA agent that was killed and American troops injured
in that battle involved in the Lindh “American Taliban” case. You can see
how these sentencing standards really point to some strange trends when
set side by side.

I guess this is not surprising in this era where American corporations
seem literally drunk on greed and power, that they are valuing property
equal to human life and are now labeling people who try to interfere on
behalf of the environment’s health “terrorists.” American corporations do
not care if they ruin innocent people’s lives, whether via labeling them
“eco-terrorists” and setting them up with ridiculous, overblown criminal
charges that are reminiscent of the McCarthy era or whether they are
leaving open arsenic pits after their open pit mining projects. Bush is
known as an eco-unfriendly president so it is not that big of a leap for
him to use the federal courts to protect corporation’s interests against
environmentalists. As a matter of fact, he is now authorizing spies to
watch not only environmentalists, but also poverty action groups, peace
groups, etc. So we have no money to house the Katrina survivors, but we
have ample money to spy on Catholic Services doing peace work. We do not
have the resources or money to prosecute the companies that left vats of
toxic waste with unbelievable shelf lives in the nuclear waste dump in
Hanford, Wa., vats they did not even note the contents of for later
generations to reference. Those vats now have to be burped or they will
explode, but god only knows what is in there. They are putting people in
jail who burn 3 SUVs rather than dealing with the industrial nuclear,
mining, air and water pollution criminals. It is all about money and
priorities. It is all about values we put on life and living things versus
money and power.

We will be watching how these sentencing standards of past “terrorist”
trials compare to these new trials of environmentalists being slurred as
“eco-terrorists.” It is not fair, nor does it make sense, to be treating
environmental activists as “terrorists.” That is malicious and
inflammatory and purposefully done to taint the accused before they even
get to trial. That wording is a hollow attempt to trigger a body of law
that has no place in these cases currently coming out of Eugene. The use
of the term “terrorist” in these environmentalist arrests has allowed
federal resources to come in. It has allowed inflated charges and threats
of excessive sentencing, and apparently excessive spying, to be placed
upon these people, forcing some of them to break under the pressure,
claiming to offer some kind of insider information for their own skin,
such as Meyerhoff has apparently done.

Jeff Luers was sentenced to 22 years in prison for doing property damage
to 3 SUVs in Eugene, Or. One “American Taliban” got 3 years, the other got
20 years and is complaining that is excessive now. The well-respected
social justice activist Daniel McGowan, who is oft referred to as gentle
and warm-hearted, who was working at a non-profit that provided resources
for women dealing with domestic violence (womenslaw.org) when arrested
this December, is now being accused of environmental activist crimes,
which caused property damage, alone, and he is threatened with the same
punishment as a man who tortured and killed 40 women. Even the Green River
Murderer was not labeled a “terrorist.” What has made the president, our
government, and Eugene, Or., of all places, decide to target these
activists on this aggressive witchhunt? It is very curious. It seems like
we are still missing a puzzle piece here…we will have to see what
transpires in the days to come.

i Reuters, 12/21/05 'American Taliban' Lindh seeks reduced sentence
(http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-21T212329Z_01_KRA176941_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-LINDH.xml&archived=False)




20.12.2005

Spying Techniques 101
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

All this talk about the U.S. government spying on Americans, secret CIA
prisons abroad, FBI roundups of environmental activists in a sting last
week, based on informants, rather than evidence, etc., has me thinking
people need to know more about spying. Spying is actually a licensed
industry in most, if not all, states. I did private detective work in the
late 1990’s-2000, and it was an eye opening experience, most certainly.
For instance, I learned if you feel you are being followed, SLOW DOWN. It
is almost impossible to follow a car going noticeably slow without raising
suspicion. I found out about “bumper beepers,” which are devices you can
simply slap on someone’s car, under their bumper, and then GPS will track
their every move for you. Somehow it seems these are legal for private
detectives, not just police, to use.

One of the funny parts of the spying industry is the spies spy on each
other. The spying office I worked at got a letter from another spy in town
saying they had video footage to prove that the office was using many
business names that it had no license for. The spy office I worked at had
an assortment of fake magnetic signs for the sides of its vehicles. The
signs usually had names that implied a business like appliance repair or
utility work, yet the signs were not for real businesses. (I noticed after
the 9/11 attacks, there were reports in the NYTimes about a lower level
CIA parking lot. The report said a bunch of taxis, appliance and utility
vehicles in that lot below actually belonged to the CIA, not the
businesses associated with the outsides of the vehicles, which immediately
reminded me of the spy office I worked at.)

As I stated above, vehicles used for spying often pose as things like
taxis, appliance repair or utility repair crews. A tip-off of a spy
van/car in your neighborhood is dark tinted windows. If you cannot see
inside a car parked near your home, that is a red flag. One of the spies
from the office I worked at was spying on someone and he fell asleep on
the job. He basically set the camera to go, and sat for hours and fell
asleep. When he woke up, his van was blacked out! The people in the
neighborhood put cardboard on all his windows! And they also parked his
van in, with cars right up to his bumpers, in the front and back of him!
Apparently that neighborhood had been having a bunch of nasty divorces and
spying incidents in the past, and they weren’t having it! He had to call
the police to rescue him! He proved he had a Private Investigator license,
that he was on assignment from a spying office and finally, the sheriff
got him out of there!

Another way to spot a spy vehicle is the license plate numbering. Every
state has codes regarding the numbering. I do not know what the current
codes are, but in the past, Washington state used special coding for
government vehicles. A 1-2 letter suffix or prefix indicates different
things. For instance, in the past, a B and/or M stood for state owned, a C
for county owned, a D for city owned, SP for State Patrol, WSP for
Washington State Patrol, etc. In the past, codes for California included
the use of A in licenses for state assemblymen, Aa for Assemblyman’s
personal vehicle, S for state senator, Ss for senator’s personal vehicle,
Ss for retired senator,…I don’t know if they still use this, but in the
past, Calif. had a license code of a diamond with an E in it for state
owned vehicles, a stop sign shape with an E in it for city or county owned
vehicles, and a triangle with two P’s in it for a press photographer’s
vehicle.

It is amazing how much vehicles are actually used in the spying game. The
spy office in Seattle I was privy to used many dummy vehicles. They would
park them somewhere near the home of the people they were paid to spy on.
Then underneath the passenger side dashboard was a little joystick thing
and a screen. There were cameras mounted in the taillight sections on the
side and back of the car. The joystick in the front was maneuvered to get
a proper camera angle, through the back reflectors, on the person’s home
and driveway. If possible, the goal was to get the front door and the
driveway activity on camera. The spy then locked the car, and walked a few
blocks away where another spy picked him up. A camera with a VCR and
tapes, and battery packs were in the trunk of the car left on the street
and the camera was motion sensitive, so it only filmed when something
happened. Every day or two, someone would retrieve and change the tapes
casually in the trunk, or when done with surveillance, the spy would again
walk up to the car and drive it away. So, vehicles sitting on your street
can actually be spying on you with no one in them.

Another thing the spy office I worked at did was use what they called
“bumper beepers.” There were little units you could attach under someone’s
bumper without them noticing it. As soon as the bumper beeper was on, you
could track their every move via GPS. Right now, in Dec. of 2005, there is
a big outrage at Bush’s admissions of approving what some are calling
illegal spying on U.S. citizens. This follows other trends, such as the
use of bumper beepers by the government to spy on Americans. Earlier this
year, in Jan. 2005, a Boston Globe article
(http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/01/17/gps_spying_may_prove_irresistible_to_police/)
by Hiawatha Bray, says, “It's possible the police have attached an
electronic tracking device to my humble Ford Contour, enabling them to
track its every voyage. Unlikely, but possible -- and perfectly legal,
according to a federal court ruling handed down in New York this month. It
seems that police have an unlimited right to use digital technology to
track our movements, all in the name of keeping us safe. Somehow, I don't
feel any safer.” You might want to check under your bumpers for strange
discs or boxes next time you go out.

Another thing I learned at that spy office in Seattle is that spies rely
heavily on stereotyping. They try to figure out what people will do, etc.
by things like the cars they drive and clothing they wear. As a matter of
fact, more than once, the spies at our office were miffed trying to find a
person, only to figure out that they were crossdressers so the woman who
lived where they kept thinking they would find the man they wanted to
film, was the man. It took a while for them to figure that out each time
it happened.

As outsiders, people who watch, spies often make generalizations based on
third hand observations, missing the core of what is actually going on.
Much as the current FBI sweep of environmental activists associated with
the NW that happened last week, that type of profiling is rampant all
throughout the history of spying. Maybe they need to dehumanize the people
they are spying on to quell their conscience, but it is odd how spies talk
at times.

For instance, I was handed something entitled, “Insurance Fraud
Investigator’s Guide to Gypsy Organized Criminal Groups” a few years back.
It says it was “prepared by Professionals Against Confidence Crime,
Not-for-profit International Organization of Law Enforcement
Professionals…” Inside this “guide” is a long list of racist stereotyping.
Interestingly, I see now, for the first time ever, that there is this
insert on the bottom of the first page…”This document is the property of
the Professionals Against Confidence Crime. It is being distributed to
your agency with the understanding that it is not to be further
disseminated outside of your agency without the consent of the originator.
Distribution within your agency is to be protected in accordance with the
normal safeguards for sensitive information. Prepared by Detective Dennis
M. Marlock, Professionals Against Confidence Crime, (414) 935-7325.” This
document was not given to me in some hush-hush manner. I have had this
document for years and never even noticed that disclaimer. I am reporting
what I am seeing in this document as a reporter who was handed this
document due to my interest in racism and human rights issues. But
obviously from that first disclaimer, you can see, this is controversial
stuff and apparently Marlock did not want people to know about his
involvement in this racist project. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he was
patrolling with the Minutemen now!) I was handed this document by a
concerned person who wanted the racism in this document exposed, thus I
feel I have no obligation towards this organization at this point, and
feel I have more of an obligation as a reporter to say what is printed
therein.

Marlock’s “Gypsy” crime “guide” starts off, “For decades, groups of highly
organized criminals, who choose to call themselves Gypsies, have viewed
the insurance industry as “an easy source of unlimited income.”” The word
Gypsy is then defined as “a criminal lifestyle of thievery and deception
dating back to 1000 AD, of or pertaining to that segment of the Romani
population who have combined toether for the purpose of obtaining monetary
gains, wholly or in part by illegal means, while protecting their criminal
activities through a pattern of graft and corruption.” Then Romani and
Romany are defines and there is a disclaimer that says “The word Gypsy
denotes a criminal lifestyle of thievery and deception and is not intended
to include the law abiding members of Romani society.” Then Marlock lists
“fraud claim identifiers,” such as “claimant rents home or apt., claimant
has unlisted telephone, claimant presented a “traveler card ID…”” But the
most telling “identifier” was this one: “During a home visit investigator
noticed that the furniture was covered by plastic slipcovers. Adult
females wore ankle-length dresses. Everyone connected with the case spoke
with some type of foreign accent.” The document goes on, “The indic
languages of these criminal groups is a Sanskrit based language known as
Romany. Although Gypsies can speak many different languages, including
English, they all tend to speak with a noticeable accent.”

A quick google on Marlock’s name shows entries like “The most vocal
crusader against “Gypsy scams” is a Detective Dennis Marlock of the
Milwaukee Police Department and president of Professionals Against
Confidence Crimes” and a look at his website shows I am not the first to
call him a racist and that he has not exactly hidden this view of his. He
has more of this type of rhetoric prevalent in the “guide” I have, on his
website. His website at
http://www.fraudtech.bizland.com/insurance_fraud.htm says, “Criminal
Gypsies look on insurance companies with the same appreciation and
gratitude they hold for welfare agencies; both are sources of easy money,
and both are heavily patronized. Just as Gypsies may be on welfare rolls
at several offices, so they often insure their cars, homes, and personal
property with multiple companies, anticipating, with reason, that some
unfavorable event is bound to occur for which all the insurance companies
will pay restitution. Were it possible to isolate the accounts of Gypsies
in insurance company records, those accounts would undoubtedly show that
Gypsies as a population are extremely jinxed, Gypsies are unusually
frequent victims of thieves and are very accident prone…the Gypsies slip
on spilled products in grocery stores, trip over items in the aisles of
department stores, and tumble down stairs almost everywhere. The injuries
they sustain in all kinds of accidents are predominately to the soft parts
of the body, to the back and to the head, injuries that commonly leave
physicians perplexed as to their exact nature. With the Gypsies' lawyers
threatening lawsuits, insurance companies usually pay hastily and well for
the suffering the Gypsies endure.”

Marlock’s “guide” that I have, also had a strange homage for their
“Closing View.” It has a Romani man saying to his son that he did not want
his son involved with the Gypsy “garbage.” The story says, “He concluded
by stating that it was the criminal Gypsies who have placed a stigma on
his entire race. That honest Romani are frustrated are chagrined to be
categorized with the Gypsies is understandable, that they willingly accept
the designation is astounding and that they defend Gypsies is
incomprehensible. As for the Rom just cited clearly recognized, the
enemies of the Romani are not the police, the prosecutors and the judges.
Nor are they the reporters, news commentators and talk show hosts who help
educate the public about the thieves in their midst. The enemies of the
Romani are the Gypsies who have created the common image and perpetuate it
through their criminal activities. Marlock and Dowling, Paladin Press,
1993”

My God, does that ever sound identical to the rhetoric coming out of the
Bush administration about the Middle East and Islam. This thing where some
outsider comes in and tells people to stop all tradition and to dress a
certain way so we can tell them apart from the “bad guys” is absolutely
racist and unbelievable, or incomprehensible, as their “closing view”
said. The only way to not be deemed the bad guy with racist pigs is to
talk, dress and act like them! In the Vietnam war, the U.S. soldiers could
not tell villagers from the enemy combatants. So the policy was, if they
were dead, they were the enemy. Philip Caputo in “A Rumor of War,” writes,
“This lead to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. “If it’s
dead and Vietnamese, it’s V.C.” was a rule of thumb in the bush.”

In an article about one of the activists arrested last week in the FBI
sweeps, by Craig Welch, in the Dec. 17, 2005 Seattle Times, he says, “a 6
hour search of Rodgers’ home and office revealed suspected bomb-making
materials such as timers and re-lighting birthday candles, three guns, and
two digital photos of nude, prepubescent girls.” Okay, that last one was
for the same effect as the national photos of Saddam arrested, disheveled,
in his underwear. Humiliation. So how is porn a bomb making device again?
And what relevance does that have, at all, to that article? That, right
there, shows me an attempt to slur character from the get go. Not sure how
guns are considered “bomb making” devices either. That also seemed
irrelevant in a cite about the “bomb making evidence” from his home’s
search. Honestly, if they searched his whole house, and that was the best
they could come up with, that he is making bombs because he owns guns and
porn, some birthday candles and a timer, that is not very convincing,
honestly And the other “evidence” from “informants” is also very fuzzy.

My experience with police and private investigators is they are an
unbelievably racist lot. When in private, racist profiling exists and
flourishes. As you can see, the man behind the “Gypsy” guide did not want
to be outted at one point, but then it seems he outted himself in the end.
We hear Marlock talking about Romanis and “Gypsies” the same way Bush
talks about Muslims and “terrorists,” the same way the FBI talk about
environmentalists and “eco-terrorists,” and the same way American
overlords talked about the dead Vietnamese in the Vietnam war. And when we
try to ask the officials about this, they use “executive privilege,”
“national security,” etc. to evade questions and answers. KIRO News (CBS)
in Seattle reported the NYTimes did not release the story about the Bush
regime spying on Americans for SEVERAL YEARS at the request of Bush,
believing its release would hurt national security. I wonder what made
them finally drop that ball to the public. But I wonder what other stories
of import the NYTimes are hiding for Bush for years now, as well.

The lack of accountability, the flimsiness of evidence from informants,
the racism and profiling, the inflammatory language, the hidden prisons
the CIA is running all over the world…spies and the government need to be
scrutinized, not believed. Mad Magazine had a cartoon called Spy Vs. Spy.
With more people and groups profiled and hunted down by the pro-corporate
U.S. government, it is getting to be a spy vs. spy situation here, whether
we like it or not. Because we are now being spied on, we are spying on the
spies spying on us. They kind of dragged us into this spying game. But it
would do us all well to learn more about the private investigator and spy
industry, as it is in every major city. There are almost 100 listings
under “Investigator” in the Seattle phone book alone. The private
detective company I worked at, which is in those listings, was hired by
the city and state. That “private” moniker is blurred. Who do you think
those 100 spy companies in Seattle are spying on? This site,
http://www.crimetime.com/licensing.htm, lists the private investigator
licensing requirements of all the states. Think about this industry, what
it does, and how it relates to your civil liberties and freedoms.




18.12.2005

Poor Kids and Guilt at Christmas
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

It is interesting what we remember and do not remember about Christmas’
past. One of the strangest and most pronounced memories I have of
Christmas is one year when I was about 10 years old and we were dirt poor.
I interacted with other poor kids, trying to somehow soothe my own
discomfort. I dressed up as Santa and wrapped some of my toys which were
still in good shape. I took them to the home of my babysitter, who was
also dirt poor and had 3 kids younger than me. You might think my memory
would be warm and fuzzy, that I was doing something kind for another in
the Christmas spirit. But the feeling that lingers for me, is how awkward,
how disenfranchised, the poor people, kids and adults, I knew and
interacted with at Christmas felt.

When my parents got divorced, I became a two-income kid. Following the
fault lines of institutionalized sexism, my mom was left on welfare in
destitute poverty and my dad fought paying child support and was a
well-to-do aerospace engineer bachelor. Due to my father’s higher class
level than mine and my mom’s, the guilt was really horrible as a kid. For
instance, my dad would not help me get a present for my mom. He did not
want me giving anything to my mom, ever. He kept books and shoes and
clothing at his house for me, and I literally shed my old self on the
weekends for him. But since I always had to be sent home to destitute
poverty and hunger at the end of every weekend, I always knew I had to put
my “poor” clothes back on to go home, and I felt awkward at the places we
went with the kids who lived in those worlds 24/7.

After the weekend with dad, I felt bad, as a child, bringing home
leftovers from big food feasts to my mom’s empty home and hungry belly. I
felt icky bringing home nice presents my mom could never afford to get me
as a kid, always coming from my dad. If he had paid his court-ordered
child support, my mom, herself, could have bought me food and presents,
but instead, all funneled through him, which made my mom very bitter.
Christmas has always had huge guilt issues around class for me. I knew
that getting nice things at Christmas had huge political overtones, even
as a young child. If I loved a gift my dad gave me, my mom felt bad, as
she could never afford those types of presents. So even if I got a present
that was really cool, that I liked, I felt obliged to show no joy over it,
so my mom would not be hurt. As a young child, this type of social
monitoring for the adults involved is distressing and exhausting.

When I look back on Christmas’ past, the only ones without weird guilt
feelings are the ones spent with my mom when we were poor, but her family
would send us a yearly cache of baked goods, homemade maple syrup,
hand-knitted items, etc. Out of all the presents of all my childhood
Christmas’, the ones I seriously remember loving most were the Barbie
clothes my grandma would knit me, oddly. Everything else seems to be a
blur. I really did like a small electric organ I got one year, and I liked
the Lite Brite too, but again, I associate a lot of dark, guilt feelings
with those items as playing with them made my mom mad, reminding her of my
dad.

People think you can buy kids off at Christmas with presents. I recently
saw a Christmas episode of “Bewitched” where the people on Samantha’s
street were taking in the kids at a local orphanage for Christmas eve and
day. Ms. Kravitz, and Sam and Darin took home kids as if this was so great
for these kids. Do you know how freaking HUMILITATING this type of thing
is for the kids involved? People with money take poor kids out for a day,
treat them like kids people care about, then ship them back to the cold
institutions with a new toy, whoopee. I, also, was in a state child
protection institution at age 8, in Los Angeles, called McLaren Hall.
(McLaren Hall is a notoriously rough and abusive asylum setting where
unwanted kids were warehoused and abused by the state in the 1960’s-2003).
When we, the kids, were finally allowed out of there to be shipped off to
foster homes, they gave us, the kid prisoners, basically, a big box of
toys, as if somehow that made the previous weeks, months or years of
torture go away.

When I left McLaren Hall, and they gave me that big box of toys, I was in
such shock and trauma by then, that toys were no different than dirt to
me. Seriously. I remember sitting in the car as we drove away from McLaren
Hall, and not being able to hear the social worker’s words in the car…I
could only think about how the telephone poles were moving as we drove and
I think it meant I was perhaps finally out of there. I was not excited
about the box of new toys. I did not give one crap about them. I am sure
some corporations donated those toys for charity brownie points and tax
write offs, but they meant nothing to me. And I am not alone. As I have
talked to adult survivors of McLaren Hall, I have had more than one of
them express ANGER at the box of toys they gave us when we left. One guy
sent me an email about McLaren Hall after reading an article I wrote about
it, and the subject line was “F*ck McLaren Hall’s Teddy Bears!”

Myself, and other kids there did not find that box of toys comforting or
endearing, it angered us in ways. It seemed as if those toys were supposed
to somehow buy us off, to make us not talk about the horrors we just saw
inside McLaren Hall. Toys were so far down the list of what we needed…we
needed safe parents, families, homes, food, clothing, school…Kids from
McLaren Hall had much more important things on their minds than toys. Even
as an 8 year old, I smelled something funny about those toys. And why
would I want to play with something from there, once out of that place of
terror? It would only remind me of that hell! The McLaren Hall box of toys
had a creepy vibe to it. Although I am not comparing McLaren Hall to a
concentration camp, it is kind of like giving kids a box of toys when they
leave a concentration camp. What good are those tainted toys?

So my toys from dad were filled with guilt from my mom. And my dad did not
want my “poor” things from my mom in his world either. And toys from
McLaren Hall reminded me of the scariest place on earth. By about 8, I
pretty much gave up on toys for comfort due to the adults around me and
the political significance of the toys given to me.

When I was 10, as I said, I tried to help my neighbors’ poor kids not feel
what I had felt. I tried to wrap up my old toys, and to visit them, giving
them maybe a little extra Christmas joy, as I knew their parents were
struggling just for food money. But after that effort, I had an epiphany.
I realized that little band-aids can actually emphasize what we do not
have somehow. I realized how weird “charity” can be. I realized that it is
not the presents that matter, honestly. It is the caring. And a token
caring for a minute at Christmas, can actually echo as a reminder of how
much people do not care the rest of the year. You do not see the kids I
described in this article on those warm Christmas TV ads. I have talked
about poor kids and unwanted, abandoned kids in this article. Although a
toy may have a slight significance for an “underprivileged” kid, what they
really want and need is stability, health, a home, reliable food, a loving
support network, and an opportunity to get presents on their birthdays
too, not just on Christmas. To be “included” for a token moment just
doesn’t cut it. Kids are smarter than that. Temporary charity is for the
giver’s benefit, honestly. That is what I learned, as a ten year old, one
Christmas in 1970.




10.12.2005

Environmentalist Witch Hunt 2005
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

This week (Dec. 7, 2005) approximately 6 people were arrested in
connection with alleged arsons and environmental activism (resulting in
property damage) in the Pacific NW (http://portland.indymedia.org). I have
said we needed to “support” them, and people have written me asking why I
am asking people support “terrorists.” The media and the government have
used the word “eco-terrorist” to brand these people, throwing out that
touted but rarely used maxim of “innocent until proven guilty.” These
people who are charged with these crimes, themselves, do not call
themselves, or identify as, “eco-terrorists.” I do not know why or who
started this concept that using inflammatory words in the mainstream media
was “impartiality in reporting” or even blind justice, but I find the use
of “eco-terrorists” in the coverage of this case to be very egregious, and
frankly, irresponsible.

So, why would I say something like “support” these folks who are being
charged with these crimes on the federal level in an organized sting? And
the reasons, oddly, have little to do with the individual cases
themselves, or the crimes they supposedly committed. My biggest concern is
that the current justice system does not provide fair hearings. Just by
labeling these people “eco-terrorists” in all the media and court papers,
it sets up a terrible slant on the outcomes they face. For the reasons of
wishing for integrity within our justice system, I wish that these people
were not flung with slander at the get go by the very government
supposedly offering them a fair trial venue. That, right there, is
alarming to me and makes me think we need to “support” them on a purely
legal level.

Next, I have problems with the way the criminal justice system uses plea
bargains to bully and coerce confessions out of people. It seems to me
that what is going on is the government charges someone with incredibly
serious crimes, puffing the charges up as much as possible, then they
scare the plaintiffs to death, and then say, if you say you are guilty, we
will reduce the crimes we are charging you with. How is that fair or
uncoerced? That is coercion in the worst sense! In some cases, people are
literally trading their life for that guilty plea, bargaining down to a
manslaughter and/or life in prison sentence, rather than a death penalty
sentencing. The only way a guilty plea could be believable is if the
charges they plead guilty to were the same ones they were charged with
originally.

I am also worried about those charged who will need to rely on public
defenders. The public defender system is overworked and understaffed, as
well as underfunded. And the tension from that spills over onto the
clients daily. Many a person has gone to jail and never really understood
what just happened, or what the crime they actually were charged with was!
The criminal law system funds prosecutors at twice the level they fund the
public defenders in most places and that is another unfair playing field
that makes me seriously worry about the right to a fair trial these people
are supposedly entitled to. Support can be in the way of helping people
understand the charges against them, and many legal aid groups try very
hard to help advocate around some of this mess. But I dread anyone new
going into that mess.

I also think prisons don’t work. I am not even sure what their goal is.
Especially when they start using prisoners for slave labor, that starts
getting very close to/is an outright violation of the U.S. Constitution
which bans forced servitude. I am not sure what the point of warehousing
people in jails is. Prisons do not benefit anyone, it seems. Yes, certain
folks are out of control and we really need to deal with them. Such as
sexual predators, child molesters, wife beaters, violent thieves, etc. But
it seems like prisons just make people who were violent, more violent. And
just putting a bandaid on the violence, rather than talking about what
that is a symptom of, is getting us nowhere fast. It just seems like a
ticking time bomb to have all these really explosively angry and hopeless
men locked up behind bars like that. It just seems at this late stage in
society we could figure out a more healthy and safe solution to some of
these issues. Because the people charged this week did no bodily damage to
anyone, which seems to be the standard practice of these environmentalist
groups, it seems the use of the word “eco-terrorist” is used for some kind
of dramatic effect and that is irresponsible behavior for a government and
the media, in my opinion.

I also have trouble blindly accepting the U.S. government when they throw
around terms like “eco-terrorist” in light of the whole Judi Bari/Darryl
Cherney case (www.darrylcherney.com). This is from Darryl’s website:
“Darryl Cherney has written scores of songs about the actions he and his
friends have taken defending the environment, fighting for civil rights,
and protesting and mocking the political status quo...He has worked with
Earth First!...successfully protecting…portions of the Cahto Wilderness,
Trout Creek (both in Mendocino County, CA), Luna (where Julia Butterfly
sat for two years in Humboldt County, CA), and even some individual trees
(in California and Ohio). And he worked alongside his political organizing
partner Judi Bari at building alliances between loggers, steelworkers and
environmentalists. All the while writing and singing songs about it.”
“While touring universities and organizing for a large, prototypical
campaign called Redwood Summer, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were car
bombed in Oakland, California. (www.judibari.org). The FBI and Oakland
Police blamed the two (falsely) for bombing themselves and had them
arrested. Judi was almost killed while Darryl was only slightly injured.
Redwood Summer carried on regardless and serves to this day as a model for
political campaigns nationwide. Judi and Darryl went on to sue the FBI and
Oakland Police agents for violations of the United States Constitution.
Tragically, Judi died from cancer in 1997. Darryl along with Judi's estate
and their team of veteran civil rights attorneys took the FBI and OPD to
trial in the Spring of 2002. A jury unanimously awarded $4.4 million for
violations of Judi and Darryl's freedom of speech and their right to be
free from unlawful arrest and illegal search and seizure.”

And Judi Bari’s site says, “(revised 6/19/02)On June 11, a federal jury
returned a stunning verdict in favor of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in
their landmark civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three
Oakland Police officers. The jury clearly found that six of the seven FBI
and OPD defendants framed Judi and Darryl in an effort to crush Earth
First! and chill participation in Redwood Summer. That was evident in the
fact that 80% of the $4.4 million total damage award was for violation of
their First Amendment rights to speak out and organize politically in
defense of the forests. "The jury exonerated us," said Darryl Cherney.
"They found the FBI to be the ones in violation of the law. The American
public needs to understand that the FBI can't be trusted. Ten jurors got a
good, hard look at the FBI and they didn't like what they saw."

"It's really beyond our wildest dreams," said Darlene Comingore, Judi
Bari's friend and executor of her estate who stood in for her as
co-plaintiff in this suit. "We hope the FBI and Oakland and all the police
forces out there that think they can violate people's rights and get away
with it are listening because the people of the state of California and
Oakland today said, 'No, you can't. You can't get away with it.' Lead
attorney Dennis Cunningham said the message he hopes the verdict sends is
that: "Ashcroft is doing precisely the wrong thing to abandon the (Levi)
guidelines and let the FBI go after dissent with a free hand. It's clear
that their intention is not about fighting terrorism, it's about
suppressing dissent. That's what the FBI has always been about. Hopefully
it will make Congress think twice about giving them a free hand."

That post above is circa 2002, but it is amazing how much that sounds like
today. Another reason I worry and feel I need to support these people
right now is that American spying history past, on its own citizens, is
littered with flaws. In 1962, a national security “watch list,” issued by
the FBI, red-flagged all materials coming from Puerto Rico of an
anti-American or pro-Soviet nature, peace groups going from the U.S. to
the Soviet Union, and any American interacting on a regular basis with
students in Moscow, or with the U.S.S.R. By 1972, the FBI’s “watch list”
expanded to include the previous groups with Puerto Rican or Soviet Union
connections, plus U.S. protest and peace groups, including Women Strike
for Peace, and also “extremist” groups, which included the Black Panthers,
Students for a Democratic Society, and the Progressive Labor Party.
Persons sympathetic to North Korea, North Vietnam, Red China, and
pro-Cuban individuals were now added to the list also. The FBI also
maintained a list of “suspicious” people, who were to be rounded up in the
event of a national emergency, as they were in positions to influence
others “against the national interests,” “due to their subversive
associations and ideology. ” This FBI roundup list included a) professors,
teachers, or leaders, b) labor union organizers and leaders, c) writers,
lecturers, newsmen, entertainers, and others in the mass media field, d)
lawyers, doctors, and scientists, e) other potentially influential persons
on a local or national level, f) individuals who could potentially furnish
material financial aid.” In 1962, MLKing, Jr. was added to this index. The
NYTimes recently reported the FBI is again profiling political protesters
in America, and included “anarchists” as an additional target group this
time around.

As we moved through the 1960’s and 1970’s, American national security
agents were confused as to who they should be spying on, who the enemy
was, and what the status quo was they were protecting. At one point in
the 1960’s, black children trying to attend public school in the South
were attacked by police as the enemy! In the 1970’s, police thought
non-violent anti-war student protesters at Kent State University were the
enemy, and opened fire on them, on an American campus! Terms like
“communists,” and “extremists,” came under more and more scrutiny, the
more liberally they were applied across society in the 1950’s – 1970’s.
In the 1960’s, the line blurred between average citizens and government
critics, politicians, professors, feminists, environmentalists, farm
workers, students, journalists, hell, the Nightly News, were openly
questioning the U.S. policy in Vietnam and Nixon’s reign as president. So
we are back to that place again. Where our government feels backed
against the wall by the people and they are now nervous and uneasy and,
frankly, armed and dangerous.

President Bush is anything but “eco-friendly,” thus I can see how he would
immediately exaggerate the threats from people who *are* eco-friendly. He
is a pro-oil, pro-gas-engine-car president, which is nuts in this day and
age. He will not move off the track that pays his family money: oil. He is
friendly to miners who leave arsenic pits in the open to kill nearby
wildlife when miners leave town. He is friendly to all kinds of corporate
agendas that RUIN our environment. Certainly GWBush’s environmental
policies have done more damage (or “eco-terrorism,” if you will) to the
environment, internationally, than all of the environmentalists arrested
this week.

Those are some of the problems I am having with all this labeling and the
government’s actions this week. As you can see, my reasons have very
little to do with these individual cases, or the details of their cases.
My reasons are more policy-based, revolving around my desire to see
justice work, and to not see innocent people labeled before they are tried
in court. Just as I was one of those who argued in law school that the
worst child murderer in the land needs the most top quality
attorney/public defender to make sure something that serious is
represented in a fair trial, I also argue that no matter what the crime,
we have some serious problems with the criminal law system in the U.S. But
even more frightening is we have a serious problem with the Federal
Homeland Security Department. It is very possible they are using these
environmentalists to deflect from the concept that they failed in New
Orleans and that no one is sure what they do with all their funding
anymore. I am concerned with the problems in the criminal law system, but
I am especially concerned when people are punished for politics, not
crimes.

In the cases of other environmentalist activists of late, in Oregon, no
less, sentencing guidelines were thrown out the window and excessive
sentences were handed out based on politics, not the crimes. I fear that
environmentalists are being profiled, much like racial profiling, and are
particularly prone to being exploited by the justice system right now
because there is a strange use of these sentencings as a political symbol.
It feels like the courts are trying to make these excessive charges and
sentencings to scare people from defending the environment from
corporations doing things like logging old growth forests which cannot be
replaced. I just do not like it when the courts make political
sentencings, on the right or the left. The concept of “blind justice” is
an ideal for a reason. And America should try to live up to that ideal.

I guess I have gotten to a point where I just simply cannot trust my
government, which makes the innocence of my youth look far away. I do not
trust that they can get the names straight on their “terror” lists, I do
not have faith cops can investigate things properly, I do not have faith
in our Dept of Homeland Security and their new or old Cointelpro programs.
I do not like the lack of transparency in these grand jury indictments
either. What are they hiding? I do not have faith in public defenders or
in plea bargains. I have suspicions about the agenda GWBush’s government
is pushing as a very environmentally unfriendly cabinet. I am very
suspicious and uncomfortable with the corporate agenda in America, which
sacrifices air, water, land…for private profits, often unchecked. And I
worry about the corporate power over the U.S. judicial system. But mostly,
I worry that a bunch of people who could have contributed wholly in
society will lose their freedom behind bars, for mistakes and flaws in the
American justice system. That is pretty much what haunts me to say we need
to support these people during this period.

Too many people have been charged, or just held with no charges in this
“terrorist” net, then released later, as innocent, for me to just believe
someone is guilty of a crime just because they are accused or charged with
crimes by the U.S. government. People *do* slip through the system,
wrongly accused, all the time. With a justice system so riddled with
flaws, one becomes sad at the human losses those flaws envelope daily. And
with a track record like the U.S. has, regarding political prisoners past
and present, it is very hard to “support” them in all this. Which leaves
me to the support of those charged. Honestly, it doesn't matter what your
stand on environmentalism is, these arrests are about political freedoms
in my perception, and political harassment and profiling, not about
whichever individual actions evoked this wrath.




07.12.2005

The Class Politics of Volunteerism
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

It is no coincidence that women volunteer more than men in a sexist
society. Women are the free labor units for childcare, housework and yes,
social volunteerism. Women are still, even in 2005, playing the unpaid
social housekeepers. And the poor are still taking on a disproportionate
amount of volunteer labor. At this point, I have decided to quit
volunteering for any organization where the board members and leaders of
the organization live at a higher class level than me. No exceptions.

I have heard enough anarchist rhetoric from white middle class men who
want me to do volunteer work for them, for free, while they make money off
the same project. I have heard all their guilt trips about how if I ask
for pay like they do, I am a capitalist pig. But I can also see very
plainly, with my own eyes, that if I am a capitalist pig for asking for
food money as I volunteer on projects where others are paid enough to fly
around on vacations, that I am the idiot.

I began volunteering in my teens. I was very concerned about the treatment
of older people in convalescent homes. I felt it was inhumane. I went into
convalescent homes, myself, not through any organization, not with any
group. I went to the convalescent homes myself and asked if I could do
something to help these forgotten people tucked away and suffering. I
spent many days in junior high and in high school, going after school to
the hospitals to write letters, give water, listen, hold a hand of elder
patients. While I was doing this, some slime bag administrator was sitting
pretty in his mansion and refused to pay for decent treatment of these
patients. I was picking up corporate slack, for free.

I got another good taste of me being used for some fat cat’s profit
elsewhere in the public school system when my son was young. I could not
believe how much free labor the public schools wanted from us to “pay” for
“free” schooling. At Northgate Elementary in Seattle, Wa., parents on
welfare were forced into horrific situations by oblivious middle class
parents. When my son was in the 1st grade, he had to walk past a display
case in his school hallway full of expensive walkmans, cameras, and gifts
that only the elite kids would get, handed to them, onstage, during school
assembly, for their parents selling corporate crap for the school. My 6
year old son would come home crying saying if he could just sell $500
worth of wrapping paper and tulip bulbs he could get a “free” walkman! He
would beg me to help him sell. I felt very angry at this position I was
put in by the public schools. I did not have rent or food money and now I
was dealing with this mess.

I went to the school and told them to stop making my kid into a whore to
sell corporate goods for them for “free” schooling. I said we were low
income, no one I knew could afford their overpriced wrapping paper from
some other state they were selling and I resented the consternation they
were putting into my home via this. I argued that I had a kid’s cotton hat
company and if they were going to send out free sales squads from public
schools, then sell the products of the parents, not some faceless
corporation in another state. That fell on deaf ears. I told them my son
did not have equal opportunity in all that. And what was their response?
They actually sent a corporate spokesperson to my home to try to TAKE MY 6
YEAR OLD DOOR TO DOOR TO SELL HIS STUFF FOR HIM! Wow! I finally withdrew
my son and sent him to a combination of private schools on scholarships I
applied for and homeschooling situations as we simply could not afford the
class division and free labor FORCED on us by the middle class in
elementary school. It had nothing to do with education. Incidentally, I
found a Seattle School District guideline that says the school MAY NOT do
just what they are doing in Seattle. It clearly says no incremented prizes
can be awarded for fundraising. Yet, when I brought that to the attention
of the school superintendent, the principal and the PTA, they said the
School Guidelines were merely “suggestions” and not binding at all!!!

By the 5th grade, we tried public school in Seattle again at West Woodland
Elementary. My young son was again forced to whore corporate goods, this
time overpriced stale candy bars. I, again, refused this forced sales by a
child for schooling. This time, the entire 5th grade class he was in sold
the candy as commanded to by the Seattle Public School District. The
reward for the corporate whoring by the kids was his whole class got to
spend a day at a skating party, rather than at school. But my son did not
whore his allotted amount. So, he was literally to be punished by West
Woodland! They said my son had to SIT IN THE OFFICE ALL DAY because his
class would be gone at a skating party my kid was not welcome at. That was
the end of him attending West Woodland. By the way, the same city,
Seattle, that says it cannot afford its own public school system, just
paid out over $100,000 to “study” the monorail project, which is now
canned. There goes another $100,000 out of the public school budget, paid
to people who are already overpaid, and now kids will be whored some more
to cover that!

I have spent almost my whole life as an unpaid activist. I have
volunteered endlessly. I have also worked an insane amount of minimum wage
jobs in desperation. It seems I am spit on more than lauded for such
efforts. And I find the disempowerment of poverty to be very crippling.
There seems to be this thing were predatory capitalists and middle class
bosses, landlords, etc. see the poor and women as a free manipulative
labor source for their own profits. It is weird but people act like since
we are already poor, we need nothing else. They act like since we survived
poverty this long, we should stay there and not them, as they cannot stand
poverty, but obviously we can.

In 2001, I worked for the most abusive boss I have ever worked for. This
boss, Sue Wakeman of Probe Northwest, had this idea that since I was poor,
she could do things to me she could not do to her other employees,
although I must say she was pretty much abusive to most of us on a regular
basis, but she was 100% different in her interactions with her employees
who came from money. They got special treatment and the rest of us were
the boss and her privileged employees’ pee-ons. In Dec. 2000, I was the
person in the office who did the books input. I did the computer books
where we put in the checks we wrote, and the money we took in. Sue handed
me a sheet of things to input. She tried to gloss it over quickly as
something to just put in but not look at. Well, what she had me punching
in was the accounting of Christmas bonuses to EVERY employee in the office
but me. And I had worked there longer than any other employee working
there at that time except for one! I was livid. I confronted Sue and asked
why the ENTIRE crew got bonuses but not me. She said I did not need a
bonus since I was poor already. WHAT?

Another time I showed up for work at Sue’s office after she had hired a
class privileged gal to replace her sister who quit in disgust after
something like 16 years working for Sue, and since there was not much work
in the office to do, she gave it to the new girl and I was told to leave
the office and go clean Sue’s house! Because I was desperate for food
money, I did it. But it was absolutely humiliating on several levels. I
was an office worker, but now somehow was back to maid. I had been a maid
my whole life, it seems, and I was somehow sold on the idea that if I got
an education I would not remain a maid. But remain a maid I did, because
of my class background. Since I have been a maid, and survived it, Sue
thought well, why not take me out of the office to clean her kid’s toilet?
Sounded good to Sue. I would argue that perhaps her prissy privileged new
worker could use some experience in maid work, since I have had mine, and
I worked there longer, but of course, the privileged do not get dirty, the
poor do. More importantly, the middle class do not tolerate such shit as
they are not hungry. Honestly, I felt I should be paid MORE to houseclean
as it is harder work. After Sue pinned a few more diet ads on my computer
at work, I finally had it with Sue and left her business as her slave
laborer.

Fast forward to 2004. By 2004, I was still living in poverty and beginning
to write a lot. I was headlining at anarchist and alt press venues
regularly, yet rarely, if ever paid. Places that were asking me to
volunteer and write for free for them, it turned out, were run by white
middle class men living far beyond my class level. I have never once been
paid a cent from Alternative Press Review, for instance, while headlining
on their website constantly. They also ran a 3 page article of mine for no
pay in their most recent magazine they sell at Barnes and Noble.
Infoshop.org’s owner/dictator Chuck0 would tell me he could only pay me
$25 for many original headlining articles, often several a WEEK, while he
asked for and spent money via Infoshop donations to pay for his new car,
his cross country vacations, etc., while simultaneously living in a white
middle class suburban home with his parents with rent and food free. Chuck
tried to also get paid for rent for the Infoshop “office” (i.e. his
bedroom) in the Infoshop budget, he tried to ask for a “Librarian salary”
which was again, for him, yet when a welfare mom who was hungry and wrote
more headlining original articles for him than anyone perhaps ever, he
said no, he needed to go on personal vacation to San Francisco with that
Infoshop.org money, yet again. When I was submitting work to the NYC IMC’s
Indypendent, the editor told me “writers will be paid last” while he paid
himself under the radar. Although the IMC’s pretend to be volunteer, there
is money being collected and not all is transparent, such as at the NYC
Indypendent.

I found out that the editor of the Indypendent, another white male middle
class boy, was paying himself to work on the Indypendent. I asked him why,
he, as a white middle class man, should be paid more than welfare moms
with no money who work for him. He was arrogant and defensive and said he
HAD to be paid to work or he would go elsewhere. When I asked why he HAD
to be paid, but expected me to work for free, he just devolved into an
incoherent tirade. I believe in guilt, he then added two others to the
Indypendent payroll, but he said very clearly to me that “writers at the
Indypendent will be PAID LAST” so he can kiss my ass. What a bunch of
capitalist pig liars, to be blunt.

Then let’s fast forward to Real Change Newspaper, in Seattle in 2005. They
asked me to write for free for them, repeatedly, while simultaneously
advertising for 2 paid writer positions with their paper that pay $13 an
hour! I told them if they wanted me as a writer, they needed to pay me
like they paid middle class writers, at $13 an hour. They again kept
pushing for me to write for free. I looked into their budget. They took in
approx. half a million dollars to “help the homeless” via this Real Change
paper the year prior. Yet the papers themselves cost 5 cents each to
publish, and the homeless folks are CHARGED 35 cents each, to go sell
these things on the street as some type of supposed charity! So where did
that half million dollars go? Well, the editor of Real Change said just
what Chuck and Indypendent dude said, HE MUST BE PAID. He said he NEEDED
about $50,000 a year in salary while those he claimed to be helping stood
in freezing rain on streets selling the papers that they paid 30 cents
over production cost a piece for! The editor said to me he could get paid
much more elsewhere, so he now is acting like his $50,000 a year salary on
the backs of the poor is some sort of self-sacrifice? Oh please! And now I
am supposed to write FOR FREE for them, while men who are middle class and
never have been homeless insist they MUST be paid for writing for Real
Change and they must be paid salaries from $35,000-$50,000 while poor
women like me in Seattle are supposed to write for free for them. Dream
on!

Where I am at now is I can only laugh when white middle class “anarchist”
men try to guilt trip ME about being a capitalist just for asking for
minimal payment so I can pay their fascist landlord parents my rent. I
laugh now, heartily, at the men who try to guilt trip me for not doing
something they would NEVER do. I believe in my heart that if you took away
the control and the pay that these “anarchist” and alt media men are
getting, they would leave quickly. Or, if these men were asked to do what
they are asking me to do, they wouldn’t do it. Thus, how big of a fool am
I? No more. At this point, no more volunteering for men to make a profit
off my free work. No more volunteering for ANYONE who lives at a higher
class level than me. Period. And it is not because I am a capitalist pig.
It is because the middle class people around me are capitalist pigs who
will take to their own benefit and do not care if I am homeless or hungry,
while they drink their lattes and fly around protest hopping.

I implore all low-income people, all people of color and all women to STOP
GIVING free volunteer hours to white, middle class men, white middle class
editors and white middle class male-run “volunteer” projects where these
men actually get paid while pretending they are volunteers, such as
Infoshop.org and The Indypendent. These white middle class men, whether
they call themselves “anti-capitalist capitalists” or whatever rhetoric
they spew, want merely to maintain their lives in middle class comfort off
our backs, in anarchy, in alt press, and in mainstream America. Invest in
poor people, but know who you are supporting. Look at the lifestyles of
the Board of any place you volunteer to help the poor. Look at the people
in charge of the organization. Are they all middle class white males who
are paid under the radar? Or are they poor like those they ask to
volunteer for them? What is their yearly salary while they are asking you
to volunteer? Most middle class white men who work in nonprofits have
found a way to skim off quite a hefty profit for themselves. Do not let
that go unchecked off of your unpaid labor. DEMAND EQUALITY in your
volunteerism. Stop volunteering for free for white, middle class males who
pretend they work for free. Work in places where ALL are paid or NONE are
paid. But this feigned volunteerism by paid white men in anarchy and alt
press has gone on long enough. These men say to me all the time that if
they were not paid, they would not do their “volunteer” work. What is good
for the goose is good for the gander. If you want my work for free, you
better be poorer than me!




30.11.2005

Reverse Ageism?
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I found it absolutely hilarious that I was called an “ageist” recently for
calling Hugh Hefner a “pig” due to the way he keeps very young women in
his “pumpkin shell” and keeps all women his own age far, far away. The
irony that I would be called the “ageist” for calling out Hugh’s ageism is
ridiculous. The people defending the Playboy establishment have said that
my response to the Playboy agenda is “predictable” for a feminist. Yet, I
find the defenses for this behavior to be oh so predictable, as well. Yes,
I hear even women (mostly young women) defending the Playboy bunnies,
centerfolds, and kept women of Hef as “liberation,” yet I also see Hef has
set a “curfew” for the “girls” he keeps at his mansion, and I see the kept
“girls” fear “getting in trouble” with Hef, just as they would their
father, for breaking curfew. I see Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater is
terrified of “his” women being out in the world without him. He needs to
keep them in his pumpkin shell, where there he can keep them very well, so
he sets a 9 o’clock curfew, so he knows where they are at night. What is
Hef afraid of “his” women doing without him after 9 pm? Maybe meeting
someone who is rich AND their own age?

It is sad and even tragic to me that the women Hef has made into
concubines in his mansion on the new E! Show, “Girls Next Door” are either
unbelievably dumb, or just in denial. Are these young women in denial that
they, too, will be replaced when they “age out” like every other woman
before them at the Hef mansion? Or are they actually so dumb as to not
understand the implications here? The reality is, once you hit 40, and
usually even 30, you are worthless trash in the Playboy world. (And if you
are fat or flat-chested, well, you are a worthless woman at any age.) If
you are an “ugly” asexual rich old man of 70, you are supposedly still a
God, and young “pretty” sexualized gals of 20 are still viable as lovers,
but if you are a woman of 70, do not expect to be welcomed or lauded over
in the world of Playboy. There is no place for older women in Playboy,
there is only room for older men, but the fact is, women age too!

On a recent airing of the new Playboy show on E! about Hef’s three “main”
girlfriends, you see the 3 women Hef supposedly keeps for himself saying
very catty things about Hef’s old girlfriend and former pin-up Barbie
Benton. The mostly 20-something gals felt extremely threatened when Barbie
visited, but then they resolved their fears by saying, on camera, that
they are not worried about Barbie, because “she is too old for Hef.” I had
to burst out laughing when both his girlfriend Holly and Bridgit said
this. So, do these gals not get that they, too, will be “too old” very
very shortly? Do they actually believe they will be the ones who last into
their 40’s at the mansion? I have to laugh out loud at that. But I also am
sad that these women do not get it. Unless they have some time machine to
stop aging, these women, like all other women who aged out before them,
are very replaceable. And they will be replaced, because they are valued
as objects, replaceable accessories, not as people. It is funny that Hef
never “ages out” but the women, they age out. And I am supposedly the
ageist for pointing that out.

The problem I have with this is it treats women like objects, not people.
I also have a problem with the double standards galore. The way very old
men are pandered to by very young women in the world of Playboy is more
about sexism, gender hierarchy, and who women are here to serve, than it
is about sex or liberation. No one I have met thinks Hef is some terrific
sexual lover. As a matter of fact, most assume he is a terrible sexual
partner or he would not have to lock “his” young gals up like property for
safe keeping. Most assume if he was any good at sex, he could please older
women with sexual experience, not just these young inexperienced “girls”
in power dynamic roles. The exchange at the mansion is more about money
for sex, or prostitution, not about sex for sex, or real love, from what I
can tell. As a matter of fact, I think what Hef is afraid these women will
find out in the world without his curfew is a man who would give them sex
for sex, or real love. Any man with money can apparently buy female
accessories for his home and arm in public to make him seem virile. I
believe part of why Hef keeps such young women around is he cannot please
women his own age, as they are more demanding sexually, as they know what
good sex is. If he was actually great at sex, he would not need a curfew
to get the women to stay home at night. Most agree if Hef had actual
sexual ability, he would not have to buy his women as he does. I have
known enough women in the sex industry to know that the women themselves
do the sex work as work, not as sex. I see the situation at the mansion
currently as one of an old pimp and his young whores, the only difference
is he hordes the whores for himself.

When I see ragged old Hef posing with gals who look like his grandkids,
surrounding himself with young, thin, fake-titted, fake-blonde brunette
chicks to make him look somehow sexy or viable, I think it is pathetic. He
looks like the ultimate loser to me. Any man who has to surround himself
with young women 50 years his junior to have any viability seems
laughable. Again, compare Hef to other grown men who are perceived as
suave, handsome and sexy, such as Sting, or Paul Newman. Those men do not
need to surround themselves with young chickies for virility! Sting is
considered some kind of sex God because he is willing to embrace tantric
sex, with his wife, who is his age. Paul Newman, likewise, is married to a
woman his own age, of his own intellect, and he is considered far more
sexy than Hef ever was. It almost seems like Hef was a very ugly boy and
man, and decided to distract from that via “pretty” (as in fake hair, fake
tits, etc.) women around him. Even his own daughter, Christie, failed his
own artificial beauty standards, or in other words, his genetic “ugliness”
based on his own “beauty” scale, failed him even in his own female
offspring. His daughter is not anywhere near “pretty enough” for the pages
of Playboy, and anyway, she aged out long ago. I find it interesting that
the daughters of porn Kingpins are treated as sacred cows, such as
Christine Hefner. Apparently Christine does not need or live with a curfew
from her daddy the way his concubines do, as Hef is not worried about his
daughter out there in the world.

I found it interesting that on a recent episode of “Girls Next Door,” two
of Hef’s main girlfriends remarked they do not care about Barbie Benton
because she is too old for Hef. They also were threatened when Barbie kept
saying over and over during her visit to the mansion that Hef doesn’t have
use for women out of their 20’s. The older girlfriend being kept at the
mansion right now, named Bridgit, likes to get new Playmates visiting the
mansion drunk so they would not do well the next day on photo shoots
because she is jealous that she cannot be a centerfold. This 31 year old
woman cried repeatedly on the show about how she is not good enough for
the magazine and how much it hurt her, and how she now hurts other women
due to her being hurt from this. Both Holly and Bridgit complained they
felt inferior to the Playboy models, and then justified it in ways that
seem anything but feminist. They try to undermine the other Playmates, or
they write off older women, as they did with Barbie, trying to save their
positionality. It is a form of women infighting over men, really.

The hierarchy of women Hef keeps in play is very interesting, as well. He
has his own girlfriends wishing and wanting to be centerfolds. Bridgit
said that even after getting her Masters Degree in college, all she really
wanted, still, was to be a Playboy centerfold! Both Bridgit and Holly
noticed that Hef’s other girlfriends were on the cover and in centerfolds
of Playboy and perhaps that is part of what they thought they were getting
by becoming his girlfriend and are now disappointed at not getting it.
Finally, on his new show, Hef placates the three left-out gals by saying
he is going to feature all three together in a layout in the magazine. The
“girls” are ecstatic and thankful. It is just a weird set-up, honestly.
They were not “good enough” for the magazine on their own, but as a trio
of Hef’s accessories, there is a little spot for them somewhere, maybe to
publicize the TV show. But these women seem to be pretty good at fooling
themselves, so maybe this was good enough for them to feel some validity.

If Hef has to keep his little women in the house, locked up by 9 pm, you
gotta wonder what is going on. Another of his current concubines, Kendra,
said on the show that she wishes Hef would extend the curfew to 10 pm.
This sounds like a teenager complaining about her dad, not a grown woman
talking about her lover. Under any other circumstances, that situation
would be seen as abusive and controlling. If a grown women said to you
that her own lover would not allow her out of the house without him past 9
pm nightly, what would you make of that? Would you not view that as
domestic abuse? Yet, if Hef does it to many women at once, it is not
controlling and abusive? I don’t buy that. No man is going to do whatever
he wants, while telling me to be home where he can control me every night
by 9 pm! That is for sure!

I remember in college, there was a woman in her late 40’s, whose husband
was so domineering that he waited in the college parking lot for her WHILE
she was in class. She was not “allowed” to go do things with us after
class, as her husband was sitting there, waiting, watching, daily. I
thought of her as being in an abusive relationship and also worried for
her safety. While watching the “Girls Next Door” show, I saw Hef’s three
gals go to Las Vegas for a day, without him. Yet as night rolled around,
the two more obedient, and older, girlfriends of Hef felt a pressure to
get home by the 9 pm curfew. Kendra, his youngest girlfriend, wanted to
stay overnight in Las Vegas. But the other two obedient whores wanted to
run home for Hef, worrying he would be angry if they got home late. And
Hef actually feigns some type of loneliness when they are gone, but I do
not think it is loneliness, but rather fear and insecurity that he is
displaying. When I saw those gals running home, trying to make curfew for
grandpa, it made me sick, honestly.

There will be NO curfew for intelligent, sexually-active adult women in my
liberated world view. And women will not age out any faster than men in my
utopia. Playboy as liberation? No thanks. I left my daddy’s house at age
16, and I had no desire to then go live with grandpa as his sexual slave
after that! Call me an ageist for that statement, but we need to look at
what is going on here. The people at Playboy want no intelligent
discussion of this. They want blind acceptance, but not all of us are
under Hef’s curfew or on his payroll. We WILL talk about this, whether the
domineering grandpa wants us to or not. We WILL discuss the double
standards of beauty at the Playboy mansion and in Hef’s own bloodline, we
WILL discuss the blatant racism and ageism at the mansion, we WILL discuss
the infighting amongst women in the world of Playboy, whether old Heffie
wants it or not. And talk about predictable. We have heard from the
Playboy bunnies and Hef much more than the feminists on this one, and it
will be interesting to talk to these “girls next door” once they age out
and they are the ones visiting the mansion as old has-beens, with the new
“girls” saying “We are not threatened by those OLD women…” just as these
women said about Barbie while they were the youngsters.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife, but couldn’t keep her
So he put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well.




23.11.2005

Are U.S. Soldiers Sheep or Robots?
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

People are trying to support the U.S. troops, while saying they are
against the Iraq war. That can only be done by saying the soldiers
themselves are mindless sheep who will do anything they are told, even if
it is illegal, or they are robots, who obey and do not think. Either of
those two characterizations seem insulting, if not disrespectful, to the
soldiers. Yet without that disclaimer of the soldiers themselves either
being duped (they’re stupid) or the soldiers are merely following orders
(robotic followers with no independent thought which is a situation we
take as alarming when it happens elsewhere), there really is no way to let
the troops, the fighters on the ground, off the hook completely for this
war, as many pacifists would like.

If you use the mentality that our soldiers are merely following orders,
thus they escape all culpability for their illegal actions in Iraq right
now, then that same luxury *must* be applied across the board. If
Americans can justify anything their troops do in war, even in an illegal
war, then the same “understanding” of circumstances must be applied to
every freedom fighter, every person of Iraqi dissent and heritage who is
now fighting an illegal American occupation on their home land. If we
apply the American soldier accountability standard to Iraqi citizens, then
we not only have a justified military against U.S. soldiers there, but
they also have the added validation that they are protecting *their*
country, on *their* soil, in absolute destitute poverty, from illegal
foreign invaders. America cannot even claim there was any immediate threat
to Americans’ security and safety as the Iraqis are facing with Americans
in their space now. So if we apply the same soldier accountability that
America wants to use, to Iraqi fighters against the U.S., American
soldiers’ justifications for their actions are minimal, as they are not
protecting their homeland, their country’s people, etc.

Additionally, there comes a point when hiding behind orders won’t work.
Nazi officials publicly announced their Nazi positions with pride, using
their full legal names. When those Nazi “doctors” were doing social
experimentation on Jews for things such as seeing how much pain they can
endure, those doctors were literally bragging in public, as if they were
untouchable. Yet after the war ended, those people became internationally
hunted war criminals and Germany did not lead the way towards their
capture and prosecution, either. Let’s apply some of that thought to the
current Iraq War. Even if the American powers that be are now gloating
about their war and its righteousness cloaked in some strange rhetoric
about “freedom,” it does not mean that those people will be exempt from
being hunted down like the war criminals they are later. And it does not
mean America will be leading those manhunts for American war criminals,
either. Other countries outside America could force America into an
international court to defend itself and personally, I hope to see that
this lifetime.

I am very disturbed that a large bulk of the forces on the ground in Iraq
right now went there to kick some “Arab” butt, *any* “Arab” butt, as
revenge for 9/11. The fact is that was over a dozen Saudi Arabians who
crashed into the WTC, but Americans not only are horrid at geography, but
they also have zero attention span for the particulars of the news.
“Arabs” hit the WTC, now Americans are gonna go get ‘em, is the mentality.
A large bulk of Americans are apparently not seeing any difference between
the Middle East nations. So since Saudis slammed into the WTC, we are now
bombing Iraq and apparently a large bulk of American soldiers used that as
their platform to become soldiers.

Whose fault is it that ignorant American kids are taught racism, that is
later fanned and fueled by the American government to turn them into
genocidal soldiers, who ask no questions? Whose fault is it that we are
bombing Iraq for something Saudi Arabians did? And should we be rewarding
kids who jumped on the military bandwagon out of blatant racism? Are we
not rewarding their racism if we protect them from accountability for
choices they made based primarily on racism, not economic need? I would
guess over 50% of those who joined the U.S. military to go into the Iraq
war after 9/11 did so due to racism and political ignorance. For instance,
Cindy Sheehan’s son came right out of a middle class white home with two
married parents. I doubt he was ever homeless, I doubt he ever experienced
genuine hunger. He was not drafted, he was not poor. So how does a kid
like that, straight out of privileged American suburbs, justify his
destruction and murder in Iraq, as somehow personally relating to him,
again? And why would his safety trump that of a hungry, homeless Iraqi who
was made hungry and homeless by the illegal American invasion? To be
blunt, if one of those two had to die in the struggle, which is more
justified? I think the answer is obvious.

We can either make excuses for a large bulk of American kids who joined
the U.S. military after 9/11 to enforce American racism and imperialism on
the world, or we can quit making excuses for them. If it were true that
this was a drafted military, I would not be making this argument from this
angle. If it were true that it was economics, and need for FOOD, that lead
all those youngsters into joining the U.S. military after 9/11, I also,
would be singing a different tune. But reality shows that a large majority
of those who joined the U.S. military after 9/11 did so for racist
reasons, not economic ones. Those who were “poor” were poor before 9/11
too. It was not until 9/11 that these people decided to make a career
killing, and thus, I have to say that was based on racism, not economic
need.

Americans are living at a higher standard than most people in most
countries. For us to impose illegal brutality on other countries just
because we want to control their oil, and this done by an oil mogul family
president, the same family that gave us dead people galore in the Kuwaiti
war his dad threw, to secure oil for America from that region, run by a
royal family with no democracy in the 1990’s, is ridiculous. It is clear
that the oil-dependent Bush family has one thing on its mind, and that is
its own profits for the industry it is controlling. Apparently the Bush
family does not care how many thousands of Americans, and countless untold
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, die for their personal greed. The Bush
family ran a completely bogus Kuwaiti war for their profits in the 1990’s
and almost ten years later his son is still furthering that same agenda. A
totally irresponsible family has done so much destruction to the WORLD for
its greed, that it is truly astounding the whole Bush family is not being
held in prisons to go before an international court for their combined
terrorism, from the Iran Contra affair to Bush War I and Bush War II.

The Iraqi war has ZERO to do with freedom and anyone stupid enough to buy
that line of crap needs to get an alarm clock and wake up! Look at *when*
Condi Rice smiles, while being questioned about this war. It is truly
creepy and nearly demonic. We are not bombing Saudi Arabia for 14 Saudis
planning and flying into the WTC because they are oil rich and still
kissing Bush’s ass. We are not bombing North Korea, which has much less
freedom for its people than Iraq, because they have nukes and no oil we
want. We are bombing Iraq because they have oil that our criminal
president wants full access to.

The Vietnam War was sold to innocent DRAFTED soldiers as a war to save
America from Communism and it was not until a decade or so later that
America finally understood what rhetoric they had been fed. This same
situation is transpiring in Iraq this time, except these soldiers were not
drafted. And the fact that economics alone did not bring them to the
recruitment centers to enlist, but rather 9/11 brought them to these
centers says clearly this was about racism, not class status. At this
point, the only way to let the soldiers off the hook, to let them have
impunity in this war, is to reduce them to mindless children and stupid
sheep who just follow whatever they are told like robots. And that does
not seem very noble. But that seems to be the rut we are now in. You
either support the soldiers as mindless victims of their leaders, or you
hold them accountable for committing illegal racist crimes abroad. And
when you look at when and why these soldiers now in Iraq are there, it is
not about economics, it is about racism. It is about racist American
leaders.

If you listen to the pacifist left, they say the military troops are just
mindless *VICTIMS* that are merely following orders. They are mindless
sheep who do whatever their master says, no matter how illegal,
destructive or inhumane. If we listen to the right, these soldiers are
liberating people, and are bringing much desired freedom to the region and
the only people fighting the invasion and American take-over of Iraqi
government in an IDENTICAL plot to that of Diem in Vietnam, are
“terrorists” who are against the Iraqi people. Yet the Iraqi people are
making a loud cry, and have been for years now, for America to get the
hell out of their country. And American government has done everything
conceivable to stop that message from the Iraqi people from getting out –
America took over the Iraqi newspaper, the Iraqi radio, the Iraqi TV…why
do we need to squelch free speech and media in Iraq to “liberate” it?
America has conducted a major propaganda campaign in Iraq to try to make
the people there complacent to the Bush war, but that crap is working no
better now than it did on the determined people of South Vietnam. I do not
believe that most American soldiers in Iraq give one damn about freedom
for others. I think this has to do with freedom for Americans and their
gluttonies, not about freedom for others. And the proof is in the pudding
that we could not have had the Iraq War without 9/11. 9/11 caused the
spike in military enlistments, not poverty, and the U.S. government
capitalized upon our youth’s racism beautifully in all this. Anyone stupid
enough to believe this war is about freedom for anyone but America, does
not deserve protection in their naivety.




11.11.2005

Seattle Police Kill Again
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

Last night, Seattle Police killed yet another person for no apparent
reason. At 70th NE and Roosevelt Way, in the University District last
night, a car of people were chased and then one of them was killed, for
some macho police chase that makes no sense. Apparently running a stop
sign is now cause for deadly force in Seattle. This car was NOT stolen, NO
weapons were involved…the only thing that caused this was the Police
behaving irresponsibly, yet again. The Seattle Police have killed SO many
people in the last few years in this exact same scenario that I remember
CLEARLY the local news announcing not long ago that the Seattle Police
were NOT going to do these high speed deadly pursuits except in the most
dire situations. The excuse on the news this morning for this was “the car
was driving irratically,” “when they were pulled over by police they sped
up instead of pulling over,” “the police THOUGHT they saw a weapon in the
car,” police saw them throw something shiny out of the car.”

Now remember, this was in the middle of the night, so there were very few
cars on the street. And the ENTIRE reason the police say they killed
someone this morning, was THEY THOUGHT THE DRIVER’S IRRATIC BEHAVIOR COULD
KILL SOMEONE. But the Seattle Police MADE SURE someone was killed! The
Police KILLED someone this morning because that person COULD HAVE
supposedly killed someone when they were driving irratically this morning
around 3 am, from what I can tell. When the cops went to find the shiny
thing they tossed, all they found was an empty metal container according
to the TV news. And they did not find ANY weapons. And the car was NOT
stolen. When the police began to DRIVE IRRATICALLY and went into a high
speed pursuit, THEY endangered more lives than the original driver did.
And in the end, the police were the killers too. And this is far from
being an isolated incident. I am stunned how often this same scenario
plays out in Seattle, honestly. And they promised to stop this behavior,
yet it just played out again.

There is NO excuse for police CAUSING deaths like this. There was NO
excuse for the police CAUSING a DEADLY situation last night based on the
premise that another car MAY be dangerous. There was NOTHING to justify
that chase. The police promised to stop these deadly high speed chases
unless there was something seriously at risk. The fact that the police
KILLED the person they accused of MAYBE being a danger to kill someone
else is INSANE! It is twisted logic. And knowing the past patterns of the
corrupt Seattle Police, which has lied to my face and the public’s face
repeatedly, and avoided all reasonable accountability for their aggression
on our streets, I assume no one will be penalized for this police killing
last night.

Last night on the local news, there was also a report of a Seattle Police
officer who literally LEFT his post while on duty to have sex with a drunk
woman he met while responding to a possible assault charge. The news
reported that this officer called the SPD station and said he was “taking
vacation time” all of a sudden, in the middle of his shift, from what I
can get from the news report. Then, he had sex with the woman who had
originally called police for help. Then when he was caught, he said he
could not be penalized because when he had the sex with the woman, he was
not on duty! Yes, this is the bumbling Keystone Cop situation we are
dealing with in Seattle. And I believe this officer is still a paid
Seattle cop today.

The Seattle Police are DANGEROUS criminals in my opinion. Tonight they
KILLED someone PREEMPTIVELY. Because they THOUGHT someone MIGHT be a
danger and may kill someone else, they just killed the driver. Right on a
Seattle street. And now they are trying to pretend it was somehow
something other than a macho tirade by unaccountable authoritarian asses
with guns. If we used the mentality the cops used last night, we, as
citizens, would be obliged to shoot out every freakin’ cop car we see
today, killing the drivers, as those cops MIGHT kill someone. That is the
same logic used on the car of folks in the U District last night.

The amount of deadly force used last night by Seattle Police comes nowhere
near the level of threat presented. And again, if we citizens acted in
that manner, we would have to kill all police preemptively. The fact that
the car was not stolen and there were no weapons begs the question: “why
did the Seattle Police kill this person last night?” Apparently the
Seattle Police COULD HAVE killed more than one person too, as more than
one person was in the car. So you tell me…which is more dangerous…a car
slowly weaving a bit, late at night on the road, trying to get home, or a
raving adrenaline-pumped cop car speeding down the road, endangering all
in its path, chasing and scaring that slow car? This situation has played
out so often lately that I am sick and tired of it. If Seattle Police
cannot stop their maniac behavior on our streets that kills people in
their desire for high speed chases, we are in some serious trouble here.
It is like the Seattle Police are into drag racing on the streets. Since
they cannot do it legally, they just do little drag races with innocent
victims on our streets when it is late at night and no one is looking.

Our cops have sex with women they respond to on assault charges, right
when they come to do the police intake. And the ex-Tacoma Police Chief
Brames, in a neighboring community, actually raped a woman, and the police
department FULLY KNEW OF THIS, and Brames even admitted it, yet he
remained the Police Chief, until he gunned down his wife in cold blood in
a store parking lot in front of his kids, then killed himself. His wife
had asked for help with domestic violence but since he was police chief,
no one would help her. The rape victim also asked for help and got none.
Our cops have been caught taking drugs from street people and reselling
them and bullying people on the street to get their drugs for them to sell
for personal profit. I watched a cop point a machine gun a foot from my
son’s head in a permitted protest zone in March 2003, and then watched the
Seattle Police Chief lie and say on TV and radio that there were no
machine guns present. I remember a cop chasing another car which had a
deadly crash, I believe it was in the Fremont area, not that long ago.
When are we, the citizens, going to have some way to get the Seattle
Police to stop randomly killing Seattlites for their drag racing thrills?
This has gotten WAY out of hand. The Seattle Police Chief is a liar and I
can prove that. He lied about the weaponry present at the March 2003
anti-war protests, for one. And he has done nothing when citizens complain
with detailed complaints, en masse, about police violence. I know that
more than 40 of us launched legal complaints with the Seattle City Council
for the police violence on March 22, 2003, and many more protested in the
City Council Chambers again after Seattle Police rioted upon unarmed
protesters, injuring many, on June 2, 2003 at the LEIU protests. The City
gave us permits for both those protests then sent in riot police to injure
and harm unarmed, nonviolent protesters with chemical and violent
weaponry, including, yes, machine guns. I was there. I can testify to this
first hand.

Look, the whole world saw the WTO riots. And this year, the idiot who ran
that circus, Norm Stamper, the old Seattle Police Chief, just went on a
book selling tour, talking all about the MISTAKES he made during WTO while
we paid his salary, yet were any police prosecuted for these “mistakes?”
Hell no! Instead, later, the Police Chief made money on tour talking about
his failures! I cannot believe people are paying Stamper to tell us how he
broke the law on us.

All I can say is you are as apt to be killed by a Seattle Police officer
as by anyone else in Seattle. The only difference is if you are killed by
a Seattle cop, you will somehow be deemed a bad person, and a whole
concocted story will be made up to justify the death, even if the excuse
is as empty as the one given today for the killing last night on our
streets by cops. If you are killed by a cop in Seattle, somehow you will
be victimized twice. All I can say is shame on the Seattle Police. They
are killers and no, it is not justified at all. If that was MY son they
killed last night, all I can say is, there WOULD be hell to pay. TODAY.
But it doesn’t matter that it was not my son. There should STILL be hell
to pay. I AM MAD AS HELL THAT THE SEATTLE POLICE KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE LIKE
THIS. Seattle Police need to drag race somewhere else, and leave our
citizens alone. I am disgusted by the way the Seattle Police behave, above
all laws. The police officers who killed that person in their drag racing
last night should be prosecuted for MURDER, just as a normal citizen would be.




19.10.2005

Bush or Saddam: Who Has Killed More People?
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

The trial of Saddam Hussein is the headline on all the news stations. Yet
most of the things they are saying about Saddam, actually apply to GWBush,
and many to his dad, George Bush, Sr., as well. I saw an Iraqi man on
American television today, praising America, saying how glad he was to see
Saddam on trial since Saddam killed his family. So, does this man really
not see all the killed and maimed Iraqis from the American war there? So
when Saddam kills Iraqis, revenge and “justice” is necessary. But when
Bush kills masses of Iraqis, as well as people in Afghanistan, etc., and
lies to the world as to WHY he is doing that, it is a good thing? Why was
this Iraqi man on TV this morning only mad about the Iraqis killed by
Saddam, and not the continuing daily deaths in Iraq from GWBush and his
criminal war? Talk about war crimes! Bush lied to the entire world about
why we are bombing Iraq daily! When does Bush go on trial for HIS war
crimes? When do the Iraqi people get to finally testify about the
atrocities and cruel deaths GWBush caused on their land?

I hear Iraqi people on American TV saying they waited decades to see
Saddam on trial. Well, that gives me a little hope. Maybe in a few
decades, GWBush will finally be put on trial so the world can get justice,
as they say they are now doing with Saddam’s trial. Maybe someday GWBush
and his daddy will be put on public trial for their lies, torture and
criminal behaviors. Maybe someday the poor, hungry and homeless people of
America will see GWBush on trial for spending their food money, their
housing money, their school funds, on oil wars, the elite, and lies.
Remember, GWBush’s daddy was the head of the CIA during the Ollie North/
Iran Contra scandal. And remember Neil Bush’s Savings and Loan
involvement? And remember GWBush sent lies to the United Nations (UN) to
justify his slaughter of Iraqis that has been going on for years now, for
a reason no one can actually explain logically, just like the Vietnam War.

Saddam is not reacting to this trial as if it has anything to do with
justice. He is saying that this “special tribunal” was put in place by the
American military, basically, and thus they have no real Iraqi authority
to try him. He is saying that GWBush illegally entered his country,
illegally has turned Iraq into a war torn country of suffering, and has
illegally made this fake court to try him and he is quite belligerent
about the whole affair. And although I have no sympathy for any dictators,
I found many of Saddam’s rejections to this trial, to be my own
hesitations as well. What he is saying about why this court trying him has
no actual authority, actually has merit. It is very true that he has no
way of getting a fair trial in that tribunal set up and protected,
basically, by the Bush regime.

People complain that Saddam let his people go hungry while he lived
lavishly. The Bush family does that. Barbara Bush even laughed at Katrina
survivors, saying they were getting a “good deal” down there at the
Astrodome, since they were already poor! Bush has continued to give
billions to his rich cronies, bankrupting America and not caring in the
least about the actual realities that Americans are living in. The Bush
regime has exponentially increased poverty in its own country, meaning
both daddy and son Bush, have starved American people for their rich
buddies’ excessive lifestyles. Bushes have also sold the environment down
the road for their rich cronies as well. Bush is completely out of touch
with what real Americans experience daily. Bush Jr. and Sr. both promote
war freely, yet I do not see their kids fighting in wars ever. The Bush
family has literally starved its own people to pay for oil wars, the
current one based on WMD lies, and I am not really seeing the difference
here between the war crimes of the Bush family and Saddam’s war crimes. As
a matter of fact, the more I add up and compare the atrocities at the
Bushes’ hands, with Saddam’s crimes, I see the Bush clan committing far
more torture, killings and worldwide suffering of humans, than Saddam ever
committed. Saddam is accused of crimes in his own country. Bush I and II
can be implemented in crimes against their own people, with rapidly rising
homeless and hunger rates in America, while they war in oil-rich
countries, sacrificing lives worldwide for their profits and oil riches.
It is obvious that oil is already dead…there is no way to hold off
research into alternative energy sources anymore, as the oil industry has
done in the past, as the oil thing is obviously not the right way to go.
But the Bush family is still clinging to their oil industry with both
hands and praying the world is too stupid to connect the dots.

The news is saying Saddam did day to day things to hurt his people. But
the Bush family starves kids, boots people to the street to die of
hypothermia every winter, lets people die for lack of money for medicine,
and kills teenagers in an illegal war, built upon the lies of WMD. GWBush
claims we cannot feed the poor, house the homeless or get books for kids
into American public schools because the richest country on earth only has
money for war and its government, not its people. If the government is not
helping the people it claims to represent, it has lost its functionality
and legitimacy. The Bush regime I and II are far past lacking legitimacy.
They are literally bankrupting America for their own personal oil greed.
If that is not what is going on, then explain all those lies at the UN to
justify this war. Not one person I know can explain why we Americans kill
Iraqis every day in war. And Bush just decided to give MORE money, many
millions more dollars, to the Dept. of Homeland Security, based on Bush’s
killings in the Katrina response. Yet, he is reducing local first
responder funding at the same time. Bush is now threatening to reduce
other poverty programs in America to pay for the Katrina disaster. Yeah,
you wouldn’t want Congress to forego a raise, or to stop our illegal war
in Iraq to help feed poor Americans…

Brazil recently initiated the Fome Zero program to attempt to eliminate
hunger in Brazil within three years. A large group of countries met to
discuss a plan to eliminate hunger in the world. The ONLY country that
would not lend total support to this agenda was the Bush regime
representing America. America said that although the idea of stopping
hunger is a nice one, they did not feel governments should be held to any
universal requirement to make sure that most basic need of food, is met
worldwide. America said it felt making sure your people are not dying of
hunger should be voluntary, not mandatory! Now, what would make the
richest country on earth say that? Shouldn’t we be leading the way, not
blocking the way?! But it reflects similar behavior America has taken with
other issues such as nuclear disarmament, environmental responsibility,
health care, etc. America also incarcerates more people per capita than
any other country, and has a totally corrupt “criminal justice” system,
that kills black men at ridiculous rates. Black men who were given
half-assed, underfunded public pretenders as their only defense in court
against cops and the state. When I hear the crimes that Saddam supposedly
committed on his people, I see the same types of illegal coercions and
torture for confessions going on in the American “criminal justice”
system, with its bogus plea “bargains.” When I think of all the people of
color now held in jails all over America and in other countries where
America maintains jails and prisons, held as terror “suspects” with no
charges, no impartial oversight, no rights, basically, I am trying to
figure out how what Saddam did to his own people could be worse than that.
I wonder how different Saddam’s “corrupt” courts were compared with
America’s Guantanamo Bay, for instance. For a rich country, American
dictators, I mean presidents, make some really strange choices and have
strange priorities. We prefer killing people in Iraq to feeding Americans.
And Saddam is the criminal? What about GWBush?

GWBush lied to Americans and the UN about WMD to make an illegal war which
is still raging on! So the UN only needs a *fiction* to be presented to
them as justification for war, then they are good to go? GWBush could have
just as easily said unicorns and Martians have overrun Iraq and we need to
rescue the Iraqi people; that has as much truth to it as the Weapons of
Mass Destruction lie. What a farce America has made of the UN. To lie
boldly to the UN to justify some personal continuation of your daddy’s oil
war apparently is not a war crime. Don’t you wonder what the WMD alibi is
covering up? If we are not in Iraq to get rid of another country having
what we already have, WMD, then why exactly ARE we in Iraq killing
children, our own and other people’s too?

What can we attribute this gross double standard of “justice” to? Could it
be that Saddam has been a thorn in the side of both daddy and sonny Bush,
and we, the Americans, somehow got dragged into their personal family feud
with a man controlling the land over the oil the Bush family wants? Why is
it that GWBush, as well as his father, committed crimes very similar, if
not exactly the same, as Saddam, yet dumb Americans are rejoicing at
Saddam’s trial as if it is some step towards world peace and justice? It
is as if stupid Americans are rejoicing in bullying some other country
they know little about’s ex-president as revenge FOR the Iraqis. I think
we can let Iraq deal with its own dictator problems, since America has its
hands full with its own war criminal dictator FAMILY who is killing more
Iraqis than Saddam ever did from what I can tell, and for the WMD lie, to
boot.

When you listen to the news talking about Saddam’s crimes, insert “GWBush”
in where they say “Saddam” and you will be amazed how well it fits. Almost
everything they are accusing Saddam of, Bush has also done! And to his own
people too! Maybe Saddam gassed his own people, but Bush is sending his
own people to death in Iraq, based on WMD lies. He kills his own people
daily in Iraq based on lies. And his own people, the American people, ARE
having hunger issues, housing issues, healthcare issues, justice
department corruption and racism, health care crisis’, etc. and nothing is
being done. Bush somehow could not find a single way to get food and water
to Americans on American soil, at home in New Orleans, in the Katrina
disaster. He let people DIE for no reason at all in that situation, this
year, on American soil! Bush just floats on, his head in the clouds, with
his grotesque lily white classist mother by his side, and his CIA/Iran
Contra/October Surprise dad by his other side, and his S&L scandal brother
who is legally banned from the banking industry after his daddy’s
government bailed his bank out to the tune of a billion dollars, all
standing behind him…along with his election-fixer brother Jeb, his drunk
nephew and the two underage drinkers Laura and George have raised as well.
What a noble clan to dictate my country, and the world, with moral
superiority, eliminating scum like Saddam.

I am not defending the crimes Saddam committed against his people. But I
am also not going to defend the Bushes’ crimes either. And remember, when
George Bush, Sr. was the head of the CIA, Saddam was on the CIA payroll.
Bush and Saddam have worked together in the past, before this deadly
international family feud came to a head. And remember when daddy Bush was
implemented in keeping the Iran hostages in captivity LONGER than needed
so they could be released at the exact HOUR of the Reagan/Bush
inauguration, making Carter look ineffective at negotiations? In reality,
that is like Bush and Reagan holding those Americans hostage, just for
their own good press! Seriously, the double standards of prosecution here
are alarming! America lied to the UN to make an illegal war. THAT is a
DOCUMENTED international war crime, as is the documented lack of civil
rights given to those being held right now in American prisons, with no
charges at all against them, only a claim of “terrorist suspect.” Why on
earth is GWBush not on trial? It seems to me when you add up the suffering
and deaths Saddam caused, next to the combined deaths and suffering at the
hands of the Bush family regime while ruling America, Saddam pales in
comparison quickly. It is clear that there is no international justice;
American “justice” is as corrupt outside America as it is inside America,
and the Bush family has what resembles in every way a dictatorship going
on…internationally. The stupidity and apathy of American people is
astounding, yes. But the way the UN just looked the other way at Bush’s
WMD lies and the way America cannot even feed its own, or protect its own
in a natural disaster on its own soil, makes our exploits in other
countries, to save them, quite questionable. America has WMD, why were we
able to say Saddam cannot have what we freely have? And now we slaughter
Iraqis and Americans daily for these non-existent WMD? How crazy is this
world? How much power *do* oil moguls like the Bush family have? This
international level of corruption is really frightening.

It is clear that Saddam is not being given a fair trial, and that there
is a clear double standard regarding criteria for “justice” here. If
Saddam is on trial, then both Bush presidents should also be on trial,
for larger crimes. If America follows its past, we will be electing the
drunk son of Jeb Bush someday soon to continue on with the ruin of the
world…at the hands of America. In a CBS News piece from Jan. 2004, a Rice
University political science professor, Bob Stein, said, "there is a
family pattern here where the Bush sons - Jeb, Neil and George - have
benefited tremendously by their connections through their father." Yes,
that is quite a problem for America and the world. Appointing people with
no qualifications to high paid jobs is the usual in the Bush clan it
seems. GWBush is notorious for appointing friends with no experience to
positions they have no right to (FEMA’s Mike Brown, for instance), but
his whole family is like that. Neil Bush, George, Jr.’s brother and
George, Sr.’s son, got a $2 million contract as a “consultant” with Grace
Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm co-founded by the son of a
former president of China. Yet Neil Bush has, according to court records,
“absolutely no educational background in semiconductors.” What average
American can earn $2 million dollars to “consult” on something they have
absolutely no background in?

Maybe the world should just put all of America on trial! As we are the
ones who keep allowing these men to ransack our own budgets earmarked for
food, housing, and health care on guns to kill people elsewhere for oil,
based on lies. It is as much America’s fault that GWBush is not on trial
for war crimes now as anyone’s. It took decades to get Saddam to trial.
Maybe in decades Bush will finally be on trial for his crimes being
committed now. I can only hope that we Americans, and the world, find the
relief and reparations of that trial someday. The Bush family should be
required to pay back all those who died and suffered at their hands, from
the homeless to the illiterate in America to those who died in Iraq, both
American and Iraqi, not to mention all those killed by American made bombs
dropped by American made planes in Contra killings in Central/South
America, as well as those who lost their life savings in the Neil Bush S&L
scandal, the list goes on and on…if we held the Bush family accountable
for their deeds, it would be a healing trial for the world, indeed.




14.09.2005

The Bush Family: International Terrorists
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

It has become obvious to me that if the Bush Family is not treated like
the clan of international terrorists they are, we may just be heading
towards the end of the damn world. When I add up the grotesque crimes
against humanity that have occurred from ignorant Americans (and others)
just letting these madmen (and women, let’s not forget Barbara) do
whatever they want, the list is long. Remember Neil Bush, and how he was
implicated in the Savings and Loan (S&L) scandals, where innocent
Americans’ bank accounts were emptied out by tycoon investors, and the
Feds just looked the other way? Or how about George Bush Sr.’s little
“October Surprise?” That was the first time we saw the Bush family
implicated in an illegally rigged election. And how about that farce of an
election we saw GWBush rigging, with brother Jeb, and daddy Bush’s old
friend Rehnquist handing Little Georgie the reins? Remember the
Iran-Contra affair? George Sr. was right in the thick of it. And remember,
George Sr. was also the DIRECTOR of the C.I.A. before rigging his
vice-presidency by seemingly making deals with Iranians to hold the
American hostages longer than needed, so they could be released at the
exact HOUR of the Reagan/Bush inauguration. And do not get me started on
the Weapons of Mass Destruction or the heartless massacre of Americans on
American soil, over money, class, and race, that happened after Hurricane
Katrina.

Let me make this clear. My 21 year old son is NOT here to conquer and
pillage for the Bush family’s empire building. GWBush has two spoiled
rotten daughters and THEY need to go fight for all those privileges they
have. Cheney’s kids can go fight the empirical Bush Wars, but I do not
approve of ANY low-income people participating in the military
expansionism of the Bush Empire. I pray to god that no Katrina survivors
ironically join the military as a way out of the destitute poverty they
are now facing. Let me warn you: If you were left to die in New Orleans,
you will be the FIRST ONES sent to front line battle to die in Iraq. Think
about it.

I am not some stupid liberal mom who will sit by and let my son go off to
kill Iraqis based on WMD lies, in an illegal occupation on someone else‘s
land, only making a stink once he comes back dead, after shooting other
mothers’ sons for money, like Cindy Sheehan. I am not so stupid as to need
to see my son coming home DEAD to “get it.“ Let me make it clear right
now: My son is NOT going to fight for GWBush’s empirical expansion. It
ain’t gonna happen. They will have to KILL ME to TOUCH my son at this
point. I say this because the way the Bush clan works is by using the poor
as pawns, just like in chess. Maybe Cindy Sheehan did not get this at
first because she is middle class. But as a poor person, I know my son has
no worth to the Bush family sans as cheap labor or front line soldier.
Thus, he is not safe with them and must be protected from them. That is my
duty as a mother.

When you look at the combined human suffering that the Bush family can be
directly related to, Saddam Hussein pales in comparison. The number of
crimes against humanity at the Bushs’ hands are staggering. We did not
know why, and still do not know why, Americans were killed in Kuwait in
the 1990’s to protect a rich family’s oil empire there. Ask any American
why we invaded Kuwait in 1990, and I find few can actually answer that. If
my son was dead from that war, I would be livid. Then we had GWBush LIE to
not only Americans, but to the United Nations and the world, to justify
Bush War II, with this Weapons of Mass Destruction fiction. I see the
correlation being the massive oil deposits in Kuwait and Iraq, and the
Bushs’ oil wealth connection. And the Bush clan is not smart nor clever,
nor do they even hide their crimes! They do these things right out in the
open where we can see them, since the Bush clan has learned it can COUNT
on American stupidity and apathy to allow them to do anything they want.

In Latin, Central, and South America, the Bush hands have hurt the poor
incredibly. In Palestine, the Bush family is responsible for funding
Israel’s genocide with carte blanche for decades. In Saudi Arabia, where
almost every single one of the 9/11 pilots came from, they are connected
at the hip to the Bush family. We bombed and killed unnumbered masses of
Afghanistan and Iraq citizens for over a dozen Saudi Arabians killing a
few thousand Americans on 9/11. Go figure. That is the problem with the
Bush Empire. Everywhere it goes, the puzzle pieces do not fit. We are
continuing in a slaughter in Iraq, based on what the whole world
acknowledges was a lie! The Bush clan would love to just spend all of
America’s resources on getting the Bush family control over the
International oil supply. Through might and terror. And there seems to be
no stopping them.

Is it a coincidence that the FIRST thing the news started reporting about
the Katrina crisis was oil prices will rise? I think not. And remember
when America invaded Iraq and went straight to the oil fields to guard
them, while letting the hospitals, libraries, museums and universities be
pillaged? GWBush is personally responsible for the loss of some of the
oldest artifacts on this planet. You can basically trace every move the
Bush family makes back to oil and an elite money privilege that can only
be compared to royal empires such as Kuwait, or tyrannical Imperialists
noted in history as the worst of criminals. I have to say, the combined
deaths of poor people from the Bush clan will go down in history as
rivaling only the most frightening of Emperors.

I do not know how much more the world can take of this Bush family. The
Bush clan cares only about less than 1% of the American population, the
rich, and they have the same priorities internationally. Only the rich 1%
matter, the rest of us are cheap pawns for war games and industrial labor.
The Bush family will go down as the most destructive presidential family
ever in American history. They started two wars in the Middle East for oil
money for their own personal family, or so it seems. How do YOU explain
the Kuwait war? How do you explain what we are doing in Iraq right now?
Saudi Arabians hit the World Trade Center, not Iraqis. So why did we bomb
Iraq? The Bush family stole money from the poor in the S&L scandal, or so
the accusations go (and it explains Neil‘s low public profile as well).
They massacred people in Central/South/Latin America. They have waged
genocide on Palestine for decades. They even massacred poor people in
America after Katrina! How much more evidence do you need? The Bush family
would be more than happy to use your kids for their wars so they can
remain privileged. Got kid? The Bush family can find a way to exploit your
kids…are you gonna just stand by and cry when your kid comes home dead?
How many dead bodies do you need to see from this Bush clan before you
take action and remove this tyrant/terrorist family from power?

Look, what Nixon did was NOTHING compared to the WMD lie and Iraq war. And
he was forced to resign or be impeached. What Clinton did was NOTHING
compared to the international war crimes at the hands of the Bush family.
So where is the impeachment committee now? Why was there time for
impeachment hearings over a hotel break-in, and over consensual adult sex
in the White House, but there is no time for an investigation into a LIE
to the UN about why we are bombing Iraq?! No impeachment hearings on why
poor blacks were massacred in New Orleans, left to die, in 2005? The
double standard here is amazing. So you can be impeached for a hotel
break-in and petty theft, or having consensual sex, but you cannot be
impeached for lying to the international community about why you are
warring?!

The Bush Family has hurt America and the world, in clear and obvious ways
now, over and over. America seems hell-bent on supporting these tyrants.
No protests are happening in the streets daily, to get rid of Bush. There
seems to be no urgency to remove this family from power. And more and more
liberal mothers “support” their sons’ decisions to go participate in an
ILLEGAL GENOCIDAL WAR in the Middle East, on oil turf. And do not cry when
their own sons murder, nor do they cry when other kids come home dead. Not
until THEIR kid is dead do they speak up on TV. That is too little too
late. How many kids, mothers and poor people did Cindy Sheehan’s kid kill
before she uttered a peep to the press? America, WAKE UP! You are hosting
a family of international terrorists on your soil. Impeachment hearings
should have begun when it was clear Bush LIED to the world about his oil
war in Iraq, if not when he rigged the elections with Jeb. Now with
Katrina, there can be no rational explanation for why GWBush is not in the
thick of impeachment hearings right this minute. Being an American has
never been as embarrassing as it is now. We are the country that is
responsible for more deaths than any other country on the planet. Is that
what the richest country should be known for? Causing the most deaths? Is
that the goal? International terror at the hands of American international
domination by force?

Come on, folks, get your head out of the sand. GWBush needs to be
impeached and sent to the same place we are holding Saddam, waiting for
trial. And the whole Bush family should be sent into exile. I am sure
Saudi Arabia or Kuwait will take them in. Saddam’s killings and crimes
PALE in comparison to what the Bush family can be directly related to. The
Bush Family will go down as one of the most dangerous and damaging
families in international history when it is all said and done. And we are
the people who stood by and just let it happen. You and I. I beg you to
start writing your legislators asking for impeachment hearings. I beg you
to not allow even one more person to join the USMilitary, which has lied
as grounds for the Iraq war. I ask you demand we withdraw from Iraq TODAY.

“This is a kidnap. I’m holding myself hostage. I’m not giving in, until
you meet my demands. All the fighting has got to stop, all the prisoners
be freed, everyone had better start laughing, everyone had better learn to
be happy…” - WEW




07.09.2005

We Need to Treat Poverty’s Root, Not Just Its Symptoms
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

If you are one of the people who are immediately wanting to open your
house up to the survivors of the Katrina disaster, who are immediately
wanting to welcome these survivors into your schools and public/social
services systems, you need to really ask yourself this question: “Do poor
people really need to DIE and SUFFER HORRIBLY en masse in front of you, to
get you to care about the homeless and poverty issues in America?” The
Katrina massacre by our federal government was one thing, but the
conditions that existed, where these poor folks were neglected by their
government PRIOR to this is a reality.

Yes, the first layer of immediate poverty in the lives of poor people
coming out of the Katrina disaster is from the federal emergency
management disaster, then from the natural disaster. But the reality is,
if these people had not been impoverished PRIOR to the storm hitting,
impoverished by institutionalized systems of oppression, they would not
have even been in the area after evacuations. If you are just in shock and
awe right now, and have cried, and want to donate and reach out, that is
good. I applaud that. But you need to ask yourself, “What took so long in
YOUR response?” What happened that let you have homeless folks in your own
town, that you did not open your home up to, for years, and decades, but
now you are opening your home to homeless strangers from out of town? What
happened that made you hate your own local poor, but have the ability to
love unconditionally strangers who are poor from abroad? The musical HAIR
had a song about this that said, “How can people be so heartless? How can
people be so cruel?… Especially people who care about evil and social
injustice, do they only care about the bleeding crowd?”

People are saying that many of these families dislocated by Katrina will
need to go on welfare from here. And I want to point out the fact that
there are many families on welfare, in poverty, in every community, and I
hope you do not need to see the floating bodies of the dead to help them
out and share your houses and wealth with them without STIGMA. I not only
want to know what took Bush, Cheney, Brown, Chertoff, FEMA, DHS, and the
others, so long to respond to this mess they created in New Orleans, but I
also want to know what has taken America 2 terms of George W. Bush for
response! The long long neglect of the poor in America is well-documented.
What has taken America, itself, so long to respond to the POVERTY DISASTER
IN AMERICA? America has homeless vets living on the streets. America has
homeless children freezing to death on streets. America has hungry
children and inferior health care in minority and poor neighborhoods.
America stigmatizes hard working “welfare moms,” degrading and shaming
them continually. America CREATES (for industrial profit) then blames the
poor, but reality shows that the humanity of a society can be shown in its
treatment of the poor. The working poor are berated by pampered lily white
women like Barbara Bush, while her husband and son have slashed social
programs and bankrupt America. The rich keep getting richer and the poor
keep getting poorer. What in the hell is taking so long in your response
to THAT crisis, America?

Open your doors to ALL homeless people, demand social services refunding
since the Bush slashings equal to what that Emperor spends daily in Iraq
on his private publicly funded oil wars, be non-compromising in the demand
for affordable housing, increased Section 8 funding, worker rights…We, the
People, need to stop this sluggish response to the POVERTY CRISIS IN
AMERICA. What is taking you so long, America, to rescue your own poor, in
your own ghettoes, coast to coast? What is taking you so long to respond?
Do you need the poor to play out in horror and drama, losing family
members in mass graves for you to take action? You need to seriously go
examine that. Donating money to cover the Katrina disaster is only a
band-aid. We need to address the disease, and that is greed, and Emperor
Bush is a major player here. Address the root causes. Please, America, the
poor LIVING IN ALL CITIES ACROSS AMERICA are waiting for relief for
decades, even centuries now…what is taking you so long to show? We, the
poor, are your mothers, your sisters and brothers, your workers, your
renters. What is taking you so long to respond to this POVERTY CRISIS, all
across America, in 2005?




05.09.2005

The Death Sentence for Stealing a Damaged TV in New Orleans
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

We all remember quite well in 2003 how GWBush sent troops invading Iraq
STRAIGHT to the oil fields to protect THEM first and foremost. While
America “guarded” Iraq’s oil supply, they let the hospitals, museums,
universities and libraries become gutted and looted. Some of the oldest
pieces of art ever found are now lost, thanks to GWBush. I feel what we
just saw in New Orleans after Katrina was very similar. America has become
a government to protect elite business profits WORLDWIDE. We all know
about the Cheney - Haliburton connection and we all know about the Bush
family oil connection. At this point, people are just little bumps in the
road for the SUVs and military vehicles of the Bush administration
worldwide.

In an accredited American law school, I was taught that the force of
violence must not outweigh the necessity or you can become liable for the
results. One such example of this was the use of spring-loaded guns. In
the South, primarily, people used to use these spring-loaded guns that
would fire at the door if anyone came in the door while you were gone. But
more than a few times emergency workers trying to save these homes from
fires, etc., opened the doors and were shot dead. The reason that
spring-loaded guns were outlawed is they used deadly force to protect
property, solely, and that supposedly is not legal in the U.S. Yet I just
saw that exact thing take place in New Orleans.

In New Orleans last week, the police were sent into the city and told to
“shoot to kill.” The heavily armed cops and military personnel aimed guns
at DESPERATE people in New Orleans trying to salvage some way to survive.
Even if going into stores taking things from the shelves did nothing but
DISTRACT these people from their lingering misery America was putting them
through, THAT ALONE would have been worth it to me. As they were left
suffering for days innumerable and at this point, I say give those
survivors every damn thing off of every damn shelf of every damn store in
New Orleans. That would come nowhere near the reparations these people
deserve and need for this atrocity.

Additionally, all of that stuff in stores that armed police were guarding
are tax write offs. There is not one chance in hell that a single item
from ANY of those stores flooded in New Orleans will be resold. Those
items will ALL be written off as business losses. So you explain to me why
these victims of blatant racism should not just take this stuff. It makes
absolutely no sense. It is clear that NO ONE was going to be hurt by the
“looting” of those stores. NO ONE. Yet we were gonna SHOOT TO KILL anyone
who tried to “loot.”

We all realize that people taking food, water, clothing, shoes, etc.
needed those things most surely and since the government was nowhere to be
found, for days and days and days, they seriously had to do what they
could. To call people who took food and water when abandoned to rot and
die in the middle of an American 21st Century city “looters” is just plain
divisive nonsense. You tell me why when people were dying in need of
water, food and rescue, these cops and military stood armed, ready to kill
at STORES?! They had NOTHING better to do with these workers? You have GOT
to be kidding!

And now we have even more nonsense coming out of FEMA Director Brown, and
the Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff’s, mouths. When asked
why they are not fixing the levees with anything but ONE LONE CRANE, so
that New Orleans can be drained, the U.S. government says, “Do you want us
to continue on the recovery effort, rescuing people still, or do you want
us to fix levees?” HOW ABOUT YOU DO BOTH! It would cost what we spend in
1-2 DAYS in Iraq to go in there and fix those levees today. And when the
federal government is asked why it is not collecting the dead bodies from
the river, and on streets, they say “Do you want us to continue on the
recovery effort, rescuing people still, or do you want us to collect and
deal with all the dead bodies lying around?” WE WANT BOTH. Again, if we
had the resources we have in Iraq available to New Orleans for even 1 day,
all of these things could be done SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Surely this is not the first time in history that a tyrant has let the
people he supposedly represents starve while building his empire outside
of his own “kingdom.” We have heard of many societies where the entire
country actually perished because their powerhungry leaders spent all
resources on imperialistic expansion, not on the country that gave them
the money to go out and pillage and conquer. GWBush will go down in
history as the WORST U.S. President EVER. He will also go down as the
biggest terrorist to the world at this time in history. He will go down as
the root of more deaths from 2001-2005 than ANY other man on earth. As an
American, I can make no excuses as to why my country has allowed this
madman to continue on his rampage throughout the world for corporate
profit. We all knew that GWBush has no humanity towards anyone who is not
American. But we did not realize, quite so fully, how much he hated the
poor and people of color of his OWN country.

I cannot explain how or why the people of America have not already
impeached this man. What Bush has done is so much WORSE than ANYTHING
Nixon did. And Nixon had only two choices presented to him: resign or be
impeached. We are there now with GWBush. He can retire NOW or he can be
impeached. Those are the ONLY two options, sans JAIL for him. Even if he
PACKS that Supreme Court with his buddies, we will STILL impeach this
jerk. He IS an international and domestic criminal at this point, and we
are harboring him. If we must, Americans will ask for help from outside
our borders, maybe even appealing to international councils for help. We
are heading for civil war in America if Bush is not taken out of power.
His killing spree is unprecedented. He is rivaling emperors of old at this
point. GWBush MUST be immediately impeached, forced to resign or jailed.
Other options are not acceptable.

We MUST turn the American agenda around to put people before profits,
people before property. WE MUST take this turn, for the sake of our
children. I ask you all to start realizing we are going to need to
impeach, jail or force resignation upon GWBush. And that means we are left
with Cheney who has been absolutely MIA for a WEEK now after Katrina, so
he will also have to go. And Condi Rice is also implemented in all this
destruction and warring worldwide and she went shopping during the
genocide of New Orleans. So we are going to literally have to remove huge
portions of our government here. This is serious stuff. America is
harboring war criminals and domestic terrorists in its own government.
What went on in New Orleans this last week was nothing less than terrorism
and an intentional genocide and I become more and more convinced of that
by the day.

Finally, America’s actions have hit home. WE AMERICANS are now GWBush’s
targets. We the poor in America are in 100% DANGER right now. WE MUST GET
COURAGEOUS, WE MUST STAND UP FOR WHAT IS RIGHT. GWBush is a MADMAN, of the
ilk of legendary historical proportions. How much more can America and the
world endure from this mad oil mogul?! Please, get a backbone and stand up
against this madman. Every day that you do not, innocent poor people die
for rich white American male corporate presidents, either in America or
around the world. You know what is happening, what are you going to do
about it?




05.09.2005

Kirsten Brings Out the White Pride Nation

Well, as I have said, I am efficient! I have brought the white
supremacists out of the woodwork. And good, that is where we want 'em,
where we can see them!

Wanna have the crap scared out of you?

Then go to:
http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=22845

This is what it says re my genocide in new orleans article:

“Try making a reply to this story. I did.

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/09...ent.php#1765061

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/09/1764294.php
My response is there. I hope more vnners get in on the fun!

I even used my real name and contact info!

Ethnic cleansing is a good thing for white Americans
by Michael Mazzone Jr. Monday, Sep. 05, 2005 at 4:03 AM
mmazzonejr@ameritech.net 847-359-2663 311 N. Mozart St., Palatine, IL 60067

Blacks are prone to criminality and savagery. Just look at all the raping,
stealing, and murdering the blacks are engaging in wherever they are
found. In New Orleans, we even see them reverting to cannibalism.

We should not save them.

My heart goes out to the white people who are suffering out there, but I'm
filled with glee to see some genocide against the blacks taking place in
the US. I hope that one day I'll never have to see another black person
again.

If America was a country of whites only, it would be a much better
country. If genocide against the blacks is the most efficient means to
meet this end, then I certainly won't object to it.
www.vnnforum.com/search.php?searchid=455673”

The site has white men and women saying things I find to be SHOCKING. I
sent this guy's address, etc to the attorney general in Illinois this
morning.

****************************************

I am also getting it from the White Pride World Wide site.

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=229050

*****************************************

I need to appeal for support here. Monetary support. I have told some of
you that I am waiting on a dental malpractice settlement, but that has
been dragging on for months now and I am sitting here with $20 for the
month, and I can do nothing but write write write right now and would like
to continue to do this important work rather than go out scrounging food
money. So I need to choose. Either get some reader support into my paypal
account or quit writing for a while now and go find food money. Please
consider donating through my http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pagedonate.html
page...I am obviously riling up the White Aryan Nation, and am pissing
white men off horribly at my calling them out here. I need some support
here. Amy Goodman is paid $500,000 a year for her journalism. If I could
get to $5,000 a year I would be ecstatic! Please quit supporting
mainstream overpaid corporate whores and support indy media written by
poor people. You can start today!

I hate having to ask for monetary support, but I am truly poor. And from a
poverty background. I have barely slept for a week working on this issue.
And I want to keep on track. If you CAN donate anything right now to help
me stay focused on calling out the racism effetively in the U.S. right
now, please do so! I need the help and support and I promise to work my
damned ass off, inciting the white nation, bringing them out with names
and addresses.




03.09.2005

The “New Poor” Versus The “Old Poor”: Who Gets Prioritized?
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

(I wrote this article in 2004, but it is as relevant to the Katrina
situation as any article I could write now, so I am republishing it.)

We have all heard the terms “old money,” and “new money” with regards to
familial wealth. “Old money” is perceived to be more noble, and more
dignified in stature somehow. “New money” is considered superficial,
transitory, or even happenstance. These same concepts can be applied to
the poor. And what is interesting is the way society will try to separate
out the “new poor” from the “old poor” when determining who to give aid
to. The “new poor” are treated as more deserving of help. And indeed, the
“new poor” are easier to help, as they are not entrenched in poverty from
all angles, 5 feet deep, yet. The “old poor” often have harder attitudes
and edges due to the prolonged crisis of poverty, and often are less
graceful with the hands that feed them. Their “polish” in dealing with
charity and welfare agencies wore off over the years, as they identified
their fate as a side effect of a malfunctioning capitalist society, not a
fate borne of their innate inferiority or laziness. So “new poor” happens
*to* someone and it is not their fault, so we give them lots of help with
no stigma. But the “old poor” *create* their own poverty, thus they should
not be helped. That constructively, is the philosophy involved. We see
time and again, that Americans love to help those who are not the most in
need of help. I do not know why that is. But it seems to be the American
way.

We see that society is eager to help home owners who lose estates in
Florida from tropical storms, or from fires in Malibu Canyon in
California. But society is not so eager to help those who never owned a
home to begin with. I remember reading in the New York Times, just after
9/11/01, about a new widow who had people give her money so she could keep
her pool cleaner coming, as if this was some heroic gesture on the part of
her friends and strangers. Yet no one seems to care about the widow living
on the streets of NYC, who cannot afford food or shelter, much less a pool
or pool cleaner. Oprah recently gave away new cars to every studio
audience member, to mostly people who already own cars. If she had given a
new car to an entire audience of homeless people, she would have given
them transportation, a place to sleep, and a place to keep food, clothing
and belongings. But instead she gave a second car to most of her audience
that day. Just what they all needed.

The rush to help everyone *but* the truly poor is an interesting
phenomenon. Perhaps people are doing an unspoken triage. People are
thinking there are poor folks who will survive without our help. Then
there is a group that will not survive without our help, such as the 9/11
widow who would have had a dirty pool lest she clean it herself which is
preposterous. And then there are the poor folks who have sunk too far into
poverty to save sans huge, sustained, long-term efforts. In the last
class, we have truly poor people that we abandon altogether, such as
people who have been homeless for 10 years. The middle group only requires
token aid, and thus is the maximized venture for those wanting immediate
glory or brownie points for helping the poor. It requires the least input
for the maximum accolades. And appears to be America’s choice group for
charity.

In the aftermath of Florida’s recent barrage of tropical storms, I am sure
the “old poor” are slipping under the radar of powers that be, to utilize
programs set up for the “new poor.” Programs no one would facilitate for
the “old poor.” I saw this in full play after the 7.1 earthquake in 1989
in Santa Cruz, Ca., that collapsed the Oakland freeway. Santa Cruz at that
time had a large homeless population. Then the quake hit. And suddenly
middle class families were temporarily homeless, due to structural damage
to the homes they owned. A shelter was set up at the Santa Cruz Civic
Auditorium, with beds, blankets, food and water. We had torrential rains
after the quake, so the homeless population showed up to use these cots,
dry blankets, food, etc., these things that were set up for middle class
quake victims apparently. There was a public uproar when suburban families
complained about having to sleep next to “bums” in the shelter. A move was
made to separate out the “old poor” from the “new poor,” but it failed.
The “old poor” just lied, saying they had been living somewhere that was
now ruined. I remember the end result being something like the homeless
population took over most of that shelter and the middle class people went
somewhere else, probably motels, and the shelter was shut down earlier
than it would have been if it had been used by middle class families
instead of homeless poor folks.

This also played out in the Northridge earthquake in 1994. (Yes, I have a
propensity for earthquake epicenters). My building collapsed and my son
and I needed clothing, food, shelter, etc. immediately. The Red Cross
required I prove my home address and that my building had collapsed. How I
was supposed to hunt that down, without being allowed into my home, the
day after the quake, was beyond me. Finally, a fire chief came into the
Red Cross station I was at, and announced every building on my block was
condemned, so anyone living in that area was automatically cleared for
services. I was finally able to prove my address from something I was able
to get out of my car. But if I had been homeless and hungry, like everyone
else in that shelter, but had been so before the quake as well, the Red
Cross apparently was not interested in helping us at all.

As conditions degraded in the San Fernando Valley in the days after the
Northridge quake, water and food were a hassle to obtain. Lines of people
wound around blocks waiting to buy food and water from grocery stores.
Since the stores were damaged themselves and aftershocks kept on coming,
customers were not allowed to go inside the stores. You would finally get
to the front of the line, give a list to a clerk, they would go risk their
lives in a building too unstable to allow the public in, and would bring
what you wanted up front and you paid in cash. Another option was to wait
in long lines at local high schools for the National Guard to give you 5
gallons of water to put in a container you brought to the site. I was not
enthused about standing in the hot sun for hours to get water. I wondered
if I drove my old Dodge Dart to a part of town with more money, if I would
find water easier. And sure enough, I did.

Unlike the long lines for food and water in the San Fernando Valley, the
National Guard was literally sitting at I-5 off ramps giving out free
cases of bottled water to families in the middle class white suburbs of
Santa Clarita, which is only a few miles north of the San Fernando Valley.
Santa Clarita had suffered hard blows from the quake too, it was not like
they were in an area with little to no damage. They had enough damage to
bring in the National Guard with water and to warrant Red Cross stations
be set up there. But somehow their water was flowing freely, while people
were fighting for water down in San Fernando, which has a large Latino
population and a larger low-income population. In addition to the cases of
water just sitting by the off ramps in Santa Clarita, the Red Cross
stations there also had an abundance of water and encouraged me to take a
case of bottled Evian water with me when I left. Unlike the Red Cross
shelters in San Fernando which were full, the Santa Clarita shelters were
completely empty. Why the Red Cross could not transport the extra water
and beds from Santa Clarita to San Fernando is beyond me. Additionally,
why the National Guard was literally sitting by road sides with cases of
water when they could have driven those cases of water into San Fernando
is beyond me as well. But this seems to be the pattern. Money and aid is
given to that middle group in social triage first and foremost.

We saw this type of thing during the Depression Era in America as well. As
more and more people became unemployed, homeless and hungry, the lines
between the “new poor” and the “old poor” blurred. Many efforts were made
to separate the two for aid. And just as we see today, somehow business
ends up as one of those in line for aid as well, as masses grow poorer.
Just like Bush’s tax break for the rich in America nowadays, we saw
Hoover’s response to the Depression was to create the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, which gave federal aid to “agriculture, commerce and
industry.” Apparently, big business becomes the “new poor” worthy of aid
at some point as well!

When a tropical storm creates homelessness, there is help available. When
an earthquake creates homelessness, there is help available. But when
capitalism creates homelessness, who do you call to cover that emergency?
And when would that aid be able to cease? After the 1994 quake, I was
stunned to find one of the pieces of furniture that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) felt was an essential, that had to be replaced,
even at government expense, was a television! When folks fill out their
loss forms for FEMA now after these Florida storms, they will be asked if
they had a TV. If they say yes, and they qualify for FEMA aid, FEMA will
buy them a new TV. Priorities such as these are both telling and
predictable. When given the choice, it appears most Americans would prefer
to help the “new poor” over the “old poor.” People really need to think
about this concept of the “new poor” and the “old poor” to assess their
own motives for helping the poor.

Why were we willing to give endless money to upper-middle class
commodities brokers’ families who suffered after the 9/11 tragedy, but not
to wives of sugar cane workers in Florida whose husbands suffer machete
injuries at phenomenal rates without any health insurance, to feed
America’s sugar addictions? Nor are we willing to donate money to the
African-American women whose husbands and sons have been shot in cold
blood by trigger happy police who supposedly did no wrong? How do we
choose who to help? How do we prioritize the needs of *all* poor people?
The Red Cross tried to divert some of the 9/11 contributions to general
Red Cross funds to help places with serious poverty conditions of famine,
etc., and Americans threw fits over that. Americans demanded the money
stay in the pool for those not starving to death in America, for 9/11
victims, such as widows of well-to-do property-owning commodities brokers,
among other more worthy candidates, for aid. As you can see, this
prioritizing new and old poverty expands beyond the microcosm of America.
It extends out to who we help internationally, in the macrocosm, as well.
Which countries are prioritized for aid from America and why? Certainly
those in the most dire need do not shoot to the top of the list for help.
We need to take some time out to seriously study our priorities and
motivations regarding aid to the poor, in the microcosm of America, and in
the macrocosm of the world, with relation to these artificial divisions
between the classes of the “new poor” and the “old poor.”




03.09.2005

Only Whites Claim Katrina’s Poor Response is NOT Racist
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I have not seen one person of color, anywhere, on any news broadcast, on
any TV special, in any print article, even on the streets themselves,
saying that the response to Katrina in New Orleans had “nothing to do with
race.” The mere fact that the ONLY people saying that are white says it
all to me. Last night, I saw the Mayor of Houston whose name is ironically
“Mr. White” pooh-poohing the racist part of this wholly. There is
something totally obnoxious about this white mayor of Houston, saying it
is “divisive” to try to address race in the Katrina response. Indeed,
white boy President Bush said that any mention of this massacre in New
Orleans being racially driven is merely a “political agenda” put out there
by his opponents. I am sure Bush is scrambling to find some black faces to
publicly deny the racist part of this, and that is why we have Condi Rice
around. For times like these. You can tell just how racist this country
is, by how many white men are working round the clock to pooh-pooh what is
obvious to the world at this point.

Yesterday morning, Sept. 2, 2005, I went out and wrote “Stop the genocide
in New Orleans NOW! Impeach GWBush” in chalk on sidewalks near my house. I
found it wildly interesting that as I was writing one of these, a white
male in his 20’s came up and said “If you were not a woman, I would beat
the sh*t out of you right now.” I said, “Why, for writing this in chalk?”
He said “You are so ignorant. You do not even know what genocide is.” I
said, “Excuse me sir, I have a degree in political science from the
University of Washington and also have successfully passed all my
prerequisites in law school, and I am well aware of what the word genocide
means.” I quoted the Webster Collegiate Dictionary definition: “the
deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural
group.” It was as if steam began coming out his ears at this, he puffed
his chest, and began to stand in a physically threatening manner close to
me. I said, “You know, I am twice you size. And I can be absolutely crazy
if you push me. Just know you may endanger yourself physically if you
touch me.” He left with his legs between his tail, but why did a white
male want to BEAT ME for saying that?!

I watched this trend continue all day yesterday. White men threatened me
with violence ALL DAY yesterday for not giving an inch, calling this a
genocide. I took a very large protest sign out to the streets yesterday.
It said “No more RACIST and CLASSIST genocide in New Orleans. Impeach Bush
Now.” The first bus I got on, a black man immediately said to me “You got
that right, sister.” Then as I waited for the next bus, a black delivery
man unloading near where I was waiting came up to me and said I was 100%
right with my sign. When I got on the bus, I sat down, and an older black
man turned around from the seat in front of me and said my sign was right
on, and wondered how a white girl like me ended up out there protesting
the racism. We talked for quite some time. Then I got off the bus into
downtown Seattle.

Sadly, I was the only protester on the Seattle streets yesterday. I began
to walk to the Market and a white businessman in his 50’s said “Ma’am,
ma’am…” and I kept walking thinking he was going to hassle me. He ran
after me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “I just want to thank you
for that sign.” That was a good turn around from the morning threats, but
it was brief. I got to the Market and a white middle class man in his late
60’s came up to me and said, “You have a lot of nerve. No one is listening
to you.” I said, “No, it is old capitalist racist sexist white men that no
one is listening to anymore and I think you are defensive because you know
that.” He said “You better watch your mouth girl.” I said “There is free
speech in America and I will call you a racist capitalist pig to your face
again, so there!” Fuming, he threatened to go get cops. I laughed in his
face and kept on walking and talking.

Next, I walked along First Avenue thinking maybe someone with a conscience
was protesting at the Federal Building. As I walked down First Avenue, a
white male cowboy started glaring at me, then walking next to me at my
pace, then began berating me for saying this had to do with race. I
pretended I did not hear him and kept walking. Sadly, when I got to the
Fed Building, I was the only protester. I stood on the street there
protesting for a while. Then decided to move to a place with more foot
traffic, Westlake Center.

When I got to Westlake Center, it was packed with shoppers. Disgusted, I
began saying very loudly, while holding my sign, “Your children are going
to ask you what you did to stop the racist genocide of 2005 in New Orleans
and you are going to have to tell them you went shopping! Can you live
with that?” Black folks walked by with very wide grins as I was screaming
this on the corner. Three black teen girls came up and said their aunt had
said what I was saying. We talked at length at why this is blatant racism.
They wanted to protest. I told them that even one person protesting makes
a difference and they could see I was certainly getting a reaction.

As I stood at Westlake, Seattle’s insane Police Department rode up on
their little bikes. They walked right up to my face, and one of them, in
FULL UNIFORM, ON DUTY, made circles around his ears at me to symbolize
that I was “crazy.” And yes, he was white, of course. I no longer am
amazed at the gross lack of professionalism in the beater police squad in
Seattle. But that seems very inappropriate to me.

As I stood on the corner with my sign, black males and females were coming
in a solid stream saying that I was right, thanking me, etc. Yet white
male after white male came up to me, pointed to the word “racist” on my
sign, and called me crazy, a bitch, and many other slurs. The police stood
by monitoring me, ready to arrest at one wrong move. Three men in a row
threatened me with violence, and I was getting louder with each for
safety. The police moved closer. Then a fourth white man and his wife
approached. The police moved within hearing distance, within two feet of
us. I knew they were getting ready to arrest me as a public nuisance or to
try to put me in some weird psych thing they keep for logical women such
as me. But as they leaned in, they heard the white man saying “What the
hell is wrong with those men hassling you? You are absolutely right and
you have courage.” Ooops, not what the cops wanted to hear. For about 5
minutes, these folks from Canada began to tell me they are teachers, they
have to explain this to kids, and it is impossible without bringing in the
race and class equation. The police got bored and rode off.

By the time I got home yesterday from my one woman protest about town, I
felt absolutely exhausted. I tried to figure out WHY this was so agitating
to white men. I cannot believe I am going to be this honest, but I have to
say, that my conclusion after yesterday is, that these white men really do
WANT genocide, they really do WANT those poor black people in New Orleans
dead. They are not even neutral on the subject. They want them DEAD. And
they will try to beat and silence anyone who works against that. Is it
mere coincidence that not ONE person of color threatened or harassed me
yesterday and white male after white male threatened me with violence? How
do YOU explain it?

Yesterday, someone wrote me an email claiming I was nuts to apply racism
to this lack of response. I wrote back and said, “without knowing you, I
can guess with certainty that you are 1) white and 2) male.” This was his
response this morning via email: “Kirsten, I am white. I am proud to be
white. And I have no idea why you even brought that up. Was it my
vocabulary that gave me away? You sound like a racist. I said nothing
about your education. I was not referring to you when I talked about
education as the key. I was speaking about people in general. You seem to
want to make you and race the focus of everything. I was hoping that you
actually had something valid to contribute. But it sounds like you are
filled with hate. You sound like another one of those who need to blame
the entire worlds problems on American white men. Too bad. I tried.
Rmartin” Do I even need to add commentary to that? LOL! These white men
try to play some patriarchal game, calling me ignorant and uneducated,
then when I bust out the reality that I have more “education” than THEY
do, they lose their minds and begin calling ME the racist! LOL! I have
begun posting this crap on my website at
http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pagehatemail.html.

Katrina has exposed the racism and classism so prevalent in America today
and it has shown it is intentional, is my take on it. Those who defend the
racism and classism, or try to deny it aggressively, seem to WANT genocide
of people of color and the poor. That is my serious take on it. ONLY
WHITES are saying Katrina’s response was not racist. That should say it
all. (And I am not saying all whites are denying this racism, I am saying
that the only people who do deny it, are white, from my experience so
far.) Seeing who is angry when you try to fight racism, often tells you
where to begin. Go make some racists mad today!




02.09.2005
American Genocide in New Orleans
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I was seriously hoping that I would not have to write this article. But it
has been too long now, and I have to say something. Regardless of whether
the deaths en masse of poor black folks in New Orleans is due to neglect
or maliciousness, the end result is constructively a genocide on poor
blacks in America, right now, in 2005. The lack of aid to New Orleans at
this late hour (7 pm, Sept. 1) is not explicable. I have only one
explanation that I can muster up. And that explanation is classism and
racism.

The reality is these refugees in New Orleans right now were already poor,
so that tells you how much the government cared about them BEFORE this
disaster. Why would you expect the government to all of a sudden, now,
prioritize the group they did not care about before, to the tune of
inadequate health care, inadequate and expensive housing, etc.? So this is
not a shock, I guess, that the American government is apparently going to
let poor black Americans die for no apparent reason, right on the nightly
news. They were already not caring about the health of these people, so I
guess they are still in that mindset.

Look, New Orleans is not on Mars. I cannot explain why military aircraft
carriers, the like we saw during the South Vietnamese evacuation in the
Vietnam War, are not landing in New Orleans and airlifting these folks
out. Are they all in Iraq or what? I also cannot explain why they are not,
at the very least, airdropping food and water onto the people in New
Orleans, like they did in Afghanistan after 9/11. These people are
literally DYING because America is not doing that! I cannot explain why
they did not evacuate the New Orleans jail until AFTER the disaster,
either. The many, many ways that the American government has now
jeopardized the lives of poor black Americans in this Katrina disaster has
literally scared me to death, as a poor person. I feel very strongly that
if those were middle class white people stuck in those conditions in New
Orleans right now, that relief would have come days ago. For some reason,
just as the cops let L.A. burn in the Rodney King riots, this smells of
racism to me.

New Orleans is not even a day away from the West Coast. I cannot explain
why it is taking days to get help to those people dying down in New
Orleans right now. But I remember when I was in the Northridge Earthquake
in 1994, that the white middle class people had all the water they could
use from the national guard, while only a few miles to the south, the
mostly Hispanic communities, were standing in lines for hours in the sun
to get only 5 gallons of water. My son and I drove up from the San
Fernando Valley into the Santa Clarita Valley in 1994 after the quake
collapsed our apartment, after seeing block-long lines at stores for water
and long lines at high schools and parks with National Guard trucks giving
out water to anyone with a 5 gallon container. When we hit Santa Clarita,
there were cases of bottled water at every I-5 off ramp, with military
personnel just sitting there, waiting for these middle class families to
drive up. When I hit the Santa Clarita Red Cross, they also asked me to
take some water off their hands, unloading a few cases of Evian water into
my trunk! They had a surplus. I asked both the military and the Red Cross
to please load the water up and drive just a bit over the hill where the
water was desperately needed. And they refused. Maybe that story is a
microcosm of what is going on here in New Orleans right now. No one wants
to drive over the hill with supplies?

I cannot explain why there is not at least food and water for the people
we are seeing suffering in New Orleans, and the idea there is no landing
strip is not true. I have seen flat lawns with massive people littered on
them, I have seen abandoned highway strips that could sustain a landing,
and I am sure if you told the refugees if they move out of the area for
the plane to land, they will be airlifted out, they would cooperate right
away!

I have watched insane police hold machine guns to the bodies of mothers
carrying clothing out of department stores on TV news. I saw the cops
force the mothers to drop the clothing, with his gun in her chest, and she
dropped the clothing, and it floated away. A pure authoritarian waste.
Even Nazi-ish in nature! I saw police allowing their own into stores for
food, but holding the people back from the same luxury, calling poor
blacks desperate for food and water “looters” while the cops do the same
exact thing and are NOT called looters. I would assume some cops are gonna
die if they keep trying to act like this. I see America fueling a heavy
crisis in New Orleans, then blaming the refugees for getting desperate.
Just as it is in the Middle East, if people were fed by American
government, instead of patrolled and pointed at with guns while hungry,
things will be safer for all.

The racist cops of L.A. used the Rodney King riots to validate some kind
of weird racist theory that blacks are violent and riot. But that is bull.
The movie “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd is a beautiful
movie about this idea where you drive someone to desperation then call
them criminals. My friend was cleaning pools in Beverly Hills during the
Rodney King riots and she said there was a cop car on every block. But
when she got into the lower income areas, a cop could not be found. So,
from my own disaster experiences, I guess the class/caste separation of
even disaster rescue in America is obvious and dominant.

I just told my 21 year old son that he is watching a genocide of people in
America right now on TV, as this is what this feels like to me. I have
heard NO logical argument as to how on earth those people could still be
stranded in New Orleans. It is not Mars. This is ridiculous. And it has
become obvious this delayed response in New Orleans is fueled by classism
and racism, unless the U.S. government can spit out some logical
explanation, but I have not heard one yet. New Orleans is a scene of
constructive genocide right now on America’s poor blacks, and I do not
know how Americans are just sitting quietly as they watch this on TV. I am
out of my mind about this right now. Just out of my damned mind. I have
never hated GWBush more, and I have never seen a better living example of
classism and racism alive in America today. According to resources in
Canada, Canadian TV is reporting they offered planes full of food, water,
and supplies to help New Orleans refugees and America turned them down!
Again, I wish I did not have to write this article. And I hope I am wrong
in this conclusion. But again, I have waited days now for logical answers
from the U.S. government and it appears those answers are not coming!




01.09.2005

Open Letter to Alternative Press Review Magazine
From: "kirsten anderberg"
To: kirstena@resist.ca
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Open Letter to Alternative Press Review
(or How Not To Get To Publish Kirsten Anderberg’s Articles)

by Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

In the current issue of Alternative Press Review (APR), the holy male
editorial trinity take a huge swipe at me, belittling my work,
pooh-poohing the issues I have raised about sexism in their publication,
and basically reducing me to a ranting, incoherent, oversensitive feminist
because I called them out on publishing almost all white male middle class
writers, exclusively. The have reprinted my article entitled “2005: Males
Are Still Considered The Norm, Women Are Still Considered Abhorrent”
(http://users.resist.ca/~kirstena/pageaprnowomen.html) in the newest APR
print magazine, which has just been published. (I was paid not one cent,
by the way, for this use of my work on both the APR Front Page right now
or this article published in their newest magazine, or the 26 archived
articles of mine they have on their website at www.altpr.org). This
article of mine used APR as an example of male-dominated press and it
apparently hit a nerve with the male editors at APR. This article that the
APR boys pooh-pooh was published in many alternative media sources as a
pertinent and relevant article. It headlined in pro-feminist Social
Nerve’s last zine, and is still on their website
(http://xm.gnostika.org/zine/april2005/2005/). The article was also
published by PhoenixAnarchist.org. It was also published by West Midlands
Anarchists (http://www.wmanarchists.org/thought.htm), and it also
headlined on Canada’s resist.ca
(http://resist.ca/story/2005/3/31/7415/04685). And by the way, those are
alternative press sources. So, APR does not speak for all alternative
press, that is for sure. I argue they speak for the MALE alternative
press, just as that article said.

Apparently APR likes my writing enough to have it published on their front
page, at altpr.org, right now as I write this, on Aug 31, 2005. There is
an interview I did with Pablos Paredes up there right now on that front
page. Yet these men are simultaneously printing my article in their newest
magazine (Alternative Press Review Volume 9, Issue 2) under the heading,
“How Not To Write For APR.” Ironically, as Jason publishes a guide on how
to not act like me to get published at APR, I *am* published not only in
their print mag, but also on their website. So that is a stark contrast of
realities! Let me get this straight, I make a lot of sense and am a good
writer, except when I criticize the boys and then I am incoherent? I am
not buying it. Jason McQuinn says my article has a “frantic tone and
less-than-logical content” but I would argue it is his retort that fits
that descript. He then goes on to defensively label my work as “simplistic
male-bashing feminism.” Honestly, he wrote a beautiful example of exactly
what my article said alt media was about.

You will notice Jason does nothing to coherently explain WHY APR is
publishing almost exclusively male-written articles, in the current issue
#2, as well as in the issue #1, he instead spends most of his “article”
berating me and saying he, a male, knows what feminism IS, not me. He
spends the article not explaining clearly WHY APR cannot seem to publish
even 10% women writers, and instead argues in a boyish defensiveness that
it is merely COINCIDENCE that almost all males are published by APR. He
argues that small alt press cannot be concerned by the issues I have
raised of grotesque disproportionate representation of white males in alt
press.

And indeed, APR editor Thomas Wheeler goes on the attack in the Letters to
the Editor section in the new APR magazine. A woman named Sarah Butler,
from Montreal, QC wrote about minorities and women being left out of
something APR reviewed last issue and Wheeler’s response, echoing what my
article said, retorted: “I have no interest in engaging in superficial
numbers games with DIY-oriented projects nor am I interested in writing
reviews that focus primarily on politically-correct quotas for
self-organized punk bands, independent documentaries, self-produced zines,
or any other review material submitted to APR.” Yes, Thomas, we get that!
Thomas does not seem to think the issues of inclusion for women or people
of color has any relevance to him, as a white male. Or the men o’APR like
to say they are “feminists,” and publish feminist writers’ work for free,
while fighting and berating the same intelligent women feminist writers,
such as myself, when we notice the skewed figures?

And why is it that the ONLY people using the wording “politically correct”
nowadays is white males on the defensive? Again, is it that APR likes my
work, publishes my work on their front page, as it is now, yet are trying
to get me back in line with a big patriarchal stick? Are the boys at APR
trying to “discipline” the bad uppity feminist writer in public and use
her as an example for women who may want to write for APR in the future?
Indeed, their article by Jason is saying, basically, “listen gals, if you
want to write for US, don’t act like Kirsten Anderberg.” I take this as
only the highest compliment, as it only shows how effective that article
was, honestly.

I think what bothered the boys at APR most was I did not need the men to
publish my critiques of them and that they got wide airplay. Men like
Chuck Munson at Infoshop.org, and the men at APR, are very dominant, and
are big on being the alpha males who define how it will be, such as
McQuinn’s article title suggests. I did not have to go through the men to
publish that article, I published it myself or sent it to alt press
editors. And the boys want total control of the media, so they tried to
recoup by published a little article by Jason telling gals how not to act
like me and then they will get the reward of publication in APR (for free,
if they are women writers like me). I can write, boys. And I do not need
APR to “review” my work for validation. And I can write and publish my
own rebuttal to the current APR rebuttal too. No wonder I am so
controversial: I AM EFFECTIVE! And it did not take me ten years like the
men either. My presence on the scene has been very noticeable over the
last two years simply due to me calling the boys out repeatedly on their
sexism.

Jason McQuinn’s article was mere evasion of the issue, trying to silence
the issue by belittling me, and it was also an attempt to define the
parameters at APR for women writers. His article is a perfect living,
breathing example of exactly what I wrote about in my article.
Additionally, McQuinn whines that my article he is upset about immediately
appeared in public on websites, and then says this was proof to him that I
“didn’t write it to communicate (my) concerns with the APR collective, but
to attack APR with quite another audience in mind.” First of all, I
complained to Wheeler repeatedly about this before going public with it,
and just as he has said in press now, he is not interested in this issue
or what he terms as “quotas,” when trying to balance gender. He made it
clear he was not interested in dialogue on the issue. And did not McQuinn
and Wheeler just do that to me? How did I find out about this article
about me by McQuinn? By opening their magazine that was mailed to me
today. Also, they complain I was taking this issue to “another audience”
but APR is about what? Alternative Press!!! So, um, sorry boys, but this
is right on topic and I went to the very people APR CLAIMS to represent
with my complaints!

Funny how these men are telling me what feminism is, what matters and what
does not, and yet, they continue to publish my work on their website, even
right now. I feel a bit exploited by that, you bet. But whatever. It is
just the Manarchist “Alternative” Press and people are getting hip to this
crap. If you want to support women and people of color writers and believe
the 90% white male quota system is not an innocent coincidence, then
buying into APR is not advisable. At this point, I will not submit to them
again, they will need to pay me if they ever want to publish anything of
mine again, and I will continue to report from the front lines of alt
media, as one of the most visible and effective feminist writers out
there, scaring male editors to death. I have no problem with that role.
Thank you APR for exemplifying everything I have said about your work.




30.08.2005

The Emergency Broadcast System: This Is Not A Test…
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

Everyone growing up in the United States has heard the announcement coming
from their TV and radio stations, “This is a test, this is only a test…”
The Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) is something that many of us have
heard tested throughout our lives, yet most of us have no idea how it
works in real time. The EBS has been used to broadcast emergency
information, for real, more than 20,000 times between 1976 and 1996, but
it has never been used for its original purpose, to alert Americans of a
*national* disaster. The only time I have ever experienced a takeover of
all media, streamlining into one station, the EBS, was in 1989, after the
earthquake that collapsed the Oakland freeway. As infrastructures reeled,
while attempting to recoup some semblance of normality, a constant
reminder of strange times came via radio. All stations were broadcasting
the same thing, earthquake survival and recovery information, and all
stations you tuned into gave you the same EBS broadcast.

The EBS broadcasts after the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989 had really
interesting information. I remember one report dealt with the issue of
trees and tree doctors. The tallest palm trees in Santa Cruz, where I
lived, had swayed in an extreme manner during the quaking. This created
large holes around the bases of the trees, threatening nearby houses with
their precarious instability at the base. Tree doctors were offering free
tree packing services in the area and a phone number was broadcast to call
for help. Other things that were broadcast after the 1989 quake were
school closures, the status of federal aid getting to our area, ways to
make water potable, which roadways were impassible and alternative routes
that were available, emergency shelter locations, reports on aftershock
activity, and more. The EBS became a portal of necessary survival
information and community instruction right after the disaster.

Due to the role radio can play during and after a disaster, I think that a
wind-up/solar radio should be part of every family’s disaster preparation
kit. I have used crank radios in disasters, and they work wonderfully.
Instead of worrying about batteries, you just crank the radio when you
want to listen. My very old model needs to be hand cranked about 1 minute
to run for 15 minutes. I also have a hand-pumped flashlight that was
invaluable in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. I highly recommend
hand-cranked/pumped radios and flashlights be stored in every home,
office, school, and car (you can google crank or solar powered radios,
etc. to find these products).

The Emergency Broadcast System was created in 1963 by the Kennedy
Administration, in preparation for civil defense in a nuclear age. It was
created as a way for the president to access thousands of radio and TV
stations simultaneously, to communicate with citizens in a state of
emergency. Prior to the 1963 EBS, there was a “Control of Electromagnetic
Radiation” (CONELRAD) system put into place by President Truman, in 1951.
In 1994, the EBS was replaced by the Emergency Alert System (EAS).

Most commonly the EBS has been utilized for severe weather emergencies.
Due to this, people on the East Coast and in the MidWest sections of the
United States have seen the EBS in action more than those in mild weather
areas on the West Coast. I have been in several natural disasters on the
West Coast, and only once have I actually seen the EBS triggered into
play. In the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, the EBS was not triggered as
the area sustaining the damage was relatively small, and all
communications systems in the surrounding areas were functioning. The
Northridge area was devastated, but we were able to get contact with
resources relatively close to us in a short time. In contrast, the 1989
Loma Prieta Quake isolated Santa Cruz in many ways, and the largest,
closest city to our north, San Francisco, was dealing with its own chaos
from the quake. Landslides made many paths out of Santa Cruz impassible,
and for a period, we were seriously on our own, in a crisis, in a small
ocean town. Thus the breadth of the emergency, and its access to
surrounding infrastructure for relief, plays into the use of the EBS.

The screetchy sound the EBS test made, was meant to get our attention, but
it also triggered EBS equipment in the area. Once the EBS was activated,
the station making the broadcasts were given an official message for their
audience to air after the screetchy sound. The early EBS equipment could
not do much but alert people with the tone, then an announcement. This was
almost a phone tree system, where one station’s activation of its EBS
equipment would trigger other area’s EBS equipment, and if one station in
the system did not do its part, others down the road went without
necessary information.

The new EAS was designed by the FCC, broadcast and cable media, emergency
management agencies, the alerting equipment industry, the National Weather
Service (NWS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The
Amber Alert System now being used across the nation, has been tied into
the EAS, as well. There are now state and local EAS’s in place, in
addition to the federal system. Now when you hear the test we all grew up
with on TV and radio, it says "This is a test of the Emergency Alert
System," not the old “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.”

In addition to the name change, the EAS has upgraded its system with
digital technology and streamlined announcements that circumnavigate the
old system that resembled a phone tree. Now the EAS can send out emergency
information through stations automatically, even if no one is present at
the stations. The EAS is also using the same type of signals as the NWS,
which has made the weather and emergency system warnings digitally
compatible, increasing functionality. Products now available on the market
allow for decoding of EAS messages, allowing first hand citizen access to
this information, giving them a way to get to the source of the
information, without having to wait for broadcasts as in the past. The
digital tests for the EAS are also less intrusive and less common, thus
when the EAS is actually triggered, it is more powerful. Most people
learned to just tune out when an EBS test came on…because it was so rarely
NOT a test. This system tests less, and boasts more effectiveness.

The FCC is the agency that oversees the EAS. It enforces the rules
implementing the EAS, and educates different industries about the
requirements of this system. The NWS provides professional quality
emergency weather information to the EAS, with the help of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). FEMA and local emergency
agencies are responsible for emergency management announcements (or
announcement content) during the implementation of the EAS warnings as
well.

Although these systems are evolving, there is still an issue regarding the
sole use of broadcast means to alert people of an impending crisis. The
EAS simply cannot replace in-person warnings. There is a strange situation
here where the government is dependent upon the media to get its emergency
messages out, yet with the unleashing of indy media, which often does not
fall under FCC control, the government is finding it is not as easy to
rein in the media for its own means nowadays. Additionally, less people
are using mainstream sources for their news, thus getting a standardized
announcement to all the indy media venues now seems nearly impossible. In
a world where the media was controlled by the government’s agenda,
emergency alerts at a national level seemed somewhat easy. But now, with
successful media in America that is openly hostile to the government
agenda, getting media to cooperate in any way, even as an emergency alert
system, is getting more thorny by the day. Figuring out WHO to believe for
your news has now also complicated emergency warning systems.

How you are informed of emergencies is going to get more complex with
time. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was not aware of what was going on in NYC until
a friend called me and told me to turn on the TV. I could have easily not
turned on the news the whole day if she had not called, and if I had not
gone out and had worked all day at home, I could have not known that was
going on. It took a friend to call me and tell me to turn on media, so the
media was not enough, I needed a human to lead me to the emergency media!

Certainly while you are in the emergency area, you know it is going on. In
the Northridge Earthquake, it was obvious it was a quake, but there were
other questions. Were we the worst hit, or were we outside of the main
impact zone, so the severe damage we were seeing was nothing compared to
elsewhere in Los Angeles? And in the Santa Cruz Earthquake, as I raced
home with my son from his childcare, person after person standing on their
front lawn, looking at their shattered front windows and tumbled chimneys,
said to me, “What was that? Was it a nuclear blast? An earthquake?” I
replied, “I have no idea.” It was not until we got home to a radio that we
confirmed it was a quake. Getting some clarification, and assessment of
the gravity and breadth of damages, can be essential during and after a
crisis, and often, the media is the first way we find important
information out. Yet the media is no longer the one dimensional animal it
was in 1963.

I expect we will see more changes to the EAS system as the government
catches up with the independent media explosion and technology. Disasters
are occurring more often due to more and more cities, with ever-increasing
density of populations. The issue of how we deal with disasters, and how
we alert folks to the dangers and safety measures, is far from being
resolved.




29.08.2005

Part Three of this three part series gives current information about how
to get involved with prisoner support now, including the names of
individual prisoners, different ways to get involved, and prisoner
support resources to further your education on this subject.

Prisoner Support As Civil Rights Activism (A 3-Part Series/ Part 3)
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I interviewed 4 members of the ABC about issues ranging from public
defenders to women prisoner needs to political prisoners we should know
about now. The answers the ABCN provided were so informative that I felt I
needed to publish all of their answers, so this article is broken up into
a three part series. Part One explores how ABCN volunteers first got
involved in prisoner support, what the ABCN is, how human rights and
prisoner rights activism are related and what has touched these activists
most about their work with prisoner support. Part Two explores the issues
of public misconceptions about prisoners, women prisoner needs, public
defenders, and state harassment for prisoner support work. Part Three
gives current information about how to get involved with prisoner support
now, including the names of individual prisoners, different ways to get
involved, and prisoner support resources to further your education on
this subject. I interviewed Mr. Twitch-Entropy (ABC Legal Services),
Anthony Rayson (ABC Network), and Tony Young and Chantel G., both from the
Lawrence ABC in Kansas.

I asked these activists what they needed most, as far as support, to
expand their work. Mr. Twitch said that they needed money, as he was
paying out of his own pocket and it was truly a strain. He said it is a
challenge to get enough time to organize benefits to raise enough money
for all of their postage expenses that require daily upkeep. He said there
was also a need for more committed prison support workers. Tony also
echoed that money was crucial, but also echoed, “but what I think we
really need are more anarchists to be doing this type of work. I think
most of the work being done against prisons right now is not coming from
anarchists.” Chantel also said money was a need. “because we run a
literature distribution, we use a lot of stamps and paper and photocopier
toner and other things that cost money. Those costs add up. However, for
the long-term success of the prison abolition movement, we are going to
need a larger number anarchists getting involved with the movement and
doing the hard work required to bring down the prison
industrial complex. Every group of anarchists in this country needs to be
doing some sort of prison abolition work. Individuals can make an effort
to educate themselves so they are able to educate others. Groups can make
sure that they show the links between whatever issues they are addressing
and the prison system. We can all be doing something to help destroy the
prison system.”

I asked what three things people could do right now to educate themselves
more fully on this topic? Mr. Twitch recommended visiting the ABCN
website, as well as the Prisoner Aid and Resource Center. He also
recommended checking out Anarchist People Of Color/APOC
(http://www.illegalvoices.org/), the Chicano Mexicano Prison Project
(http://uniondelbarrio.org/cmpp/) in San Diego and the MPLU-support
website in Belgium run by ABC Antwerp. Anthony runs a vast distro of
zines, with tons of contact information in them. You can write him at
South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, P.O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430, and if
you give him an idea of what you are interested in, he can hook you up
with zines to meet your interests. Another thing Anthony recommends is
writing letters to prisoners. This will prove to be a most compelling area
of education - and humanization! Get the truth out of the gulags from
those most oppressed - not the liars in the government and sycophantic
media! Thirdly, check out the wealth of documentation on the prisons from
other solid sources, AK Press (http://www.akpress.org/), and so forth.

Tony said “the best way for someone to learn about life inside prison is
to contact those who are there. I try to encourage people (especially
anarchists) to write to prisoners. But writing letters isn't always easy.
The ABCN website has lots of info about prisons. Critical Resistance
(www.criticalresistance.org) is a strong, prison abolition organization
that published a really good organizing tool-kit. It is highly recommended
for anyone interested in working against prisons. I just learned of the
Friends and Family of the Incarcerated (www.journeyforjustice.org), a
group that is organizing an August March in D.C. Both Tony and Chantel
recommended the books, “Lockdown America” by Christian Parenti and “Are
Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Davis. Chantel recommended Prison Sucks
(www.prisonsucks.com) for statistics about prisons and prisoners, and also
encouraged people to write prisoners to learn more about prison issues.

I asked for the names of prisoners these activists would like us to get
educated about. Mr. Twitch recommended “Alvaro Luna Hernandez,
anti-imperialist Chicano-Mexicano Texas political prisoner,
(www.freealvaro.org), and Jeff "Free" Luers, eco-tage political
prisoner in Oregon (www.freefreenow.org). Anthony said, “I guess I would
say, first and foremost, is Kevin (Rashid) Johnson (Kevin Johnson #185492,
Red Onion State Prison, P.O. Box 1900, Pound, VA 24279) locked down in a
brutal supermax hellhole in Virginia. Not only is he the most awesome
political artist in the world today, but he is also one of the most
brilliant revolutionary tacticians, analysts and strategists. The other
prisoner I feel offers such incredible insights is Clarence Anthony (Talib
Y. Rasheed) Taylor locked up in Indiana (Clarence A. Taylor #13606 /
17-63, Indiana Department of Corrections, Pendleton Correctional Facility,
P.O. Box 30, Pendleton, IN 46064-0030).”

Tony said he has been writing Josh Gunter, who is a Buddhist punk
anarchist. You can write Josh at Joshua Gunter #697357, 264 FM 3478,
Huntsville, Tx. 77320-3322. Tony said he also writes Hyung-Rae, who is an
amazing revolutionary artist. You can write Todd (Hyung-Rae) Tarselli
#BY-8025, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg, PA. 15370-8089 or contact
Lawrence ABC at tearthemdown@riseup.net to view his artwork.

Chantel recommended Cassidy Wheeler. She said Cassidy “is an anarchist
prisoner who was convicted under Oregon’s Measure 11 sentencing policy. He
basically shoplifted a pair of socks while he was drunk. Once he was in
the store’s parking lot, he pulled out his
camping knife and yelled some things at a few workers who had come out of
the store. He wasn’t even close to the workers! For this mistake, he was
convicted of two counts of Robbery in the First Degree and got a
seven-year sentence. Since he’s been in prison, Cassidy’s been talking
about anarchy every chance he gets and working to make radical reading
material available to other prisoners. Because of his outspoken
anti-racist views, he is a target of white supremacists. Last year he was
identified by the prison officials as one of the “leaders” of a boycott of
the chow hall, commissary, and phone system by the prisoners. Because he
is seen as a leader, he has been in solitary confinement for over a year.
He is housed in the IMU, the most locked-down area of Oregon State
Penitentiary, the prison within the prison. Despite all this, Cassidy is a
positive and upbeat guy who finds the best in every situation. He truly
cares about his fellow prisoners and about
people in general. He enjoys reading zines, writing letters, and receiving
photographs of nature.” You can write Cassidy at Cassidy Wheeler #14282456
OSP, 2605 State Street,
Salem, Oregon 97310.

Chantel also recommended we learn about Charles Hoke. “Charles is also an
anarchist prisoner, convicted of committing various kinds of robbery and
using the money to help pay the mortgages of family farmers who were in
danger of losing their homes or land. Charles has also come under the fire
of white supremacists because of his anti-racists views, but he is adamant
that he is a to friend people he likes, despite the color of their skin.
Charles loves animals and tries to eat a vegetarian diet, no easy task in
prison. He loves birds, reading, and corresponding with folks around the
world. He really enjoys receiving photographs of nature and can receive
three photos per envelope of correspondence.” You can write Charles at
Charles Hoke #475420, LeCI, P. O. Box 56,
Lebanon, OH 45036. Chantel points out that “neither of these fellows has a
website and most prisoners don’t. It has been extremely difficult for
Lawrence ABC to find people willing and able to build and maintain
websites for prisoners.”

(This is part three, in a three part series of interviews, with the ABC
prisoner support network. Visit
http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pageabcinterviews.html for the entire series.)




23.08.2005

Prisoner Support As Civil Rights Activism (A 3-Part Series/ Part 2)

I interviewed 4 members of the ABC about issues ranging from public
defenders to women prisoner needs to political prisoners we should know
about now. The answers the ABCN provided were so informative that I felt I
needed to publish all of their answers, so this article is broken up into
a three part series. Part One explores how ABCN volunteers first got
involved in prisoner support, what the ABCN is, how human rights and
prisoner rights activism are related and what has touched these activists
most about their work with prisoner support. Part Two explores the issues
of public misconceptions about prisoners, women prisoner needs, public
defenders, and state harassment for prisoner support work. Part Three
gives current information about how to get involved with prisoner support
now, including the names of individual prisoners, different ways to get
involved, and prisoner support resources to further your education on
this subject. I interviewed Mr. Twitch-Entropy (ABC Legal Services),
Anthony Rayson (ABC Network), and Tony Young and Chantel G., both from the
Lawrence ABC in Kansas.

I asked the interviewees what is the most common misconception they find
people holding about political prisoners, and/or prisoners, in general?
Mr. Twitch said that this was a complex issue, as there were factors
involved, such as deeply seated, and institutionalized, racism. He said it
was impossible to talk about prisoners without also discussing the social
factors involved. Anthony said, “people are afraid of prisoners and can't
conceive of "prison abolition." They see vicious criminals menacing
society. We are not in favor of letting criminals endanger citizens.
That's what our government does, but people do not realize that as
criminal behavior. Murderers, extortionists, thieves, bullies, liars -
these are how business, the police, government and the military operate -
with impunity. We already have criminals menacing society at every turn!
Incarceration is a crime against humanity in and of itself and does not
solve any problem a prisoner may have. Nor does it do society any good.
There are alternatives to deal with aberrant behavior that do not "pour
gas on the fire" as the punishment industry does.”

Tony Young said, “I do not think that most non-anarchist people I know
believe that there are political prisoners in the U.S. As for other
prisoners, most people seem to have bought the propaganda and believe
that only people who deserve to be in prison go there. Some anarchists,
on the other hand, romanticize political prisoners and prisoners of war,
especially those who were captured and enslaved for participating in armed
struggle.” Chantel said, “the media has lead people to think that
prisoners are horrible people, monsters. People on the outside forget that
prisoners are human beings with feeling and emotions, hopes, fears, and
ideas. People on the outside forget that prisoners are our mothers and
fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, cousins, aunts, uncles,
grandparents, friends and neighbors. They forget that nice people they
know can and do end up in prison. They forget that they themselves could
end up in prison.”

I asked the ABC activists how they responded when people said the only
people in jail are criminals, so who cares? Mr. Twitch said “The
police-state is a reality right now in this country, just judging from the
Grand jury activity against political dissent out on the west coast now,
it is a clue McCarthyism is in vogue, and I'd worry about goin' down for
casually knowing someone being investigated by the government under the
ever-expanding language and enforcement of the Patriot Act.” It all starts
“when someone knocks a little too loud unexpectedly at out doors. When 70%
of prisoners are in for non-violent drug offenses, that makes you wonder,
where people's priorities on the logic-meter are. I think the word “crime”
is criminal, and should be ejected from the dictionary.” Chanel said, “I
think the most important factor in dealing with comments like that one is
reminding people of their basic humanity and the basic humanity of
prisoners.”

Anthony said, “those people are ignorant and self-centered - just like the
government wants people to be. If they are not afraid to learn the truth,
we will try to help educate them. Those too close-minded, we don't waste
our time with. Testimony from prisoners who are mothers and incarcerated
because of economic "crimes" can reach the hearts of most people. This is
just a fear-induced argument and appeals to the heartlessness and
callousness of people - "sheep" in the government's flock. I suppose the
slaughter in Iraq is all about "democracy" too?”

“There are a few things that could be said to counter this. One would be
that no judicial/penal system is without fault and that, even in the U.S.,
innocent people go to prison. There are many stories of people being
released from death row, even in the corporate news. So one could ask, if
the U.S. system murders innocent people on death row, then how many others
who are not guilty of the crime they were convicted of, are there in
general population? It could also be pointed out that many people locked
up right now are there because of crimes that did not cause physical harm
to anybody. Arguing the "drug war" point is very useful because it's one
that a lot of people can agree with, because a lot of people use drugs. I
also like to say that the "real bad criminals" are those in society who
will never by imprisoned in their lifetimes. They are the police, guards,
judges and corporate executives. Some people will also agree with this
statement because of experiences they've had with police brutality or
distrust in corporations. I have found that the productivity of these
conversations depends on the economic status of the person being talked to
or their personal experiences.”

I commented that I have noticed a predominant amount of the people
receiving high profile support in jail seem to be men. I asked to what
that was attributed? Is it just a tremendously disproportionate amount of
men are incarcerated? Or is it mostly men running the prison support
networking? I asked for resources that specifically address women
prisoners’ needs. Mr. Twitch said, “the prison populations are still
predominantly male; though don't forget also the underserved
"transgendered" peeps either. I think there are a lot of men doing the
prison support work, and that is a difficult obstacle to transcend in
attracting and holding a more gender-balanced activist makeup in radical
political groups; because due in part to the nature of male assertiveness
and tendency to dominate group dynamics. I think a lot of men aren't
sensitive to this happening within a collective,
and it is definitely a part of the problem. The women I notice who are
outstanding in their work, are the ones who have found a way perhaps to
find a group that respects women to include them equally. There is a WABC
( Women's Anarchist Black Cross ) collective,
headed by a former Oregon prisoner "Sixpack," who co-produces a community TV
show in Portland, Oregon. The women's populations are beginning to
increase dramatically…Lydia Bartolow at the Break The Chains prisoner
support collective in Eugene works with the Coffee Creek Correspondence
group that supports that Oregon Women's facility. Mostly the non-violent
check-writing and drug offenses; sometimes
the spousal abuse, and rare cases of self-defense murder.”

Anthony responded that “94% of America's prisoners are men. Getting women
prisoners to open up and trust prisoner supporters is difficult.
Overwhelmingly, these prisoners have been victims of sexual &/or physical
abuse. And, they are still preyed upon by guards, the system, sick
predators on the "outs" and so forth. As well, most of these women are
mothers of small children. The authorities threaten these women with the
loss of custody of their children, if they get seriously political.
There's a group called P.A.C.K. (People Against Court Kidnapping) that
deals with this dreadful phenomenon.
Contact Kebby Warner #259737, Scott Correctional Facility, 47500 Five Mile
Road, Plymouth, MI, 48170 for more information. I'm not denying sexism
plays a part in this, too. Our collective (ABC Network) has some
tremendous women members in it and I guess they could answer this question
better. I have some zines dealing with women
prisoners. Here are a couple of other sources: Break the Chains, P.O. Box
12122, Eugene, OR 97440, Breakthechains02@yahoo.com, Break the Chains
Women's committee, Breakthechains03@yahoo.com and Chicago Books to Women
Prisoners c/o Beyond Media Education, 7013 N. Glenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL
60626, http://chicagobwp.org,
jackslowriver@yahoo.com.

Chantel responded by saying, “The majority of correspondence our group
receives is from male prisoners. We are often working so hard to answer
the letters we receive that we don’t have a lot of time to do outreach to
women. The ABCN discussed this problem at our recent network meeting and
brainstormed some ways to let female prisoners know about the resources we
have available. We are trying to balance outreach to women with not taking
on more than we can handle. Lawrence ABC has sent letters and e-mails to a
couple of books to prisoner programs that focus on women, as well as other
woman focused prisoner supporters. We are trying to find ways to get our
literature list to female prisoners in the hope that those prisoners will
contact us if we distro something they want to read.”

“Part of the reason for the situation is that as far as sheer numbers go,
there are more men than women in prison. That means we probably will get
more letters from male prisoners. Another part of the problem is that in
this society, men typically get more attention than woman. Men are also
socialized to be assertive and ask for what they want, where women are
socialized to be passive and not ask for things. I think all of these
factors play into why most people hear more about male prisoners. I don’t
know that I would agree that there are “mostly men running the prison
support networking.” I just don’t know enough about the broader picture of
prisoner support to know that there are more men involved than women.
While there are more men than women in the ABC Network, I would not say
that men are running things in our group. The women I know who are
involved in the ABC Network certainly make their voices heard.”

“As a woman, I think I am keenly aware of the fact that women prisoners do
often seem to take a zurück/back burner to male prisoners. I try to always
address that in my support work and think of ways we can assist female
prisoners. However, often I feel like all the prisoner supporters I know
are constantly just trying to keep on top of the letters that are coming
in and the immediate work that must be done. Often outreach gets put on
the bottom of the things-to-do list. Check out the following organizations
that focus on female prisoners: Women’s Prison Book Project,
http://www.prisonactivist.org/wpbp/.” She also recommended the Chicago
Books to Women in Prison, http://chicagobwp.org/ and California Coalition
for Women Prisoners, http://womenprisoners.org/.

I asked these activists if they had any opinions about the American public
defender system. Mr. Twitch responded, “Wow! Well, it seems they are too
much interested in the deal-making, and rarely are concerned with
personally helping to get a person off, or putting any research time into
a case; it's definitely a risk. It's almost as if they are working with
the prosecution sometimes.” Anthony said, “The public defender system is
a joke. Only they are liable to being sued - not judges or prosecutors, so
they walk on eggshells and don't "rock the boat." They're trained lawyers,
brainwashed into being indifferent functionaries in this rip-off system -
this meat market over human lives. Many aspire to become prosecutors and
judges and are part of the "game." They dutifully railroad poor blacks
into prison. It's all a sickening scam. The police come in and do their
"testilying" and the public defenders go through the formality of
"defending" the accused - because they don't have the money to afford a
sharpie lawyer. They're just an adornment to make it look "legitimate."”
Tony replied, “I am experiencing the system now. I was arrested recently
and the guy who was appointed to me is so swamped with work that he could
not possibly provide me with adequate counsel. I think this is common.”

I asked the ABCN folks if they ever feel/get hassled by police or the
state for their work. Anthony said, “We need people willing to put their
anarchist principles to task. This
is very demanding, nose-to-the-grindstone work that requires long-term
dedication. It's extremely rewarding, stressful, emotional and
complicated. It can be dangerous, too, as the authorities are intent on
infiltrating our groups and disrupting our work. We need people to stop
being lazy and to reprint our zines and generate supplies, and help us put
pressure to bear where and when it is needed.” Tony responded, “I have not
personally been hassled by the police for the work I do to support
prisoners.”

I said it was my belief that the jails are filled with poor people, and
that white collar criminals and the serious global corporate criminals
walk the streets daily, free, threatening every bit of life on the planet,
for their individual profits. I believe it is an inaccurate statement to
say only criminals are in jail. No, only poor people are in jail. A PBS
special said that 90% of those criminally charged require public
defenders. Doesn’t that clearly say who is being charged with crimes and
who is not? My contention is jail is not about crimes, jail is about
class. I asked these activists what they thought about that statement. Mr.
Twitch said, “I absolutely agree, that is correct; I'll say no more.”
Tony’s response was, “I think this is a correct statement.” Anthony
responded, “I agree with it, totally. Prisons are meant to keep the poor
in check. With 2.2 millions prisoners, they are overwhelmingly poor and
being warehoused for a super-lucrative for-profit punishment industry.
Profits are guaranteed as all the money to run these gulags has been
extorted from taxpayers. As well, prisons are being "privatized" for
profit and companies employ prisoners at sweatshop level wages, which
drives wages down for all workers. This is a country of "extreme"
capitalism - virulently racist and
internationally predatory.”

(This is part two, in a three part series of interviews, with the ABC
prisoner support network. Visit
http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pageabcinterviews.html for the entire series.)




19.08.2005
Prisoner Support As Civil Rights Activism (A 3-Part Series/ Part 1)

Prisoner Support may not be something you think about very often, but if
you ended up being jailed due to a mistake or unfair sentencing due to
politics, such as racism or classism, Prisoner Support organizations could
literally be your only lifeline. Part of the frightening aspect of prison
is the isolation. As human rights activists, the prison situation is
pertinent on many levels. First of all, a very disproportionate amount of
black males are in jail, which is a red flag for racism. Secondly, a
disproportionate amount of those charged with crimes require a public
defender (a PBS special I saw said 90% of those charged with crimes
nationally in the U.S. need public defenders, which also shows who they
are charging with crimes). This is a class issue. Thirdly, the human
rights conditions within prisons are atrocious and violate laws.
Enforcement of the human rights laws within jails is the issue there, and
it is prison solidarity groups that are pushing for human rights
enforcement within the jails from outside. So I just outlined three
reasons to get involved with prisoner support: Racism, Classism, and Human
Rights Enforcement.

As a young child, the Pete Seeger “Live at Carnegie Hall” album was played
often in our house. During the “We Shall Overcome” portion, two things
struck me as a young child. One was he had the audience sing “We are not
afraid.” And then he said, “We sing “We are not afraid” even though we are
afraid.” That statement has stuck with me my whole life. We make sure to
sing “We are not afraid” and in unison, *even though we are afraid.*
Another thing he said during that song on that album was, in essence, if
you are feeling like your life is meaningless, you need to go down to
places where people are dealing with serious issues of racism, classism,
civil rights issues, and he promised you that if you went down to
Mississippi and Alabama and got involved in the civil rights struggle,
putting your body on the line, that the meaninglessness in your life would
go away. That also struck a chord in me, even as a very small child. I saw
that my own mother was most alive when she got very active in political
struggle, whether that was in feminism , anti-classism, or anti-racism
protest.

Right now, one place you can guarantee your work will be appreciated is in
the area of prisoner support. If you are feeling your life is meaningless,
if you feel you just work, buy, consume and get ready to die, you can
change that today, by getting involved with prisoner support. As I said,
people are jailed for their race and for their social class in America,
and these people need the support of people outside jails. The Anarchist
Black Cross/ABC (http://www.anarchistblackcross.org) is a prominent
prisoner support organization. I interviewed 4 members of the ABC about
issues ranging from public defenders to women prisoner needs to political
prisoners we should know about now. The answers the ABC Network (ABCN)
provided were so informative that I felt I needed to publish all of their
answers, so this article is broken up into a three part series. Part One
explores how ABCN volunteers first got involved in prisoner support, what
the ABCN is, how human rights and prisoner rights activism are related and
what has touched these activists most about their work with prisoner
support. Part Two explores the issues of public misconceptions about
prisoners, women prisoner needs, public defenders, and state harassment
for prisoner support work. Part Three gives current information about how
to get involved with prisoner support now, including the names of
individual prisoners, different ways to get involved, and prisoner
support resources to further your education on this subject.

PART ONE:
I interviewed Mr. Twitch (ABC Legal Services), Anthony Rayson (ABC
Network), and Tony Young and Chantel G., both from the Lawrence ABC in
Kansas. I asked what the ABC prisoner support network is, as it appears to
be a network of smaller ABC groups. Mr. Twitch said “the sizes and
continuity of the groups vary like the breeze at times unfortunately. I am
an entity of one here at the ABC Legal Services myself, and truly
autonomous, as a current ally-member to the ABCN. Mainly, we try to focus
on Anarchist Political Prisoner support, and the eventual abolition of
prisons as they are, period. We are also involved in Prisoner Book
programs, and attempt to educate other prisoners to politicize themselves
through zine distribution and correspondence. I supervise a small prisoner
legal network mostly within the state of Texas.”

Anthony responded that “the ABC Network is a collection of autonomous ABC
chapters focusing on open-ended prisoner support. We want to learn from
and help educate prisoners (mutual aid) in order to strengthen awareness
and resistance to the prison system. We want to support resisters, be they
anarchist, New Afrikan or whatever. We want to make connections with the
most oppressed sectors by working with those held captive by the state.
Our goal is to provide the most insightful material, inside and out, often
written by prisoners, to help swell the ranks of those in resistance to
the state, to work towards the abolition of prisons, capitalism,
governments and other oppressive systems. Also, we want to make the human
connections with prisoners, educate those on the "outs" about the evils of
this slave-based system of repression. As serious anarchists, we think it
is tactically necessary and important to focus on the massive
incarceration industry in the U.S. A main tenet of anarchism is prison
abolition.”

The ABCN Mission Statement of the U. S. says, “ABCN is a network of
anarchist prison abolitionists…Through solidarity work with other groups
and the ongoing work to help serve the needs of our locked up brothers and
sisters, we seek to overcome fear, ignorance, and apathy.” Chantel said
“each ABC group affiliated with the Network makes its own decisions about
what projects to undertake and what prisoners to form relationships with.
There is no ABCN central office telling groups what to do.”

I asked these activists how they got interested in prisoner support. Mr.
Twitch came into ABC through his affiliation with Pirate Radio in Austin,
TX. in 1999. He became an official member of his local ABC collective in
Spring 2002. Anthony Rayson got involved with prisoner support after he
began the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro in 1998. He said it was the
responses from the prisoners that were most compelling. He said he was
mentored into prisoner support work by Sean Lambert, a bi-sexual prison
abolition anarchist out of New York and continues to work in prison
support as he sees it as “ground zero” in “the struggle at home.” Tony
Young’s first experience with prisoner support was in 2002, when he wrote
a political prisoner in Nebraska named Mondo We Langa. Later, he moved to
Kansas and got involved with anarchist-activists and “began thinking about
the importance of prisons in sustaining the State and capitalism. After
several months of varied involvement, I decided that my activism would be
aimed at destroying the belief that locking people in cages makes us safe
and I would do my part to tear down the prison-industrial-complex.”

Chantel said she heard an anarchist who had spent several years in prison
speak at the 2002 North American Anarchist Gathering. She said she had not
really thought much about prison issues before that, and the speech really
moved her. Chantel said the ex-prisoner spoke of the “way white
supremacist groups recruited men in prison by having people on the outside
correspond with them and send birthday cards. I was struck by the fact
that anarchists need to be doing the same thing, not just as a way to
recruit for our “cause,” but because we really care about people and want
to reach out to them.” She ended up being one of the founding members of
the Lawrence ABC in the Fall of 2002.

I asked how human rights activism and prisoner rights activism are
related. Mr. Twitch said “As you may or may not know, the state of Texas,
being one of the largest prison populations in the world, equally
alongside the state of California, has perhaps the most egregious and
human rights abusing forms of isolation imprisonment formats in what they
call here, "Administrative Segregation"; this is a 23-hours a day total
maximum security prison-within-a-prison solitary confinement. Much of what
has been publicized in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, goes on daily
in our countries maximum security facilities. Just the dietary needs are
at times barely admissible as humane treatment in the name of budgetary
austerity; illness, contagious disease, and sanitary conditions are
rampant problems inside.”

Anthony responded that “Prisoners are human beings, ensnared by a criminal
government. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically
designates prisoners as slaves. Slavery - economic, prison, sexual - is
the bedrock of capitalism in America. Prisoner "rights" (and lack thereof)
goes to the core of the modus operandi of this government. The most
important resisters to the government are often prisoners. Laws written by
predators are not legitimate. Prisons are how America keeps poor people
down. The world gets bombs and we get bars.” Tony responded, “One cannot
talk of defending human rights while supporting a system that depends on
psychological, sexual, and physical torture.” And Chantel said, “Prisoners
are human beings. As human beings, they are entitled to the same basic
rights as other people. Being in prison is punishment enough; having
their human rights stripped from them is a double punishment.”

I asked what had touched the ABC activists most deeply about their ABC
work? Mr. Twitch said, “The strength of some of these people to keep
going and resist the oppression and the sheer constant feeling of despair
that pervades prison life; the relentless ingraining of the
institutionalized mindset; I don't know how I would hold up emotionally
knowing that much of my intense love for freedom was taken away. I have a
lot of respect for that in some folks I represent.” Anthony said, “I guess
I would say the most heartfelt benefits from this work have been the
outpouring of guidance and affection I have received - especially in the
aftermath of my father's death in January of '01. The courage in the face
of brutal repression they are forced to endure is very inspiring, too.
When a prisoner we have supported is finally freed, it is a very
exhilarating feeling! And, the electrifying brilliance of their artwork
and political analyses is awesome, as is the stellar quality of the
writing. To me, it is the most remarkable and vibrant and useful
information being created dealing with present-day conditions. Plus, the
realness, genuine warmth and honesty of our relationships, and the humor
and soul-searing truthfulness in the midst of such Dante-esque living
conditions, provides motivation for strong resolve. Every day, many new
situations arise.”

Tony said, “I have been writing to two men on death row regularly for over
a year now. It can be difficult at times. It's hard knowing that two
people I consider to be my friends may be executed for acts of harm that
they quite possibly did not even commit.” Chantel commented, “I am touched
whenever a prisoner sends us a couple of stamps or a few dollars to help
us with our literature distribution. I know these people don’t have many
resources, so I am deeply appreciative when they share what they have so
that we can continue to get reading material to other prisoners. I was
also touched when I helped organize a prisoner art show last summer. There
are many talented people in prison, and I was grateful for the folks who
were willing to trust us with their work.”

(This is part one, in a three part series of interviews, with the ABC
prisoner support network. Visit
http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pageabcinterviews.html for the entire series.)




15.08.2005

Dreams Can Be Telling
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

When I was 27 years old, I woke up each and every morning wanting to throw
up (and I do not drink alcohol). The doctors could not figure it out.
Sometimes I would also wake up covered in sweat. It usually took up to an
hour, but sometimes 2 hours, in the morning, for it to just disappear.
Miraculously after being awake a while I would not feel sick anymore. I
was trying to figure this out when I met genius astrologer Rob Brezsny
(www.freewillastrology.com) and he told me I should try to write my dreams
down every morning. I had no idea what a Pandora’s Box he was talking
about there. But I have now journaled my dreams for almost 20 years, and I
am stunned at what you can learn from that.

After Rob suggested writing dreams down, I did try to figure out what I
had dreamed of the night before. I would sit down in the morning and just
think, trying to remember what I was just thinking, right before I woke
up. I began to get glimpses of linoleum floors with lights shining on
them, and I heard weird children’s moaning and cries all around me. I was
walking, as a child with an adult. I had this same dream over and over. I
tried to figure it out after a while because I had it so often. All of a
sudden it hit me. Where was I, as a child, with linoleum floors and halls
with children screaming and crying? MacLaren Hall is where that was. As
soon as I made the connection, I saw immediately that was the intake walk
at MacLaren Hall. When the guard walked me down the hall that night when I
was taken into custody, with the kids crying. It was the most frightening
moment of my entire life most certainly. I was 8 years old, I did not know
where I was going, I was separated from my parents and with total
strangers, children were sobbing and screaming down the halls. It sounded
like a torture chamber for children. The sounds of that night, and the
fright I felt, will haunt me my entire life.

MacLaren Hall is a child protection institution in Los Angeles County,
California. I wrote an article of my memories of it
(http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pagemaclarenhall.html) and you can also read a
10 page article by Pulitzer Prize Winner Ed Hume, about MacLaren Hall at
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1346/1_48/96195433/p2/article.jhtml?term=.
MacLaren Hall was a warehouse of severely battered and abused children. It
was the most insane of my childhood experiences. I did not know where it
was, I did not know how I got there, and worst of all, I had no idea how I
would get out of there. The entire place had bars on the windows, guards
in turrets at barbed wire fences surrounding the place, we had guards at
all times, we were in uniform clothing, it was more like jail than
anything else. All of us were minors, being held by the courts, for our
parents’ crimes. As an 8 year old, I was not even sure what I was supposed
to do once in there. But I can say I was beaten, molested and terrified in
there. These were kids who had stabbed their fathers the night they were
brought in, after their dads had broken their and their brothers’ ribs and
arms. This place was horrifying. And there I was, at age 27, taking that
walk into the dorm room at Mac Hall, night after night, in my dreams.

Since figuring out that MacLaren Hall haunts me at night, I have done
research on Mac Hall and gotten to know other survivors from there and
have learned a lot about the institution and its history even. One
survivor sent me a satellite picture of Mac Hall. Another sent me an email
with the subject line “F*ck MacLaren Hall’s Teddy Bears.” One after
another survivor wrote me of how they, too, are haunted my Mac Hall, and
they had never had anyone to ever talk about it with before. Most of us,
since we were victims of child abuse, had parents who wanted to bury the
Mac Hall thing under the rug as quickly as possible. My family, for
instance, just said it was a “juvenile hall” and that I committed a crime
at 8, so was sent to jail. Whenever I asked what crime I committed, no one
would answer. But I was the criminal at age 8 in jail of the family. It
was not until I turned 37 years old, that I learned it was never a
juvenile hall jail for minors. Ever. It has ALWAYS been a child protective
custody institution for severe cases of child abuse. So at age 37, I found
out that all those guns and guards and bars and barbed wire at Mac Hall
when I was 8, were not about keeping bad kids away from society, like I
had thought. It was about keeping bad parents away from children. So many
of us never got to process Mac Hall properly. But I probably would not
have figured out it mattered, if I had never started writing down my
dreams.

Another thing that started coming out in a pattern, repeatedly, over and
over nightly, was a house I lived at on an isolated hill that was called
the Odyssey House. One of the many repeating scenes from the Odyssey
House in my dreams is I am at the house, and I need to escape. I have two
escape routes in all the dreams, and very often I all of a sudden live
there, and they are kicking me out violently as did happen in real life.
But this time, I have my kid so it is not as easy to escape, and even in
my dreams I am saying, “Wait, how did I end up zurück/back here with my kid
again?” I have had so many dreams on that hill now that it is as if it is
my temporary other home. It was actually the Odyssey Hill dreams combined
with the Mac Hall dreams that were making me sick every morning. And after
I started writing them out, I found a relief in the morning. I found I
would wake up feeling sick, then try to remember that night’s dreams, and
once I started remembering where I was, 30 minutes prior, basically, and
wrote it down, I quit feeling sick. Somehow getting them out on paper and
out of my subconscious swirling around to do god knows what to me all day
was a good thing. And over time, I could see patterns.

As you can see, the dreams you have over and over can be good clues to
things that are bothering you. But for me, they have even helped explain
things in very profound way. One of the scariest dreams I have ever had of
my real mother has haunted me for over a decade now. I wrote it down on
January 6, 1989, at 6 am, when I woke, disturbed by it. I wrote, “I dreamt
I was visiting mom in Seattle. It was one of those old hotels, like the
St. Goerge’s. There was a zurück/back and front bedroom. Gib (my son) and I were
sleeping in the zurück/back, mom in front. I left Gib asleep in apt. with mom as
I went out for a while. I was feeling panic even as I walked. When I
returned, I discovered two Gibs – one in my bed, one in hers. I looked at
his moles to distinguish the REAL Gib yet pretended to my mom there was
only one Gib as not to escalate this mysterious weirdness and further
endanger. I decided to leave for a minute to go talk with Rebo and Polaris
who were also staying in the motel (??). When I returned in 10 minutes
still in sheer panic (yet hiding it from mom since she was causing it) and
as I entered the front door, I saw mom looking completely insane, like a
convalescent home patient smearing sh*t on walls, her sheets were wrapped
around her, bloodied, and there was a long flesh cord like an umbilical
cord all over her, bloodying everything, and Gib was in bed with her. I
tried to act not in shock as I calmly (on exterior) gathered clothes for
him, and me to get OUT of there. When I opened her door to see this
childish craze in her eyes, gleaming with excitement from blood, yet a bit
embarrassed as the little girl knew it was “bad,” she got up to go clean
up and said “He went to get the gun. He’ll be zurück/back soon.” I doubled my
time, trying to find myself some pants while in panic which was hard. She
went to clean up and returned crazed with pointed scissors. I was already
fearful of her attacking, so I fought the scissors out of her hands, then
grabbed Gib and went to the door. As I put my hand on the doorknob, my mom
said, “You’re going to betray me, aren’t you?” I just kept going out the
door. Once out, I prayed I had the real baby Gib, since there were 2,
remember? I went to the hotel desk and told them that the lady in room C
had gone mad and someone needs to get her out of there before she hurt
someone.”

Out of all that, what I really saw as significant was the “You’re going to
betray me, aren’t you” as I touched the doorknob to leave. I have thought
long and hard on that dream. It was especially frightening, gorey and
graphic. But as I think zurück/back on what I watched my mom do to herself as an
amphetamine addict, and how she made it that I would betray her and lose
her love if I ever went for help as a child, that was very much like the
hotel scene without so much blood. I used to wonder if she was alive. She
would sleep for three days and nights solid and if I dared wake her, I had
a horrifying wrath. Sometimes I would watch her chest to see if it was
going up and down thus she was breathing, after she’d been out cold for
days on end, when I was 5 years old. I remember one time she was knocked
out, and they turned off the electricity, and it was dark in the apt. as I
sat with my dead mom, and all we had was one can of rotting spaghetti-os
in the fridge to eat. It was pretty scary stuff. And when I finally had
enough of it and went for help in 1969, she saw it as the ultimate
betrayal. She still takes me going for help as me not being trustworthy,
not that I, as a child, needed a parent and I did what I could to survive.
She has still not gotten to a place where she can say, “I was a drug
addict and screwed up and I do not blame you for trying to get away from
me during those dark days. I fully understand and I am sorry.” Instead we
get, “You were not trustworthy since you were 8 and I should have given up
on you then.”

Ever since I started writing down the Mac Hall dreams, then researching it
and finding out what it was, and then writing about it and meeting
survivors, I rarely dream about Mac Hall anymore. It is like that
nightmare has settled down and I do not need to walk down that hall every
night hearing kids scream anymore. I am working on some of the other dream
patterns, like the constant escape nightmares from Odyssey Hill. But it is
interesting to me how much I have learned about myself, and my past, and
my family, from writing down my dreams. I actually look to my dreams now
to show me what is bothering me so I know what to focus energy on. It
sounds wacky to some, I am sure, but I think writing dreams down can be
quite revealing, and even healing, in the end.




13.08.2005
Slipping in RAPIST slurs
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

WARNING: This article has adult content language and has material that
could be considered “offensive” by some. Please do not proceed further if
you are offended by “swear” words or are under 18.

This morning I wrote an article on how most men, even those
self-proclaiming themselves to be “feminists,” are holding on to sexism
with fists clenched, unwilling to let their male privilege go. I wrote
about how in the last little while I have seen sexist slurs in geology
text books, on PBS specials, on anarchist newswires, and in “alternative”
newspaper ads. Then after writing that piece, entitled “Slipping in sexist
slurs,” I saw this posted after another one of my articles on a website
that centers on black empowerment and hip hop: “Tell it like it is Eris. I
don't trust the white bitch either. Her words are suspect. I read a lot of
her "blogs" and she rants about dumb shit. I mean don't get me wrong I
will fuck the lil white bitch but I don't trust anything she says out her
white mouth. Peace and EB.”

There are many problems with that post and I want to discuss them here
rather than sweep them under the rug. I knew a gal who was raped in a
hotel room. She told me that the man made it clear he was going to rape
her and then went to turn out the light. She was in her early twenties.
She begged him not to turn off the light. And she told me, he then said to
her “Don’t worry, I am here to protect you.” She was quite disturbed for
years after this rape, but that twisted comment really stuck out to her.
And after her telling it to me 20 years ago, it still sticks out to me
too. This crazy way rapists can disengage and somehow act as if they are
nice guys, while saying they are going to rape you, is old.

I take the way that poster above signed his comment with “Peace” to
resemble that rapist who said he would protect the woman he was about to
rape. Here he is saying he is gonna “fuck” me against my will, as I was
never asked, and he is saying he hates me so he will fuck me, and then he
signs his email “Peace?” Peace to whom? Not women. Not me!

Queen Latifah dealt with this topic head on in her classic song U.N.I.T.Y.
She sings, “One day I was walking down the block, I had my cut off shorts
on, right, ‘cause it was crazy hot. I walked past these dudes, when they
passed me one of ‘em felt my booty, he was nasty. I turned around red,
somebody was catchin’ the wrath, the little one said, “yeah, me bitch,”
and laughed, since he was with his boys, he tried to break fly. I turned
around and punched him dead in his eye, and said, “Who you callin a
bitch?” You gotta let em know, you ain’t a bitch or a ho…”

I find the power dynamics of the comment saying he is gonna “fuck the lil
white bitch” aimed at me to be quite interesting. First of all, I am well
over 150 pounds. I am not “lil,” just like Queen Latifah. And so now he is
going to talk rape on me, while he preaches black empowerment? His use of
“don't get me wrong I will fuck the lil white bitch” is a very interesting
attempt at oppression. He “WILL” fuck me? Really…and I have no say in the
matter? When does he plan on doing this fucking of me in the present
tense?

I gotta say that on the heels of just writing an essay this morning
quoting Joe Bageant’s asking for “blonde pussy” in his “anarchist”
articles, and his reducing me to pussy in all of his emails to me, I find
this comment posted online today about me to be a perfect validation of
all I said this morning! And a perfect example of how I cannot get away
from grotesque sexism at every turn. The comment above telling me this guy
“WILL” fuck me, is a good reminder that women need to take self-defense
courses and even learn how to shoot guns. After the last time I was raped,
I vowed to ATTACK my next attacker in ways that are so ballistic, and so
crazed and so unrelenting that his life will be in danger the ENTIRE time.
I did visualization exercises of ripping the eyeballs out of rapists. I
learned self defense and vowed to use the hell out of it in the future. I
vowed that I would not be the only one injured next rape attempt. I vowed
to leave the man blind and injured. Thus when I hear this man publicly
proclaiming he “will” rape me, as his slave to just slam against a wall
and have at it, I feel I must remind women that we need to take those
assaults very seriously. Learn self-defense. Learn how to shoot and be
prepared to kill to save yourself. Do not be polite and ladylike with
rapists. Rip their eyeballs out immediately.

I was in a speech class in college once that required we write a
“controversial” speech and give it. Mine was how I thought men who had
raped more than once needed to have their hands cut off. And if they
somehow still were able to continue raping without hands, their feet would
go next. I never have seen a point in castration for rapists, as they can
rape with other objects and I do not believe rape is about sex, but rather
power and control. I think that the hands are where we need to cut them
off. I think it would be nearly impossible to rape someone without hands
available. And man, oh man, was that speech received as controversial. It
was definitely the most controversial speech, exponentially, to any other
speech given in that class. But why wouldn’t we do that? Why are we
allowing men to repeatedly rape children and women like we do? And why do
we just allow men like the one who wrote that comment about raping me,
basically, to just proclaim their rapist tendencies without calling them
out? Why is saying “I “will” fuck you bitch,” considered macho, not
psychotic?

And I cannot even think up a slur similar to that that women could use. A
woman saying “I “will” fuck the bastard though” loses something in the
translation. What would be equal to what that man said to me, with me
degrading and controlling him? I suppose racist slurs could be used in
such a manner. So is that the plan? Black men subjugating and boasting the
rape of “lil white bitches” against their wills and then “white bitches”
using racial slurs to try to gain the upper hand? Well, I am not playing
that. Instead, I think brothers and sisters of all colors can unite that
no man should be posting he “will” fuck any woman against her will
anywhere. And men who do so need to be ostracized as power freaks and
potential rapists.

Again, women, learn self defense and how to shoot a gun. Visualize ripping
rapists’ eyes out, first thing, no matter how gooey, bloody, and gross it
is. Visualize going NUTS in CHAOS at a rapist. My friend Beth freaked out
a rapist when he cornered her in a phone booth. She gave him a crazed look
the minute she knew she was trapped and his agenda, and said “What is your
name?” He said it was “Bob.” She bit into her arm to make it bleed, then
with crazy eyes, wrote “Bob and Beth” in blood inside a heart on the phone
booth wall…he freaked out and ran away! The idea of being nuttier than
them is a good one. And remember to yell “FIRE!” when being raped, as
people do not respond when you yell “rape.” If you yell “fire!,” they
think they might lose some of their belongings, and will come to help. And
remember, men do not want to rape women who may injure them. Indeed when
the New Orleans Police Dept. gave free shooting lessons to women and
advertised it, as a method to reduce rape, the armed women DID lower the
rape rate, immediately, as the men all of a sudden thought they could get
hurt raping us.

That is why I support the lines in Queen Latifah’s song. And why I am not
an advocate of strict nonviolence, as I think there are times to fight,
and during rape is one of them. And prior to rape is another, and I am
writing this tonight to reaffirm that no, the man who proclaimed he “will”
fuck me, is dead wrong.




13.08.2004

Slipping in Sexist Slurs

By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

If you want to keep sexism, racism, and classism alive, a good methodology
is to *say* you are against such things, but then to just slip slurs into
your vernacular, thus keeping the oppression fresh and fed. Then when
busted, the plan is to defend these slurs as nothing...Sexist slurs, for
example, most often follow the path of reducing women to “pussy,” calling
us dumb, referring to us as children who need elder men’s advice and
saying we need to be tamed and disciplined by men. Men, even “anarchist”
men, rally together and defend these statements as harmless and
meaningless, berating any woman who dares try to interfere with
patriarchal rule. And I cannot get away from this behavior, on PBS, in a
geology text book, at the University of Washington in a Greek Mythology
class, and on manarchist websites like Infoshop.org.

I was repulsed last evening when I began to read a book on the geological
formations in my home town and had to be subjected to this, yet again.
There I was, innocently reading a field guide on geology, of all things,
by Robert P. Sharp, when all of a sudden I am assaulted with this on page
2, yes, page 2, of the book! Mr. Sharp writes, “One of the first tools
our far-distant ancestors used was a rock – to settle an argument with a
neighbor, subdue his wife, or kill an animal.” Do I have any desire to
read the rest of this archaic caveman’s work? Nope. I shut the book on
page 2 when I saw that.

Let’s seriously look at the agenda there. Mr. Sharp has interjected his
own delusions of what he THINKS went on in the past, and also has tainted
the text with his own sexism. That would be like me saying what people
used rocks for in the past was “to subdue a violent male partner.” We have
no proof that cavewomen did not use rocks to “subdue their abusive
husbands” and furthermore, men tried very hard to hide and destroy all
women’s history, especially their revolts in history, for ages. All
throughout history, women have been undermining men’s attempted “control”
of them, which is how we got to today. To act as if women are some type of
inferior wild animal that needs to be tamed and civilized by men is stupid
and arrogant. But men play this card over and over in front of me.

I remember taking a Greek and Roman Mythology class at the University of
Washington. Everything was going fine until the instructor took a wild
turn when we came to the Amazons. Up until then, the instructor had said
that many, if not most, of the myths were born in some way of real
persons, but the stories got exaggerated over time. But when we hit
Amazons, he broke the pattern and said that this was PURE fantasy. I asked
why the male myths had been “born of some truth” yet the Amazons were
“pure fiction.” He said the criteria he was using was that there was art
and frescos, etc., of the male myths. I said there was art about Amazons
too, so I did not see his point. He could not point out even ONE rationale
for his new theory when we hit women in mythology. He got very angry and
said I was trying to politicize the class and this was not a political
science class, it was a Greek Classics class. I made the point that men
keep destroying women’s history so how would we know anything about them?
Thus all history is politicized.

Angered, he scolded me in class. I left disgusted. Apparently this
instructor went to the break room in his department and tried to spout off
how mad I made him to a bunch of women Classics professors. And
apparently, they ate him alive saying I was right! They even told him they
are working on a class in his department on EXACTLY that topic! The
following day he asked me to stay after class. The class, and I, thought
he was going to kick me out of the class. But privately, where no one
heard, he apologized for his outburst and said he now sees how he was
applying two separate ideologies based on gender, and sexism, to the
classics.

Another alarming thing I heard recently was on a PBS show called, “One
Man’s Wilderness.” The program is a documentary of Richard Proenneke, who
lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness and people are acting as if he is
some great mentor. But I only watched one episode before I heard him
slurring women as if he is their superior and authority. He was doing some
kind of woodworking, I believe, and he said something like “Just like a
woman, you have to tame it…” This 50+ year old jackass is described as “a
keen observer and meticulous recorder,” and I agree, he documents sexism
quite well. PBS is glamorizing this guy as a wilderness god, while he
slurs women in front of us, and girl children watching. He casually slips
the slur in, and PBS is calling any woman who catches it “oversensitive.”
Indeed, when I called PBS in Seattle, and complained that children could
hear those sexist slurs, and if he had talked like that about race they
would not air it, I was pooh-poohed by the male station manager, as usual.
Part of how men keep this sexism going is by DEFENDING any man who commits
sexism. Thus those defending this behavior are equally guilty as those
spewing the garbage, in my opinion.

Another perfectly clear example of this is Joe Bageant, a white male who
writes articles proclaiming he is “poor,” which he is not, and writing
very sexist and racist diatribes that the “alternative press” and
manarchists are eating up. As a matter of fact, the man who owns and
controls Infoshop.org, (which touts itself as anti-racist, and
anti-sexist), Chuck Munson, defended this man 100% when he posted a story
asking for “blonde pussy” in the middle of an article supposedly about
poor white men displayed on the front page of Infoshop.org. So there I
was, the most oft published feminist writer at Infoshop.org, and next to
me sat a racist, sexist article! And I complained. And I was attacked by
not only Joe who continually reduced ME to pussy, but also by Chuck
Munson. I literally broke all ties I had with Infoshop.org over this as I
do not support such nonsense. There will be no anarchist revolution with
these men. These men are who anarchists are working to disempower. They
are NOT on “our” side. They have chosen to take an anti-woman stand and we
need to make them accountable for said choices. They cannot work with
feminists or anarchists, in my opinion, while defending sexism like this.

Joe Bageant is doing a great job at outing sexists in our “alternative
press” and anarchist communities. Joe Bageant said in a recent article
which headlined at Infoshop.org, Dissidentvoice.org, and Alternative Press
Review: “in which case I say, “Come sit by me comrade! (Especially if you
are a blonde.)” You do not find me writing articles asking for old white
dicks of privilege to come sit near me as comrades! As a matter of fact,
Joe Bageant is quite presumptuous to call blonde pussy his comrade. I have
blonde pussy and it ain’t his comrade, that is for damned sure. I did ask
Joe Bageant for his penis measurements since he was advertising for blonde
pussy and I thought we should see what he was offering up. Joe likes to
talk at end about “pussies” but he refuses to talk about his own penis, or
any penis’ for that matter, which is VERY telling. And VERY sexist.
Apparently women’s genitals are up for talk, but men’s genitals are
precious and sacred and may not be spoken of in such abandoned tones. This
is a perfect example of why we MUST wrestle alternative press OUT of the
controlling hands of males.

When I read the line “in which case I say, “Come sit by me comrade!
(Especially if you are a blonde.),” I immediately wanted to know what that
casual thing slipped inside an article on poverty MEANT. I asked Chuck
Munson of Infoshop.org to please pull that article off the site until we
could determine what that one line MEANT. Chuck said I was just a
hysterical overreacting feminist, I was being “too politically correct”
and he would have none of it. In essence, he was taking patriarchal charge
over Infoshop, which I had been closely related to as its most oft
headlining woman writer, and he was attempting to take patriarchal control
of me as well. I then asked for the “Infoshop collective” to intervene on
my behalf, which is when I found out that no collective really exists from
what I can tell. Chuck’s ability to control anything on the website at any
time as per HIS views and desires, and his alone, with no “collective”
input from their top women/feminist writers at least, with no obligation
to include the women he publishes most in his editing decisions, was
shocking. This incident was how I found out that *I* was not in the
Infoshop “collective,” whatever that is. I see now that Chuck is
advertising for “writers for the Infoshop collective” again. I advise all
to get the part where you are part of a “collective” as their writer, in
writing.

I also take issue with Bageant advertising for “blonde” pussy. I feel that
is a racist slur, making it clear he wants WHITE pussy. In the “polyamory”
community in Seattle, I have heard repeated complaints of racism from my
friends of color. I remember one woman told me that a couple had been
really into her online, and they wanted to meet her. Then when she
described herself for the meeting, the couple abruptly bolted. She thinks
it was because they found out she was not white at that point. I believe
her perception was correct. I see the ads in the poly community stressing
eye and hair color as a way to determine race. When they ask for a
physical description, they are often doing that to determine race,
seriously. If you respond as blue eyed and blonde haired, they assume you
are white and proceed thusly. So when I saw Bageant using a similar tactic
on Infoshop, I was horrified and immediately identified it as racism, not
just a personal preference, as the predicted defense would try to assert.

Since Chuck was not willing to take any action on this racist sexist slur,
I wrote Joe Bageant myself and asked him what that line meant. And because
Joe is used to getting away with junior high behavior on women apparently,
he flippantly responded to my question with “It means I like blonde pussy.
Regards, Joe Bageant.” When I showed this to the editors of Infoshop.org,
Dissident Voice and Alternative Press Review, the men who were posting
this article as a headline article on their sites, the men just kept his
article up and began to actually work to defend him and to make me out to
be some nut! So let me get this straight. Now “alternative media” and
“anarchists” are publishing a 50+ year old white male’s desire for blonde
pussy on the front page why again?

Just as page 2 of Mr. Sharp’s geology book made me just close his book and
move on, I also felt I had no desire to continue to work with men who
defended men using such behavior amongst us. In my opinion, Joe Bageant
should NOT be posted on ANY alternative media website. His articles
contain much more racism and sexism than that one line I have quoted.
Plus, he talks to women writers and editors in a MUCH different tone than
he does to male editors and writers. Every correspondence I had with Joe
Bageant included him making comments on pussies, including my pussy. If
you read only his emails to me, you would think he is OBSESSED with the
word “pussy.” His letters to me said things like “Love your pussy.” Yuck!
Maybe he should work on loving the genitals HE has and leaving women
alone.

I am a body esteem activist, I teach sexuality workshops, I run a vulva
museum. I fully understand sexual liberation. I am not a prude who freaks
out at the word sex. But I AM a freak who responds immediately to SEXISM.
And I will not let men ruin sexuality for women by making it sexist as Joe
Bageant has. And I believe his insertion of a need for “blonde” pussy was
also a racist statement. And yes, I have heard all the men’s arguments of
why and how that was not sexist or racist, he just prefers blondes and
loves pussy. Oh, this is so original. An old man ogles women’s genitalia
and wants a blonde on his arm. Yeah, yeah, isn’t that what the whole adult
male “entertainment” industry is about too? I find not one thing unique
about Joe Bageant’s viewpoint. I find it a perfect icon of archaic sexism.
And I found out that anarchist media FULLY supports this type of thing and
expects intelligent feminist writers to just look the other way. Well, I
am NOT looking away, I am looking these men in their eyes and calling
bullsh*t.

In an anarchist newspaper named “The Shadow,” I see that in issue #50, the
front cover shows a person in a gas mask, with the words “New World Evil”
over it. On the top, the paper says, “Information is strength, knowledge
is power.” Yet you turn the thing over, and on the zurück/back is a full page ad
of a thin blonde woman (just like Joe likes ‘em), naked in a champagne
cup. Apparently it is an ad for “digitonerecords.com” Funny how the front
of the paper has anarchy symbols and tries to rally support against “new
world evil” then you turn the paper over, and we find out women are yet
again, reduced to “blonde pussy” in a cup! I also saw an ad recently in a
Seattle “alternative” paper called “The Sinner.” There it was, on the zurück/back
page, a full page ad with a woman with shorts up her butt, saying “Come
get a piece” as an ad for a glass pipe store. Apparently the alternative
press has no interest in stopping sexist assaults on women anytime soon.

And why would that be? BECAUSE MEN IN ANARCHY STILL WANT THEIR MALE
PRIVILEGE. THAT IS WHY WE ARE NOW CALLING THEM MANARCHISTS. Anarchy
inherently defies and denies racism and sexism. If you are printing sexist
ads in your “anarchist” paper, you are a joke. If you are publishing
sexist articles by Joe Bageant, a desperate man advertising for white
pussy in the “alternative press,” then do not ask for my allegiance. We
are not on the same side AT ALL. I am a woman. I am not blonde pussy for
Joe Bageant. And no, I am not being “too politically correct.” The fact is
that Chuck Munson, Joe Bageant, Mr. Sharp, and Richard Proenneke are all
sexist pigs and have proven themselves to be such. As a feminist, I must
call them out and I must ask we do not validate these men if we believe in
the feminist cause. Additionally, Joe Bageant is racist in his language.
Thus the alternative press is not only supporting and protecting a sexist
pig, but also a racist pig. Thus we need a new name for pro-feminist,
anti-racist press, as the sexist males already took the name “alternative
press” and defiled it to mean nothing different than mainstream press.
They have co-opted the term alternative press now so much that there is no
difference between it and mainstream press.

Let us think of a new term, and use it, to clarify we are not part of old
school, male dominated, sexist, racist “alternative” press. We must make a
break from these men, and we must reclaim our media to be free of such
slurs. We must stop the racist sexist agenda in “alternative” and
mainstream press from Infoshop.org, to PBS, to our text books on geology!
DO NOT LET EVEN ONE SLUR PASS UNNOTICED. Make a stink. Call the men out.
Boycott their work. For an entire year, support ONLY pro-feminist,
anti-racist women writers, editors and publications. Let’s make a united
stand against this behavior continuing on in our communities. No more
casual slurs objectifying women’s bodies, or reducing us to monsters that
need violent male taming, in the middle of published “anarchist” text,
please.

We have heard enough from the boys now and we understand fully they cannot
respect us as equals, and that needs to change. Our pussy is not their
political comrade, nor is it the spoils they win as victors. Anarchy will
forever be undermined if we let these white men who are afraid of women’s
equality reign unfettered, controlling alternative media and anarchist
press. Stop funding these sexist media venues and writers, and those who
defend them and *be consistent*. Put your money where your convictions are
and quit giving money to places like Infoshop.org if you do not want to
support sexism. Tolerate NO sexist slurs AT ALL in your “alternative”
media. It is an achievable dream. I can see it within our grasp. Let
nothing keep us from that goal. And let us not allow the ridiculous
defense of sexism in alt media to continue. Boycott if the men feign
ignorance about this. They understand money, even if they don’t “get”
feminism.




08.08.2005

Supporting U.S. Soldiers is Not About Personal Respect

By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

I refuse to mindlessly give support to anyone who joins, or works for, the
U.S. Military and their local subsidiaries, the police. I also refuse to
support *any* child molesters. No compromise on either of those stands, no
matter *what* the circumstances. I have been banned from forums, sent hate
mail, and have lost “friends” over this stand. People make the most
bizarre excuses for supporting people joining the U.S. Military. On
today’s ABC News, I actually saw parents who called themselves anti-war
activists, trying to justify their own son’s joining the military (and
dying in the military now) as his own “free choice” that had to be
“respected.” Well, now they know how the parents of suicide bombers
working for the Taliban feel. M.L.King, Jr., among others, have said that
at a certain point, silence is criminal, and that silence is an active
lie. We are at that point right now in world history.

So if these anti-war protester parents’ son had made the “free choice” to
be a paid murderer in any other situation, would they also support that?
If he made the “free choice as an adult” to go rape children, would they
just blindly support it as his adult right? If he made the “free choice”
to join the Taliban, as did the privileged white male who escaped the fate
other captured Taliban suffered early on in the war, since he was from a
rich family in Santa Barbara, would they support that? Do they have *any*
standards about what they support or not, regarding their son’s behavior?
This is not about letting adults make free choices and respecting that. We
do NOT allow adults to make “free choices” about random killings, rape and
child molestation in America (unless they work for the government,
corporations, or Catholic Church), and I do not understand why we should
support, or even allow, such “free choices” from people who want to join
and fight for the U.S. Military.

I got kicked off of the herbalist/pagan/feminist SusunWeed.com forums over
this topic. Some woman wrote in saying her nephew just joined the military
and was going to Iraq and she was against the war but wanted to “support”
him. I told her she needed to STOP HIM from going to Iraq by any means
necessary. I said she needed to immediately contact objector.org and get
him into counseling. I told her he could get federal financial aid for
college from the Pell Grant system, he did not need to kill others for
college. These hippie women jumped all over me saying I was not
“respecting” the man’s free choice or the woman who wanted to “support”
him. I am sorry, but I am “respecting” all of the homeless vets on
America’s streets who cannot get proper support when they get zurück/back from
war, I am supporting all the children whose fathers we kill as we drop
food on them, I am supporting the belief that murder is murder, and that
the U.S. Military are paid murderers. Yes, that means I am NOT supporting
U.S. military personnel, because they are in an illegal occupation in
Iraq, they are committing identical crimes to that false regime they set
up with Diem in South Vietnam, and their commander in chief is a complete
political idiot, and this actually *is* a race and religious war against
non-white, non-Christian people by an insane fundamentalist Christian
president whose daddy was the head of the CIA and got into office on the
tail of Reagan’s “October Surprise.”

THIS IS ABOUT RESPECTING LIFE and THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST, not
protecting Americans’ rights to make murder their career.

I received the following email a few months zurück/back: “Ms. Anderberg: I read
your article Mothers and Children Run and Hide. I guess you've forgotten
that there are guerillas hiding in Fallujah. Guerillas who've killed,
kidnapped and beheaded Americans. Guerillas who are associated with
terrorists who killed at the World Trade Towers in New York City. These
terrorists hide among innocents. At least American soldiers try to get the
innocents out of the way before combat. Of course war is hard on mothers
and children. It always has been. It is also hard on American mothers who
receive their sons and daughters zurück/back in body bags. If you don't like the
war, write Congress and the President. Stop making the American solider
fighting in Iraq out to be the bad guy. They are only doing their job.
Sincerely, Patty Jerving, Milwaukee, WI”

She speaks for many, but I have several problems with her line of
reasoning. First of all, to argue the American soldiers occupying another
country illegally are “just doing their job” is no more powerful than
someone saying the Taliban are “just doing their job.” That would give the
Taliban more power, as they are defending their own soil, while doing
their job, while no one can figure out WHAT American soldiers are
supposedly defending there! The Taliban is not just made of elite
professional administrators. They have pawns for the front line, just like
the U.S. Military. Many of the men who join the Taliban to fight, join for
the EXACT same reasons poor people in America join the military. As a job,
to feed their families. So why are American paid soldiers who are working
a job to feed their families allowed a moral carte blanche when the
Taliban fighters, who joined and fight for the exact same personal
reasons, are not allowed that same compassion or support?

But this is where we get into the religious/race war part. If we accept
that the Taliban fighters are only doing their jobs, trying to feed their
families, then we need to somehow dehumanize these people to kill them, we
need to reduce them below white Christian Americans, as there is no real
logic for why American soldiers should be allowed to just “do their jobs”
with no moral accountability, yet every single action by every single
Taliban fighter is supposed to be a personal attack on all humankind! Thus
this moral superiority is now guised as appointed by God, is where we are
relegated to. Indeed, GWBush has actually said that GOD told him to do
things relating to Sadaam and Iraq. Now we are arguing which side GOD is
on, which is insane and ridiculous. And America is arguing GOD is on the
Christian White American side. And we need to protect and save GOD and the
world. For some unknown reason, even intelligent people are actually
arguing that the American war in Iraq is about doing GOD’s work, as if
American soldiers represent GOD, and that all those America is fighting
represent SATAN. Indeed, the American president has said exactly that, in
no uncertain terms, repeatedly. “They” are the “axis of evil,” not the
world’s most dominating and destructive military power, the U.S. We *need*
to dehumanize Middle Eastern folks to rationalize our wars and aggressions
in their world as good and blessed and liberating, for it is our superior
wisdom and morality that will “save” them from themselves. But maybe it is
America that needs to be saved from itself, in reality. And I am not above
that calling.

Additionally, it is so incredibly ignorant to link the 9/11 attacks with
the war in Iraq. The WTC plotters and planners were mostly from Saudi
Arabia. This is fact. Something like 95% of the pilots who flew into the
WTC on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. So why are we bombing Iraq and not
Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia is one of the most oil rich countries
that still kiss America’s ass. The connection between the Bush family and
Saudi Arabian royalty is well documented. So it is absolutely foolish to
argue we had to bomb Fallujah to find hiding terrorists based on Saudi
Arabian terrorists flying into the WTC. There is no logical correlation
there at all.

Patti Jerving wrote, “At least American soldiers try to get the innocents
out of the way before combat.” Really? So what was the warning we gave
Hiroshima and Nagasaki when America killed hundreds of thousands of people
(FAR more than the WTC attacks) in two days? Were American Indian
children “warned” about smallpox on the blankets the U.S. Military gave
them? No, they weren’t, Patti. Were children cleared from the napalmed
areas in Vietnam? No, they weren’t, Patti. People have picked glass out of
children’s scalps in Japan for decades due to our nuclear blasts there.
And we have pictures of children running, screaming, with American napalm
burning their flesh, from the Vietnam War. What warning were the people of
the Bikini Islands tests given and where were they supposed to go since
they lived on an island? No, Patti, America does NOT clear out innocents
from their war arenas anymore than the WTC attackers did. And America
kills exponentially MORE innocents in a week than the WTC attacks produced
in a day. It would take many many many WTC attacks to equal that one
Hiroshima bomb America dropped with NO warning to the innocents who were
burned and incinerated alive in Japan 60 years ago.

If you want to make war standards and etiquette, it must be applied across
the board. If you justify the military in the U.S. as paid killers who are
“just doing their jobs” to feed their families, then the same exact thing
can be said of Taliban fighters. If you say that there is some duty to
clear the innocents from target areas, then America would need to also be
held to that standard, which we do not meet at all, not in the past or the
present. If you want nuclear de-escalation, that means the biggest nuke
hoarders first…we cannot expect little countries afraid of us to not
develop nukes when we, ourselves, would never submit to such standards and
under lesser threats. If your justification for American aggression and
murder in Iraq is GOD told us to take the Taliban and Muslim population in
the Middle East out in deference to white, Christian rule of the Middle
East, that is called GENOCIDE and IMPERIALISM. I have made a stand that
child molestation is unacceptable under any circumstances, and I make no
exceptions. I have the same standards about the U.S. Military. I do not
support or accept the “free will and adult choices” of child molesters,
and I do not see paid murder for U.S. genocide and imperialism as a “free
choice” option I am willing to entertain positively as “respect.”

“You can decide to be apathetic and complacent, and hope for it all to
collapse, or you can decide to take responsibility and fight to destroy
this death machine. Either way you will have blood on your hands…it is
just a matter of whose.” – Green Anarchy Collective




07.08.2005

Class Slurs and The “N” Word
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

One of the most radical TV shows that I recall ever seeing was an episode
of the Jeffersons. The black Jefferson family was arguing with their white
friends. And George Jefferson did the unimaginable to progressive
leftists: he spoke truth. He said, right there on TV, that the white guy
was gonna pull the “n” word, as soon as he got really mad and the white
guy did just that. It was certainly a historic moment for American TV. But
I have found one of the reasons I simply cannot align with, nor trust,
people in the middle to upper classes is that the minute they do not like
what you are saying, or feel they have lost superiority, they will pull
the class card just as quickly as whites will pull the “n” word, showing
their true colors.

I have found that I may even try to trigger middle class folks to show
their true colors when mad, just so I can see who they really are
underneath that fuzzy new age/”anarchist” rap. I have only been astounded
at the things privileged people have said to me about class once they were
not in total control with feigned superiority. The first target for anyone
who hates me is to hit my poverty and use that as some indicator of
success. But I long ago quit using money as a marker of success. Is GWBush
“successful” just because he is from his family’s ill-begotten oil money?
Why would people who inherit privilege be superior to the underpaid
hard-working, rent-paying folks again? Should activists be making half a
million dollars each, for just themselves, every year, for “helping” the
poor? I do not think so! Because I have been poor, my goal is not to
become middle class. I have no desire to play into the American middle
class “dream.” I do not want to catch shopping as a “hobby.” That looks
horrible.

I know this guy in his late 40’s who is sent $1000 a month from his mommy
for nothing. He has no discernable outstanding talents, he has no kids or
family to support, he has never been poor, hungry, or homeless. Shit, he
has barely had to WALK this lifetime, always owning a car. And when this
guy took me out to help me find low-income housing a few months zurück/back, he
was fine when the apartments we looked at were small and shabby. But when
we finally started finding decent low-income housing, he quickly got
jealous and slurs started flying. Now he complains about my “subsidized”
apartment…but is not his rent “subsidized” by mommy’s $1000 a month? Oh,
right, if you are just given money as a healthy white middle class male
you “earned” it: but hard-working moms with no family who get any help are
ripe for slurs about “subsidies.”

When the poor are given anything, the whole world monitors our every
movement. We are watched and monitored about where we spend every single
cent and if we spend the money “improperly” ever, we will be punished
financially. We are scorned at the grocery store if we ever try to buy
desserts on food stamps. We are yelled at if we have anything of worth in
our house. Yet Mr. Green Jeans over there, gets handed $1000 EVERY MONTH,
and his is scott free. No one asks or monitors how he spends his $1000 a
month, which is over TWICE what a welfare mom and child receive a month in
Seattle. And no one seems to ask what exploits of the poor gave his family
money. And I do ask that. I ask how people GOT the money they waive around
as “earned” and “deserved” and I find that most often the privileged kids
have done NOTHING to “earn or deserve” their privileges. And so when I
scrutinize class privilege, I am just an “antisocial bitch,” but when
privileged people scrutinize our poverty, they are progressive with only
the interests of the poor at heart….right.

The sick thing is this pampered guy whose mommy gives him $1000 a month
calls himself an anarchist, and fancies himself progressive. Yet he is
able to make class slurs the minute he feels he is not given superior
things or the upper hand as a white middle class male. And it is
interesting how I went for years supporting myself and a child on $440 a
month, while a white single male is handed $1000 a month, and he is not
the one considered on subsidies. I guess the word “subsidy” is really like
the word “nigger.” The privileged keep that word in their zurück/back pocket to
slur us with as soon as they feel their class “superiority” threatened.
Apparently what makes it a subsidy is where it comes from. If your
survival money comes from the state, you are to be stigmatized, shamed,
scorned, and watched. But if you are given family money to spend over and
over monthly, apparently you are some superior being who “earned” that
superiority. I am not buying it. I would like to argue there is MORE shame
in being handed $1000 a month and just spending lavishly on yourself, at
Bed, Bath and Beyond, drinking at clubs, on designer clothing, etc., than
being a struggling hard-working single mom taking the wrath for deadbeat
dads at every turn, receiving low income housing “subsidies” that go
STRAIGHT into the pockets of the land-owning class again.

I am not trying to hide my problems with the middle class. They yell at me
constantly saying “If you want our help, you are gonna need to kiss our
asses, as we own EVERYTHING…” if we decipher the rhetoric. I see how time
and time again progressive leftists and anarchists pretend to be fine with
wealth redistribution and give false words to caring about the plight of
the poor, but in reality, they only show compassion when we do not compete
with them. I have watched this endlessly now and have seen it in history
too.

After the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau began to allow minorities to
own property…yeah, blacks owning property was “outlawed” in this
“democracy” at the get go. When blacks were finally allowed to own
property and compete in business, they were successful. And those who were
successful, they were in the most danger. People acted like the Freedman’s
Bureau was a good thing when they wanted to quell their class conscience.
But as soon as that touched white man’s profit at all, white man came zurück/back
with a zurück/backlash so violent as to be a second Civil War that was played out
on a different war field. We saw the EXACT same thing played out again in
the 1960’s with the civil rights movement and we see it also happening
with the Affirmative Action situation now.

I saw the same thing in college. Progressive leftists pretended they
supported welfare moms at universities beside them, recognizing that to
not do so made them part of a class elitism at our universities. But as my
studies progressed, and I started outscoring the privileged white folks,
they turned nasty. I remember I was in this women’s studies class in my
senior year at the University of Washington. All the women had feigned
support, but I could see their privilege itching and knew it was just a
matter of time. Finally, near the end of our senior year, I began to get
accepted to law schools. Some of the privileged white folks had assumed
their places were secure in all grad schools behind poor women like me.
When these kids who slacked off and partied all through college on mommy’s
money found out I had actually been studying my ass off, and outscored
them, and got into grad schools they could not, they got very angry. I had
upped the academic bar to ace them out, and now they wanted their class
privilege to take that space I earned zurück/back from me, and to hand it to
idiots who resembled Dan Quayle.

I wish I could trust the middle class to not arm themselves with classist
slurs the moment they feel they could possibly not be in the controlling
privilege, at the top. The pattern is that middle class people are fine
with helping the poor to their trash (except when they are outlawing
dumpster diving!), but they are not sharing anything of theirs they like.
Even food banks are filled with middle class people’s rotten food! They
cannot even share unexpired food with the poor! And if poor people find a
way to get something close to middle class housing or anything middle
class, the middle class throw a fit! They try to proclaim they EARN that
$1000 mommy sends them monthly and that hard-working moms paying for
deadbeat dads, well, we deserve only trash and if we get anything near to
middle class things, we are then on “subsidies” and need to be stigmatized
into place.

I cannot trust the middle class, coming from the lower class. I feel very
much the way I hear my black friends talking about white people. They say
they will work with them, but never ever take their eyes off white folks,
as they cannot be trusted. And I have seen with my own eyes how whites can
all of a sudden whip out the “n” word when frustrated. And I have seen the
manipulative crap the middle class use as slurs to the poor…trailer trash,
welfare queens, uneducated hillbillies, “subsidized,” etc. and I am sick
of it. When I use similar slurs zurück/back at the middle class, calling them
greedy, gluttonous, and naming their greed as the cause of others’
poverty, it creates public uproar and controversy.

In Malcolm X’s “Fire and Fury” speech, he says that racists are very good
at turning things around so the victim looks like the criminal and the
criminal looks like the victim. He uses the example of a racist cop
beating a black male, such as we saw with Rodney King on tape, and then
the press, cops, courts, etc. will call the beaten black man the criminal
and the cops the victim! It happens every day in America today, but
Malcolm X was talking about the 1960’s. I see the same thing with class.
Middle and upper class people rip off the poor in business with unlivable
wages, and with unaffordable rents to support their continued land
ownership, and then claim they are the victims when Section 8 pays the
land owners money for the poor people’s exorbitant rent and trains the
poor, for free, for industry, herding them from welfare offices and voc
tech projects straight into what can only be said to be “wage slaving.” I
see the middle class feigning victimhood over and over about welfare
programs. But they cause the need for them! If the middle class would quit
shopping as a hobby, quit driving freakin’ tanks around with one driver
one car, quit controlling the food, land and housing to their own personal
profits at such greedy levels, there would be no poor. If the middle class
could even somehow learn how to share, the problem would be eliminated.
And it goes without saying that the corporate leeches on our communities
are just plain egregious and benefit no one but privileged white men,
basically.

My bluntness causes me to be controversial. But honestly, I see no
difference between the racism Malcolm X was talking about, where the
racists claim to be the victims at every turn of racism, and the classists
claiming they, too, are victims of the classism they create for their own
benefits. M.L.King, Jr. said that the privileged will not just hand over
their privilege in good faith. He said we will have to TAKE that privilege
away nonconsentually from the greedy. And Malcolm X said the exact same
thing. He said we needed to take over control ourselves, as he said we
should not “ever think they’ll do it on a morality basis alone.” So there
you have it, and I agree. The middle class cushion of comfort needs to be
pulled from under their pampered asses. And the scam of claiming they, the
criminals, are the victims, must be addressed head on, at every turn.

I have no shame in calling out the middle class in America. I would be
more ashamed at being a classist. And yes, classist people with class
privilege call me a classist for calling a spade a spade. But that is the
circular logic Malcolm X has already addressed, and we are ready to meet
that circular logic head on. It is time class privilege was addressed with
logic in America, and the victims are NOT those with riches they cannot
spend quick enough on gawdy plastic crap, born of others’ labor. The
victims are NOT those driving around one driver per SUV. The victims are
not the people with rooms of furniture no one sits in. The people who
cause poverty are those with more than they need. Plain and simple. They
are easy to identify. They are not victims, they are criminals, even if
their crimes don’t break any of the laws they wrote for the white, male,
elite-written law books. The problem is those who are the “haves,” not the
“have nots.” And do not let any rhetoric convince you of the contrary. The
shame of the poor lies on those who are not poor, not vice versa. Please
repeat that three times right now. THE SHAME OF THE POOR LIES ON THOSE WHO
ARE NOT POOR, NOT VICE VERSA. Repeat that at least once to another person
today. And, congratulations, you are now part of the class war in America!




06.08.2005

Welcome To War Week in Seattle (Aug 2-7)!
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

Every summer the U.S. Military invades Seattle with its unmuffled madness,
simulating war in a manner that no Seattle citizen can ignore. For days
now, the Blue Angels air squadron have been “practicing” over Seattle, and
it is terrifying. It sounds like you are being bombed or are about to be
bombed. The only time I have ever heard a war plane so close to my life
other than the Blue Angels terror of Seattle every August, was right after
Sept. 11, 2001. Apparently an aircraft had gone into space that was
banned, and a military plane with the loudness and scariness of the Blue
Angels dominated our air space momentarily, but it was unforgettable.

I find it interesting that Americans have laws on the books in almost all
towns about noise pollution, yet none of them apply to many DAYS of air
pollution in cities the Blue Angels invade nonconsentually. In parts of
King County, where I live, for instance, there are ordinances that say
things like car dealerships cannot project their intercoms and speakers
past the airspace of their own lots. And there are also many laws on books
in Seattle regarding mufflers on motorcycles, etc. to abate “unnecessary”
noise in our neighborhoods. Yet the Blue Angels have been invading my
home, even rattling the walls, for days now, and it is not going to end
until after this weekend, when they go all out in an “air show.” There is
not a single place in the entire city of Seattle where you can get away
from the noise pollution this week. There is not a single place in Seattle
for someone to say “no” to these Blue Angels this week, so how on earth
this is consentual to citizens is beyond me. There is NO PLACE to escape
them in the entire city. Just like a real (unwanted) military presence.

In addition to the noise pollution which violates all local laws, there is
an issue of pollution. Helen Caldicott used to quote a certain number of
inches of ozone that were eaten up for each space shuttle/ship launch. The
Blue Angels are also eating up ozone with every flight. And how are they
flying? They are using Middle Eastern Blood Oil. So during a time when we
are having serious problems with global warming and oil shortages and war,
the Blue Angels are going at it as if there is no war on, there is endless
oil for them to guzzle, and they are behaving as if there is no tomorrow
environmentally. No, they are not flying hybrid jets!

And what about the glamorization of war that the Blue Angels bring to our
town? As the U.S. military brings our children home in body bags, we are
supposed to revel in a few elite flying “neato” planes over Seattle for
days? As more and more poor folks lose their kids to war, due to economic
desperation, Blue Angels are paraded about in public to put a shiny face
on war. These are the same people who are telling us there is no money for
affordable housing, yet we have $10-100,000’s to spend on days of
polluting, militaristic occupation of Seattle’s skies? I would prefer the
affordable housing to the air show. I have to wonder how many women fly in
the Blue Angels squadron. How many officers of color fly those Blue Angel
planes? I suspect that an overwhelming majority of the pilots flying those
Blue Angel jets over Seattle this week are white, and from the upper to
middle class. Blue Angel pilots are the elite of the elite, yet they fly
around trying to lure in poor kids with fancy equipment they will never
touch if they join the military. Statistics show that people of color
represent about 1/3 of all enlisted personnel but only 1/8 of the
officers.

As I dread this weekend, with its roaring war above, rattling my walls,
violating laws the rest of us must follow, I feel absolutely assaulted.
You cannot shut out the sound of these terror machines. At a time when oil
is more expensive than ever, at a time we are told there is no money for
social services, at a time when people are angry about an illegal
occupation aka war, in Iraq, and at a time when the earth is suffering
from global warming, these Blue Angels are flaunting it in the face of all
these issues, as if they are just thumbing their coned noses right at us.
I take high offense at this glamorized war invading my home, with no place
that I can escape. I do not find Blue Angels glamorous, I do not find them
interesting, I find them damaging, embarrassing and annoying. I want these
war mongers out of my city and if nothing else, I want the ability to shut
my door and lock them out. But I am not allowed that. So this week, I will
play simulated war with the rest of Seattle, against my will, for the fake
glory of a few elite who have a vested interest in diverting our attention
from fighting the war to wooing us with shiny equipment. It is not
working. I have a draft age son and I hear those engines overhead as
coming for my son. And let me make it clear right now, they will have to
kill me with a squadron of Blue Angels before they will ever take my son
to fight their illegal wars. Blue Angels, get the hell out of my town!


More articles by Kirsten translated into German:

Erziehung versus Protest? (Germany IMC, Feb 2004)
Neue fragwürdige Praktik am UN-Tribunal (Germany IMC, Nov 2003)

 


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