across from the Stock Exchange yesterday
If yesterday’s ACT UP twentieth-anniversary action demonstrated anything, it was the coalition’s own renewal, and its transformation from an AIDS activist group once largely made up of young middle-class queer white males into one devoted to the this country’s larger, evolving healthcare crisis and composed of a much broader community of people who have realized we are all directly affected by both AIDS and a medical system completely inadequate to address it or other health needs.
In New York yesterday every age group and every community in this hugely-diverse city appeared to be represented in the crowd which gathered in and around the Wall Street area. They hurled chants at a powerful corporate medical, insurance and political establishment, reached out in conversations to regular passersby, they brandished both printed and hand-lettered signs addressing an aloof, fortress-minded establishment, and they carried or dragged with them some 50 bulky black body-bag props as they wound through the narrow downtown streets in a band of roughly a thousand souls. At the site of the bull statue near Bowling Green some 30 people were arrested for civil disobedience while lying down in the street amongst those bags.
The NYTimes did not consider the event worthy of a single word or image. See See Andy Humm in Gay City News for the best account of the day.
The new ACT UP appears determined to be only the nucleus [or perhaps, this still being ACT UP, really only the trigger] for re-igniting an enormous popular movement, coinciding with the run-up to the 2008 election, directed toward finally securing this nation’s adoption of a single-payer healthcare system after something like one hundred years of broken dreams and promises.
What follows are a few scenes from the struggle as renewed just yesterday.
Category: War
ACT UP back to the Wall, this time for single-payer healthcare
going back for more, 20 years later
Apparently as a nation we can accept throwing away something like half a trillion dollars (and counting), and very likely some 700,000 lives, on a remote elective war whose only accomplishment was a second term for the regime of the biggest Big Brother we’ve ever had, but we [or at least our media and our elected representatives] still think a single-payer healthcare system means handing over too much power to government.
ACT UP has always supported a single-payer health care system, and its members have always understood the role of war in thwarting its achievement. Tomorrow morning, Thursday, at 11:30 this remarkable and unfortunately still indispensable activist group of stalwarts will be marching on and in Wall Street to mark its twentieth anniversary and the beginning of its campaign to make access to healthcare for all, including single-payer insurance and drug price controls, a major issue throughout the 2008 election campaigns.
Anyone who is able to make it is welcome to join us as we gather for the march at 11 am. We will be stepping off from the Federal Building downtown, on the east side of Broadway at Worth Street, just above Chambers Street.
Twenty years on, the press will no longer be labelling us all “homosexuals”, as did the NYTimes in its coverage of the first action, shown in the image above, although it was exactly that powerful picture and its caption which sucked me into the group. As far as tomorrow is concerned, while it should be assumed that only those who have decided to commit some form of civil disobedience could be arrested, there is less certainty about that than there ever was in our present terrifying, and terror-stuck, political climate.
I’m bringing my camera, for surveillance purposes.
An editorial in the current issue of The Nation is an excellent tribute* to the historic accomplishment of ACT UP and a reminder that neither the role nor the actors have yet disappeared. Excerpting the last three paragraphs of the editorial:
During the years that followed, ACT UP stormed the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to protest their shortcomings. On the local level, Catholic dioceses and boards of education were targeted for blocking HIV information in public schools; city governments for failing to provide care and housing; jails and prisons for setting up segregation units. Some ACT UPers set up guerrilla needle-exchange programs; others staked out the entrances to junior highs to distribute condoms directly to students. Just as essentially, ACT UP members became self-taught experts in such arcane fields as virology and patent law and in so doing rewrote the patient-doctor relationship and helped put the idea of universal healthcare–now favored by a majority of Americans–on the political map.
Along the way, ACT UP borrowed strategies from other radical movements: antinuke protesters for techniques on civil disobedience, antiapartheid campaigners for bringing political funerals to the streets. Many of its tactics–videotaping demonstrations as protection against police brutality, coordinated but autonomous affinity group actions–have become standard fare in the global justice movement, as has ACT UP’s deeply democratic tradition.
ACT UP is now a shadow of its former self, but its alums have gone on to found Health Gap, a driving force for global treatment access; the Treatment Action Group, which continues to push the AIDS research agenda; and Housing Works, which has won housing for thousands of New York City’s HIV-positive homeless. And true to form, the organization will mark its twentieth anniversary with a march on Wall Street March 29 to demand single-payer healthcare for all.
*
including a candid apology for the progressive journal’s own historic neglect: “Though barely noticed in the pages of this publication, ACT UP would revolutionize AIDS research and treatment, as well as inject new life into the gay movement and infuse the tactic of direct action with its own style of theatrical militancy.”
[image from actupny]
House votes on the war: do we say “whoopie”?
Sue Coe Wheel of War 2004 mixed media drawing on board 12.5″ x 8.5″
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday defied President George W. Bush, voting to impose a September 1, 2008, deadline for withdrawing all American combat troops from Iraq.
Ummm, . . . .
Am I supposed to get excited? Did you see that end date? Almost five months after the Congressional election which was essentially a referendum to end the Iraq war House Democrats were finally able to rouse themselves from their criminal political lethargy long enough to (almost) agree on a resolution which (sorta) says we should withdraw (note: it says “combat troops”) by September 1, 2008. That “deadline” is almost two years after the election and five and a half years after this disastrous war of aggression began. Not surprisingly, there are all kinds of ifs and buts in the agreement, and apparently nothing has to be done this year, so Bush can continue to send additional troops.
Anything can happen when this Executive gets to make the decisions for another eighteen months; think of the all the things he/it could engineer to make support for a continuation, even an escalation of this war entirely likely.
In any event, the White House has already said Bush will veto such a bill should the Senate manage to cooperate with the House resolution and one finds its way to his desk.
By the end of this year, if not sooner, the war will belong to the Democrats as much as the Republicans, and I’ll wager that since the oil and permanent bases secured by this Administration now belong to both parties we’re never going to leave Iraq.
I used to think the only solution was the impeachment of both the President and VIce-President, followed by their successful criminal prosecution. Now I’m thinking that even that unlikely (but not inconceivable) scenario probably wouldn’t change anything at all in the Middle East.
[image from artnet courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne]
pink pig Bush
(PIG BUSH, DEMOLISH THE BORDER WALL) reads the message on the side of the big pink pig aloft during the Roger Waters concert in Mexico City on March 6, two days before his Bush visit warm-up performance in Bogota
Bush’s imperial entourage dropped into Bogota yesterday, but the presidential visit to what the media describes as the administration’s strongest South American ally was cut short because of security concerns. The President, who had traveled to and from a private stage set downtown in a 55-car motorcade which was preceded by an additional, 12-car phony/decoy motorcade, fled the country after staying little more than six hours. Oh, should I mention here that I’ve read that on this trip, and apparently on every trip, our president apparently has access to Marine One (perhaps shipped in the hold of a jumbo cargo jet)? Pretty soon we’re talking real money.
The idea of the visit had been to give a morale boost to a government dogged by a scandal involving its association with drug traffickers and brutal right-wing paramilitary death squads . Bush’s meeting with Alvaro Uribe Velez in the presidential palace on Sunday brought out some 2000 protesters (and 20,000 police and heavily armed troops). On Friday, in a concert in the same city (presumably, traveling sans motorcades) former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters introduced the subject of the huge amounts of U.S. money which maintains and corrupts the Columbian regime (Colombia receives more U.S. aid than any country outside the Middle East and Afghanistan). The band’s legendary helium-filled pink pig hovered above the stage, this time bearing the legend:
EL PATRÓN BUSH VISITA EL RANCHO DE COLOMBIA
(PATRON BUSH VISITS HIS COLOMBIAN RANCH)
Sigh. Do we have any idea of what we look like?
Are the Americans who voted for this regime noticing that from the very beginning of his term in office Bush has been unable to appear or speak in public except before military or invited audiences, and that this is also true on the rare occasions he travels abroad, even when he is a guest of a government described as closely-allied to our government? What does this say about Bush, and what does this say about us?
Do those same Americans believe that all those “foreigners” hate us personally, and not just the selfish and exclusive policies of our government? If we continue to choose governments like this one I have no doubt that eventually, as very fortunate people who represent ourselves as part of a democratic system, we will come to be despised by the world as individuals, and very rightly so.
[image of Fernando Aceves and Marco Peláez from laJornada]
blogger journalist Josh Wolf still in prison!
once the man in the street
I was wrong, or at least not updated. Josh Wolf is still in prison, and were it not for the remarkable fact that today he becomes the longest-incarcerated journalist in modern American history we might not know it. I certainly didn’t until today, when I learned in the morning paper that Wolf had been sent back by a judge three weeks after being freed on bail briefly last September. And there he remains.
Sent back to prison for what? Wolf’s refusal to hand over his news tapes is simply a heroic defense of our right to the enjoyment of a free press and the absolute necessity of a free press for a free society; interestingly, most of the press hasn’t been telling the story, and we should be asking why.
The story is a little complex, but a grand jury to which Wolf was summoned to provide evidence related to a July, 2005, San Francisco anti-war and anti-globalization protest rally which had turned chaotic demanded that the blogger journalist turn over certain video tapes he had made of the demonstrators that day. Wolf refused to do so. The court has declined to accept Wolf’s several offers to show to the Judge and to the US Attorney video the footage which the grand jury had asked for, ostensibly to shed light on the matter of a police car allegedly set on fire (the damage was later determined to be limited to a broken taillight) and an incident during the same protest which involved serious injury to a policeman. Neither Wolf nor his camera were witness to either event, and the San Francisco district attorney has dismissed the lone remaining criminal case involving the protest.
It’s clear that what the federal prosecutors actually want is Wolf’s help in identifying demonstrators who are not in fact accused of criminal acts*, a serious enough assault on what we used to think of [or not think about at all] as rights protected by the Constitution, but Washington’s real assignment is surely to use someone they thought of as a little guy associated with an unpopular movement as the means to extend the dark umbrella of the so-called Patriot Act and to establish a major legal precedent for the elimination of the individual states’ protections for freedom of the press.
Writing in Bay Area Indymedia Howard Vicini explains how the states’ rights issue plays out here:
Wolf claimed exemption from their subpoena under a CA shield law which was designed to protect journalists, their sources, and raw materials, such as interview transcripts and unedited audio or video tape, Sixteen other States and the District of Columbia also afford journalists protections under similar laws.
But, in the upside-down world ruled by George W. Bush since 9/11, where State’s rights and legal precedent have given way to extraordinary power-grabs by the federal executive branch in the name of Homeland Security, the simple fact that the SFPD accepted some funding from the Department of Homeland Security gave the government the right to move the case from State to Federal Court where federal protections afforded journalists were already diminished under the Patriot Act and Executive Orders issued by the President
since 9/11.
*
[from the January 23 press release of the Free Josh Support Group]
Wolf has repeatedly stated and signed a declaration under oath that there is nothing in his footage, which relates to the police investigation. Attorneys for Wolf have offered to show the footage to the Judge and to the US Attorney in order to prove that there is nothing on the tapes which relates to the investigation. Both offers have been refused, raising concerns that the Government is seeking to have the journalist testify (as was specified in the original subpoena).
[uncredited image of April 30, 2004, SF antiwar demonstration from basetree]
time to leave: the emperor has been made a god
Reuters headline story:
Senate votes not to debate Iraq proposal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A bipartisan resolution repudiating
President George W. Bush’s decision to send 21,500 more troops to
Iraq failed to advance in the U.S. Senate on Monday, dealing a serious setback to critics of the war.
The resolution needed 60 votes before the 100-member Senate could begin debate, but it got 49, with 47 voting against. Although it would not have been binding on the president, the measure was the first serious effort in Congress to confront Bush over the unpopular Iraq war.
The proposal, sponsored by Virginia Republican John Warner (news, bio, voting record) and Michigan Democrat Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), fell victim to partisan wrangling over the limits and terms of the Iraq war debate. The measure could still be revived, but the way ahead was unclear.
Opponents said the resolution was a thinly disguised political slap at Bush that would dishearten U.S. troops and signal American disunity.
It does not force Bush to abandon his plan and the president has said he will not be swayed by a nonbinding resolution.
Supporters say the measure would be a first step, a warning to Bush that he must revamp his strategy to start moving toward a withdrawal of the 138,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq.
An appointed incompetent, treasonous and disastrous president has seized personal rule in the republic and the members of the senate, who are virtually assured of their seats until death, even after the equivalent of a national referendum calling on them to put an end to an illegal foreign war, cannot even agree to consider whether to consider a wimpy resolution which would not have the authority to do anything to change anything anyway.
I really am an incurable optimist if I can still be shocked by the cowardice, greed and perfidy of the American politician.
NBC Nightly News has puppies!
always good for ratings
Sherry Mazzocchi, of Blog Chelsea, writes to us that she sees NBC has apparently taken for a constructive suggestion the example Barry had used to condemn the triviality of what the networks represent as news. For a look at the incredible Brian Williams’s “look at these puppies!” segment recorded last night, go to this video (you’ll have to wait fifteen seconds for the advert to run).
[image from zimfamilycockers]
Boston authorities crazy about LED street art
1/31 changed everything
I’m so embarassed for my friends in Boston. No, wait: Maybe our good neighbors are all actually onto something really, really big (I’m not talking about the suits and uniforms – or an impressively stupid Boston Globe editorial*): the growing role of the artist as the new and very visible hero of whatever pockets of progressive political life may still survive in locked-down America today. Fortunately the best of our twenty-first-century court jesters are not really part of the court, and they’re not really just jesting.
This Aqua Team Hunger Force LED bomb scare thing sounds like the outrageous scenario for a summer movie, so why aren’t Boston’s mayor and police department laughing?
Go here for the press conference archtype for a new age. It’s Dada!
*
the editorial, from this morning’s edition, isn’t available on line without a registration, so here are some excerpts of “PARALLYZED BY A GIMMICK”:
. . . Turner’s ad gimmick, undertaken in 10 cities from coast to coast, affected tens of thousands of people in the Greater Boston area. Businesses lost customers. Commuters lost time. Even more serious, first responders from local, state, and federal public safety agencies were called away from their legitimate duties.
One wouldn’t expect the promoters of the TV program “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” to score high on a maturity index. But anyone older than 8 or 9 should be able to understand the dangers of staging such a stunt in the post-Sept. 11 world. Homeland Security experts will need to review the response of local law enforcement. Public safety personnel may have overreacted ; local bloggers apparently identified the guerrilla advertising campaign early on. But it’s hardly surprising if others who weren’t in on the gag were suspicious. As a rule, first responders are left little choice but to assume they are facing a legitimate threat.
Perpetrators of terror hoaxes face prison sentences of up to five years if convicted. Police arrested an Arlington man last night in connection with the ad stunt, but potential criminal prosecution is only one consideration. The tricksters at Turner, a unit of Time Warner Inc., should pay the bill for the consequences of a lame marketing gimmick.
[image of Boston supporters of the artists Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens by Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP via Gothamist]
“blogger summit”: WNBC wants in
MSM news
During the station’s introductory presentation last night at what was billed as New York’s first Blogger Summit, the host, WNBC, reported that its own advance survey revealed that zero percent of their invited blog respondents thought that local TV news was helpful to their posting. This must have come as something of a shock to the network people, although I can’t imagine why, because minutes later the station’s News and Station Manager, Dan Foreman (who later told us that he had not really expected to enter much into the discussion) asked the assembled crowd of bloggers whether in light of their responses WNBC should just shut down its TV operations and concentrate entirely on developing a blog medium.
A show of hands from the audience, after what seemed like a moment of shock in response to what seemed like a genuinely impulsive question, indicated that there was a strong affirmative response. One blogger however did cry out, “what about the old people?” In the exchange which followed, one guest described local TV news coverage as composed mostly of stories on “fires and murders”. Wow: Only two hours later, while awaiting the station’s coverage of its own “blogger summit”, I noticed that WNBC’s 11 o’clock news led with an account of a fire, followed by a report of a murder. I was visiting the site for the very first time since the early 90’s, when, because of a vested interest in the “broadcasting” of a politcal message, my friends and I would regularly scan local news coverage of our own creative theatrical actions or “zaps”.
While sitting in Studio A last night I was trying to imagine why any smart New Yorker would actually want to, or be able to, regularly wait around for a brief, fixed-schedule television news program in order to learn what was happening in the city – even if that were what was actually to be found on the little screen. At one point last night even Editorial Director Adam Shapiro admitted that the abbreviated nightly news format permitted only very limited coverage of any story.
I think that, except for those employed by NBC, few people in that studio normally watch network news of any kind. Later last night, during the local station’s on-air coverage of the summit, technology reporter Sree Srinavasan explained to viewers browsing the web as novices that they would have to be sceptical about the accuracy of the information they find on blogs. He encouraged them to look around and not to trust the face value of anything, suggesting that it would be wise to get to know the sources of the information found: This is always good advice – for both journalists and those they serve, but in this case the scepticism absolutely has to begin with the powerful MSM, best described as our mainstream corporate entertainment media. [footnote: NBC is owned by GE]
On the subject of journalistic malpractice, that most excellent community source, Blog Chelsea, says that Barry put it best, in conversation last night:
Theres a war on, but all they can say is, “Look at these puppies!” They talk about Clintons sex life, but not about all of the freedom that is slowly being taken away from you.
[image from diamondsintheruff]
thug cars for a thug America?
Chrysler 300
Hummer H2
Toyota FJ Cruiser
Cadillac presidential tank
Ford Synus concept*
Brinks truck, thugmobile, or armored personnel carrier? The only accessory that seems to be missing from these and the many other examples (real or teaser) of the offensive, fierce-looking, yet quite silly, fake-macho mounts commanding our roads these days are the gun slots or the gun mounts. America’s long love affair with the car has finally turned into fear and loathing, not of the idea of a personal wheeled vehicle, but of the other not invited into our private, luxuriously-equipped mobile panic rooms.
It’s probably no coincidence that the last time our frightened man-boys went off the deep end in a neurotic obsession with toys which dramatically represented unrestrained brute power was also during a period dominated by an unnecessary and brutal war fought, and lost, on the other side of the earth. The peak period of the American “muscle car” was 1964-1975, roughly the last decade of the American war in Vietnam.
The whole world would be a much better place if we ever grew up.
*
the two-year old Ford Sinus is actually a very small vehicle, but an excerpt from one 2005 industry report, perhaps clipping directly from the manufacturer’s press release, assures its readers:
But considering that the majority of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2010, the time may have come for the [small-]car market in the US market. The Synus concept explores what such a car might look like, along with a fanciful design theme based around ultimate security.
While Synus may be small, it has been designed to stand up to the rough and tumble of life in the big city, and has been given a look that says it can stand up for itself. Taking its inspiration from bank vaults and armored cars, this concept’s exterior design immediately communicates that it takes security seriously. When parked and placed in secure mode, protective shutters are deployed over the windshield and side glass. Small windows on the flanks and roof are non-opening and bullet-resistant. The rear hatch has no window at all.
The Synus concept also signals security through its use of a driver-side dial operated combination lock on the B-pillar. The rear hatch is operated via a vault-style four-spoke spinner. Flat glass in a slightly raked windshield furthers the armored-car look of this concept.
I have no idea whose tongue is in cheek here.
[images from bigtex (Chrysler), Legends (Hummer)cartracker (Toyota), Autoblog (Cadillac), cardesignnews (Ford)