Patriotism and the Prison of Dissent

On the same day that Barack Obama begins his nationalistic patriotism tour in Independence, Missouri, the authorities-that-be announced that protesters will be fenced in by chain-length
or chicken-wire during the Democratic National Convention. While the Democratic presidential candidate wags on about a love of country and the importance of sacrifice to the nation-state, the Federal Court approves the creation of "Free Speech Zones," or the sectioning off of areas where Freedom of Speech can be granted within a metal cage.

What Obama, the Federal Government, the City of Denver, Secret Service, and Homeland Security are forgetting is that to demonstrate a commitment to the best of "American" ideals, basic constitutional rights must be protected by any means necessary. Rather than addressing the ever-increasing totalitarianism of the United States Police State, Obama glibly blabs patriotic pap as police continue harassing communities of color, queer people, poor people, and people who dare criticize the corporate state this country has become.

The cage protesters will be confined in will be a visual reminder of the 2 million plus people incarcerated in the United States, the legacy of slavery that U.S. corporations continue to profit from, the Japanese Internment Camps, and the incarceration of queer people.

When Obama yaks about patriotism, it is imperative to remember what pro-Americanism supports--genocide masked by the right to life, slavery masked by the right to liberty, and the planned poverty, sickness, and misery of millions masked by the right to the pursuit of happiness.

American patriotism is the naturalization of racism and in claiming this project of white supremacy, Obama's claims of patriotism become a tool for white power.

U.S. is Like Communism Without the Health Care

When Denver's finest goof in a uniform, Lt. Tony Lopez told the Denver Post that "We aren't living in a communist state," I'm sure he didn't think that anybody was stupid enough in the U.S. to think that we had health care, livable wages, workable strategies to end homelessness, support of the arts, education, culture and fair labor practices. Nope. Tony was referring to government surveillance--which, according to the same article, we have plenty of--at ridiculous rates. Tony--we aren't living in a communist state--we're living in a fascist state!

In our government's growing trends towards totalitarianism, in Colorado 181 so-called Terrorism Liaison Officers have been trained to determine that people like you and me are terrorists for suspicious activities such as:

Birdwatchers beware! Binocular and camera use are very suspicious.
Geeks watch out--measuring things, baking diagrams, very suspicious.
Don't get lost or confused and double back or drive evasively.
Taking notes--with no working public education system--obvious terroristic.
SUV drivers--fuel purchases--suspect.
Buying uniforms for BDSM? Shame on you.
Parked your car too long--clearly a menace!

These Terrorism Liaison Officers are law enforcement officers, paramedics, workers for Xcel energy, and the railroads. They span the public and private sector. What policies of accountability do they have in place?

According to the article, federal authorities currently define "suspicious activity" as "Observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence-gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention."

In the past, people with dangerous opinions like "people who are destroying the earth are bad" were considered terrorists. Now, bad drivers are.

Lt. Tony Lopez--before you and your ilk drive us into immobility where leaving the house is considered suspicious, terroristic behavior, quit your job and join the millions of people struggling for a better world. Being a cop in an era when taking notes is considered terroristic is like being a totalitarian communist throwing artists into Gulags--except that in the U.S. we don't get any of the benefits of an egalitarian totalitarian society.

Unions: Queer Them or Let Them Die

I just read on an anarchist newswire a reportback from the Class Struggle Anarchist Conference.

From the report-back:
Organizers from the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC), Workers Solidarity Alliance, Industrial Workers of the World, Solidarity & Defense, Capital Terminus Collective, Amanecer, Class Action Alliance, Michigan-Minnesota Group, Anti-Racist Action, the (now defunct) Love and Rage Anarchist Federation, and even a former member of the Mujeres Libres of the Spanish CNT attended. We discussed organizing experiences in the community, workplace, and various social movements with a focus on the role of race and gender within the movement.

This sounds like it was probably an incredible event with great organizations represented. Outside of Love and Rage, which the writer mentions is defunct, the other anarcho-communist organizations sound so caught up in the burdensome jargon of white, male labor organizing that I wonder where the possibility lies.

Don't get me wrong. I can get as teary-eyed as the next Wob when I hear a searing rendition of Solidarity Forever. Sab the cat makes me chuckle too. That being said, there is something unbearably tiresome, white, patriarchal, and heterocentric about the rhetoric of the labor movement. Perhaps this is why, according to The Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 12.1% of the U.S. workforce belongs to a union.

Of those 12%, dare I speculate most are reform minded and content with the Capitalist system? In that case, there are likely more LGBTQ people in the United States than there are revolutionary minded trade-unionists.

Perhaps the time for queering the union movement is now. Since queerish icons like Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna took over the popular imaginary in the 80s, the fact of the matter is If its not queer, its not here, so get over it.



So perhaps the time has come for Sab and Felix the cat to start doin'-it, for Solidarity Forever to be sung from the bubbling tubs of bathhouses, for queer organizers like Emma Goldman and Baynard Ruskin to be celebrated far and wide for the queerness, and for the trade union movement to stop acting so gosh-darned butch.

If trade-union anarchists want to play Joe Worker, they should save it for play parties. Oversized, white, straight male workers are anachronisms. The oppressed work force is radically diverse in gender, race, and documentation status. As the icons of immigrant labor have been swept under the rug for the domination of white men in the labor movement, Joe Worker's image must be swept away if Class Struggle is to mean anything more than a postmodern nod of the head to the late 19th early 20th century.

Fire Witch Rising

For you Denverites looking for some salty, witty feminist analysis of contemporary Denver politics check out Fire Witch Rising. Fire Witch, perhaps someone I know, hopefully someone I will know, was kind enough to cross-post "The Fist of A Ghost." Her tag-line Come At Me With Crapitalist White Male Supremacy And I'll Burn You cracked me up. One of my favorite articles is entitled "Chestbeating Quaker Bigot Barks: 'Not in My Town,'" about Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's posturing to keep Denver "safe from gangs." Happy to see their are more blog bullets flying at the city of Denver than state bullets hitting citizens, I regretfully acknowledge we have a long summer ahead. With the DNC coming, helicopters flying over the city, homeless people being harassed by cops, and fascists attacking undocumented workers, I am glad to know that the radical political, cultural, and social life of Denver will be holding Hickenlooper, the Denver Police Department, and the Democratic and Republican political parties accountable for their nonsense policies, their violence against civic life, and their grotesque exploitation of resources on militarizing our city for the upcoming convention.

Radical Collective Art in Troy New York

My friend Bettina Escauriza just send me a link to a blog about radical, collective projects that have taken place in Troy New York over the past few years. Projects like the Victorian Stroll (talk about nostalgia:)), Magnet Project, Threshholds and more. Bettina is now working as a key organizer for Critical Resistance 10, the 10th anniversary of the amazing prison abolition conference. Check 'em out!

On the Rise

Its an exciting time to be alive, to be in social movements, to engage in the dialog and to partake in the action.

Thousands of grassroots, community based organizations have taken power from the state and into their own hands. While fights for broader media access continue, more people are producing their own stories, news, and art than ever before. Siphoning off the waste of our over-producing society, millions have begun to live off our society's waste. Squatters movements, space reclamation, community gardening, organic agriculture, and sexual liberation have all exploded into wildly creative directions and have become less the property of a handful of "leaders" than a groundswell of the multiplicity, the millions of people working to create a revolutionary world.

Multiracial organizing, brown-black-red unity, intersections of environmentalism, disability, and race, animal rights and human rights, community health initiatives, preparation for radical shifts in economies and environments spell out a new direction for social movements where people care for each other. Today, the strength of our movements is that we are making things work beautifully, positively, and intersectionally and soon will trump the old model of swaggering, finger-pointing statists attempting to grab power over rather than share power between.

While we have untold environmental, cultural, political, and social challenges, we have planted the seeds of liberation and are watching them break apart the concrete of late capitalism, bring alienated communities into dialog and mutual support, and flower into possibility, joy, and liberation.

DNC Protests and 3 Favorite Old Queers!

Since many seem to find my grumpiness towards the 60s white counter-culture a rejection of all white elders, I thought it might be a good idea to tell you about two of my favorite historical white people who were in Chicago during May of 68. Both exemplify some of my favorite trends in Gay White Culture--both have been formative in my own political development.



1) Jean Genet. This French homosexual was chosen by both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Black Panther Party to help document and advocate for their struggles. While in Chicago during the DNC in 1968 he admired the crotches of cops. As a person who admires Palestinian, black, and sexual liberation and simultaneously gets off on the crotches of cops, I must say, Genet is something of a hero. For those of you who haven't seen Fredrique Moffet's wonderful video Jean Genet in Chicago, you should check it out!

2) Alan Ginsberg. When I was in high school, I blared taped recordings of Ginsberg reading his poetry. As a young man, I particularly enjoyed his passages about his sexual love of young men. His homages to Whitman, his descriptions of drugs, sex, and open political discontent with the United States spoke loudly to my adolescent mind. Despite the repressive comments of rigid gay and Christian straight teachers who told me bisexuality didn't exist and that eventually all people must choose between two neatly defined genders, Ginsberg helped me get through their lies and eventually discover sexual liberation through his open discussions of sex.



In Denver 2008, a strong possibility exists that the protests at the Democratic National Convention will be filled with the sort of sex radicalism, lyricism, and power-fucking exemplified by Genet and Ginsberg. I also imagine that the protests can be rich in race, gender, ability, generational, and sexual analysis. I imagine that white queers in Denver can demonstrate solidarity with black and Palestinian liberation, the struggles of people of color around the world whose liberation movements inspired sexual liberation. I envision Denver's queer community connecting its own struggles against violence with the violence going on in Iraq, Palestine, and throughout the world.



In the memory of another 60s icon, Sylvia Rivera, who spent her life fighting for queer liberation and youth liberation in poor communities of color, I imagine the protests against the DNC can be joyful, fierce, intergenerational, and integrate the broad variety of issues and interests that impact oppressed communities worldwide.

Pink and Black Block at New York City's Pride

Well, it sounds like the Radical Homosexual Agenda is going to be sponsoring a pink and black block at this year's New York City Pride! How I wish I could be there in full black and pink glory with my queer sissies and bro bros protesting the corporate takeover of the legacies of our glorious sexual revolutions! Good to see some queers out there protesting the human rights abuses some gay-friendly companies engage in. If you're in New York, check it out. RHA will be near the leather folk (damn, how I really wish I was there) and will be making a big, rowdy scene!

The Fist of a Ghost: White Nostalgia and the DNC Protests

Political nostalgia signifies the death knell of the white Left. Denver has been overcome with it. First it was the slogan "recreate 68" which has received dozens of varying and historically intriguing critiques. Even so, the folks in Recreate 68 made compelling cases for the evocation of that complicated year referring to Paris, May of 68 and a spirit of revolution. While I don't share their analysis, they've made a concerted effort to defend their title and largely I bought their line.

Perhaps, that is, until it excused an even more nostalgic project.

A new ghost of the sixties has arrived--Come Up to Denver---a website and video based on Crosby, Stills and Nash's song Come To Chicago. I am not sure why people believe that youth culture can be revived via nostalgia for the 60s white counter-culture, a subculture fraught with racism, patriarchy, hierarchical leadership, and other systems and structures rejected by the best of contemporary activism.

Let me say it once and for all : I think evoking the sixties as an inspiration to today's youth is a bad idea.

When I saw the video Come Up to Denver for the first time I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry. Sometimes the only response to cliché is cliché.

Unlike Denver, the people in the video are largely, if not entirely white. The musicians are wallowing in an earnest glorification of musty music. The music video contracts grim shots of left-over, white hippies in Denver with Civil Rights era masses protesting in full force. In desperation, the contemporary outmoded hippies cling to a few uninspired, hand-scrawled signs.

The image conveyed by so-called activists is pathetic. It fails to capture the truly inspirational actions going on throughout town--productive projects like The Derailer Bicycle Collective, INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Food Not Bombs, Cafe Cultural, Cafe Nuba, Sisters of Color United For Education, Art in Motion, Transform Columbus Day and Denver Open Media.

A misused image of Abu Ghraib and an illustration of a black man tied to a chair accompany the badly sung song. These two still images are two of the few photographic references to the struggles of people of color. Static, frozen icons, bodies of color become symbolic objects for the misguided benevolent white activists to giddily, happily try to demonstrate on behalf of. The paternalistic objectification and inability to include moving images of people of color betrays the resurgence of 60s style racism, a wolf hiding in hairy, white skin.

What's stranger than what is shown is that the video erases inspirational contemporary histories--the recent May 1st immigration marches in Denver where tens of thousands protested corrupt immigration policy, the hundreds of thousands in the streets who protested the Republican National Convention and the millions around the world who protested the war.

The video fails to address local issues of race--police brutality, housing foreclosures, mass incarceration of people of color, failures of the education, health, and social service sector alike. By erasing activists of color and the issues communities of color face, the video traffics in a white supremacist, white cultural narcissism even the two-party system has moved beyond with its problematic tokenism of Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.

Rarely do I use my blog to criticize people trying to do good things. In this case, my sincere belief is that without a harsh critique of the video's erasure of people of color, glorification of outmoded, anachronistic, failed 60s movements, and inability to appeal to all but a handful of nostalgic, white, aging hippies unaware of white supremacy, many far from Denver might assume that this video represents what the protest movements at the Democratic National Convention will be all about.

Fortunately, this assumption can be dead wrong.

With fierce actions promoting immigrant rights, combating the prison industrial complex, racist military recruiting strategies, the white gentrification of communities of color, and environmental racism, the protests at this years conventions have the opportunity to be a new jumping off point in anti-authoritarian organizing where the much neglected issues of race finally come to the surface as the anachronistic white Left withers into oblivion.

6.26.08. COME UP TO DENVER AND RECREATE 68 ARE TWO ENTIRELY DISTINCT PROJECTS. RECREATE 68 DID NOT PRODUCE THE VIDEO COME UP TO DENVER.

What to Do?

Denver's activist community organizing against the DNC has been gnawing on the issue of self-defense vs. Ghandian non-violence since Recreate 68 began organizing. Both sides of this debate seem misguided in a city that lacks almost all resistance of either type. To advocate for non-violence ala Civil Rights, King encouraged people to be in the streets for months on end, not a few days a year. To advocate for self-defense, the Black Panthers had something worth defending, community based programs that met peoples basic needs. Sadly, uncouched in substantive movements putting consistent pressure on politicians or creative, community based direct action, these debates appear to be parodies of the past, something like Civil War Reenactments for the Left.

Of course, the impulse to create community based projects has been assimilated into what INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence has named "The Non-Profit Industrial complex" and the push towards reform minded politics has shifted from the Grassroots to gargantuan, professional activist organizations. Because these groups are accountable to the scrutiny of the government through tax laws, the likelihood of them actually organizing revolution through either reform-minded protest or direct action is low.

As the media conceals the actual effects of U.S. corporate and government behavior, the death, ecological destruction, suffering, and illness, we are left with a question about how to best act. Should we give our money to professional activist groups and give up the notion of the grassroots? Should we go to the handful of protests each year sponsored by these gigantic, unaccountable groups? Should we reject the non-profit world or throw our weight behind it? Should we organize community based programs without the aid of the state, foundations, and ruling class money? Should we enter the grassroots conversations about violence vs. nonviolence? There is much to figure our through practice.

Surviving Post-Industrial Collapse

If those who believe that the collapse of civilization is coming are right, and heaven only knows that while I'd love to rain on their parade they may very well be right, we're all going to need some serious survival skills to keep our fabulous lives on course. Aric McBay has put together In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization! From composting toilets to post-civilization condoms, Aric has some practical, fabulous ideas. But learn while you can--these ideas are all online! Aric is also the author of Peak Oil Survival: A Guide to Life After Grid Crash.

The Politics of Creativity and The Politics of Destruction

These days it seems like everybody wants to build something--this is an impulse that is entirely revolutionary, exciting, and captivating. From community gardening projects, independent media centers, no-waste food distribution programs like Food Not Bombs, thousands of active independent arts projects, community health collectives, culture centers, alternative economies, cooperative agriculture, and bicycle collectives. Building things is good. It helps us create a livable world.

While these projects are vital to environmental and economic sustainability, the pleasures of living, and the growth of community, I am concerned that many have so thoroughly renounced a politics of negation, of the ability to say "no," of the necessity of creative, life-affirming direct action that tears down institutions of oppression in spectacular and useful ways that they have bunkered down in a metaphoric nuclear shelter before the metaphoric buttons have been pushed and given up the right to defend ourselves against the violence of this brutal system. They take for granted that the apocalyptic destruction of the earth and its people is an inevitable outcome of our system. Such cynicism often sneaks into movements in the trojan horses of pacifism and performed positivity and denies the possibility of destroying that which is killing us.

Can horizontal networks of trans-local, productive, communities stop wars? Can localized organizing end occupations? Perhaps, if relationships become strong enough to resist the violence of mass marketing, so-called "social networking" data-mining, and the bombardment of propaganda in the public and private spheres. But I hesitate to fully believe that we can renounce mass demonstrations, forceful actions of negation, the physical destruction of the machinery of capitalism that threatens the land, air, the water, and our survival. To steal an old I.W.W. cliche, we can build a new system in the shell of the old; however, we cannot deny that the beast of oppression still thrives in its shell and that the beast must be destroyed.

Together I want us to garden, eat delicious meals, create spectacular community support systems, culture, art, healing practices, and media that satisfies our desires in a sustainable way.

Still, from my vantage point, pitting politics of negation and destruction against these beautiful local creative initiatives is unwise. We need a diversified arsenal to attack the system and a diversified culture of productivity to sustain ourselves and build stronger networks. If we entertain a false opposition between these modes of survival, both self-defense and the destruction of the machinery of capitalism and additionally self-preservation and the creation of a better way of living, we will either be destroyed by the system or kill ourselves.

Happily, this is not necessary. We can continue to renounce, protest, negate, and dismantle systems of violence while experiencing joy, liberation, health, vitality, and community.

Life is Queer!

What a weekend! My roomie just got back from Allied Media Conference which sounded amazing. I spent the day at a coalition meeting of folks organizing for the Democratic National Convention. This morning Hillary and I went to the pride parade which gets more corporate, more electoral, and less queer every year. Before that, we attended an early morning brunch with the Colorado Anti-Violence Program. Last night we paid too much damn money to dance at Tracks, had a beer at the Wrangler, and Bart and I went to a summer solstice celebration with the Radical Faeries. So much is going on--so much fraught with possibility and problematics. Also I read an incredible critique of convention organizing by Cindy Milstein.
My desire is that in all the creativity, the organizing, the relationships developed, the critiques formed and either dismissed or acted upon, that we are beginning to see a growth of possibility, networked social movements that can last long beyond the Democratic National Convention, the fall of the United States, and the generations that will follow our own. Whatever else, Happy Pride. Life sure is queer.

Colorado Indymedia Prepares for DNC Coverage

Saturday, June 14th more than 20 media activists gathered together at the Five Points Media Center in the offices of Free Speech TV to learn how to be the media. Colorado Indymedia conducted the training in the hopes that grassroots activists could begin to document their own stories and struggles during the Democratic National Convention.

Preparing participants to use video, radio, photo, print, and web tools to document the protests and participation in the Democratic National Convention, trainers presented a wide variety of tools and techniques for grassroots journalism and production.

Participants included members of Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, Recreate 68, and Unconventional Action. Trainers came from Colorado Indymedia, Free Speech TV, KGNU, and Indymedia Newsreel.

I was happy to see so many people come together to learn about producing media and am looking forward to seeing the fruit of their work documenting struggle in the streets and the halls of the convention in the next few months.

The U.S. Protects Hate Speech But Not Cursing

Adam Liptak's June 12th, 2008 New York Times article "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Hate Speech" discusses the United States decision to protect hate speech within the first amendment and compares U.S. policies to a number of European nations that have decided that hate speech, holocaust denial, and Islamophobic language are a crime. What's particularly pernicious about Liptak's article is that he fails to acknowledge the millions of people silenced by U.S. bombs, police, and prisons. He fails to mention that the media is dominated by five corporations that protect state and ruling class interests and deny the public a legitimate voice. He fails to discuss the role of the Federal Communications Commission in regulating what language and ideas get aired on television.

From the FCC website:
It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent or profane programming during certain hours. (See definitions}. Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for administratively enforcing the law that governs these types of broadcasts. The FCC has authority to issue civil monetary penalties, revoke a license or deny a renewal application. In addition, violators of the law, if convicted in a federal district court, are subject to criminal fines and/or imprisonment for not more than two years.

The FCC vigorously enforces this law where we find violations. In 2004 alone, the FCC took action in 12 cases, involving hundreds of thousands of complaints, assessing penalties and voluntary payments totaling approximately $8,000,000. The Commission has also toughened its enforcement penalties by proposing monetary penalties based on each indecent utterance in a broadcast, rather than proposing a single monetary penalty for the entire broadcast. At the same time, however, the Commission is careful of First Amendment protections and the prohibitions on censorship and interference with broadcasters' freedom of speech. The FCC has denied complaints in cases in which we determined the broadcast was not indecent based on the overall context of the programming. Regardless of the outcome, the FCC strives to address every complaint within 9 months of its receipt.

Instead of acknowleding the diverse censorial roles our government engages in, Liptak indicates that the only time the government can censor is when a speech act threatens imminent violence. As indicated in the above FCC quote, the government is setting the standards for what it determines is indecent. This flagrant violation of the spirit of the First Amendment demonstrates that the government is perhaps more concerned with protecting hate speech than the indecencies of banal conversation.

I am a strong advocate for Freedom of Expression. Nonetheless, I do not believe that government can grant this right. The attempt of any hierarchy to protect any freedom also implies its rightful ability to take the right away.

Hate mongers must be confronted for the violence of their language outside a legal apparatus. The government must be confronted for the violence of its acts outside a legal apparatus. In the words of George Orwell, as relayed to me probably inaccurately a few years ago, "I'd rather shoot a man than take away his Freedom of Speech."

Some Fear Carbohydrates; Some Fear Capitalism

Perhaps the world can be divided into two camps: 1) those who fear carbohydrates; 2) those who fear capitalism.

Those who fear carbohydrates tend to buy into mass media scares, fad diets, and technological solutions to problems humans solved long ago. They think the fix to global warming is nuclear power, the fix to justifiable terrorist attacks, or what Chalmers Johnson refers to as "blowback," is a higher level of military attack on poor countries.

They think to solve poverty you must starve the poor and refuse them adequate healthcare in order to inspire winning competitive attitudes on the market. Often these are the same people that advocate for abstinence rather than safer sex and salvation in heaven rather than on earth. These people believe that to be in harmony with nature we must work against it, modify it, fix it. They believe that though "God" created the earth, that it can be improved upon by human ingenuity.

These people believe that to be "in the trenches" means to serve as middle management or at the executive level of a company rather than on the floor of a factory or in the pits of a mine. Despite having one and a half bathrooms per person, or more, they view themselves as part of the struggling lower middle class.

They believe the solution to racism is for black people to get over their bad attitudes and they believe the solution to works rights is the free market. These are the dangerous people, uneducated by our public schools, unfamiliar with global communities, unaware of the violence within the United States, unable to hear the pleading voices of soldiers begging the United States to leave Iraq, unable to hear the pleading voices of Iraqis begging the United States to leave.

They will dictate the vote on both sides of the aisle. They will stand in alliance with the minority of people who believe that the electoral system in the United States is fair. They will drive us towards our destruction.

I prefer people who like carbohydrates and hate capitalism.

Conservation Needed Badly

With Americans wasting 25% of their food, a massive food shortage threatening to bring famine across the world, floods preventing corn, soy, and wheat crops that we've grown dependent on from making up for the shortfall, many are acknowledging that a global food crises is at hand. Riots have broken out in many countries and people in the United States are noticing the inflating food prices.

If the government would stop subsidizing grade 2 corn production and turn the land back into localized agriculture, if corporations would stop squandering corn in colas, ethanol, and other wastes of land, if Americans would stop eating so much and throwing away so much, we might be able to get out of this mess. As with so many things, I fear that most Americans just don't care about their own future or the future of others.

As hunger continues to spread across the world, the United States faces one more ethical failure to confront. Our debt to the world for our waste, greed, and self-destructive consumption habits has grown unbearable.

The time to localize agriculture is yesterday. The time to stop wasting is yesterday. We must do these things now.

Police Assault Longest Walk March Participants

According to this press release, after having walked 2,400 miles in prayer in the spirit of securing Indigenous Rights, participants in the Longest March were attacked by the Columbus Police. What a typical tragedy in this white supremacist police state.

In the Middle of a Whirlwind!

I'm sitting in a muggy North Carolina airport waiting for a plane to fly down to a funeral. I was just checking my email and came across this one-time online journal, In the Middle of a Whirlwind. The publication was put together by the Team Colors collective and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest! Lots of great writers and analysis--especially about the efficacy of convention protest politics!

Queer Liberation

So many well-intentioned heterosexuals want the queer world to be filled with docile homosexuals, culturally sophisticated gays and socially conscious lesbians whose sexuality refuses to threaten the norm. These friendly straights want the LGBTQ community to sit happily in church, praise the hetero-Judaeo/Christian God, commit to one partner, and die while murdering brown people to protect the United States and Western Civilization stripped of queer desires and gender confusion. So many people want the queer world to be a white world filled with white Boy Scouts. They want to police our desire and make sure we conform to their expectations of how good homosexuals behave.

Many gay people take on this sexuality and gender policing in order to protect their affiliations with the heterosexual world. They get angry when people don't conform to "straight acting" clean gender performance standards.

All people who use identity, language, and law to police desire and expressions of gender and sexuality are involved in a neo-fascist movement designed to regulate sexuality and ensure that the body continues to be a tool of capitalism--a productive organ breeding workers for the system. All who mobilize so-called "Pride" to celebrate capitalism and justify the state's relationship to queer people are complicit in the destruction of liberated sexuality.

Queer liberation cannot exist alongside any government, religion, or identity formation that relies on policing behavior, desire, and the granting of so-called "rights." Queer liberation must occur simultaneously with all forms of social and ecological struggle against the state and the machines of industry. Queer liberation demands the abolition of standards of normalcy and refuses the tyranny of Average Joe/Jane and their white, middle-class gay and lesbian counterparts.

Lucio Urtubia: Expropriation and Liberation

As I rode my bike to work beneath Denver's towers of greed, splashed by SUVs driven by glaring, rich drones scowling at my audacity to bike in the rain, I felt a deep hatred for capitalism and a love of people who struggled for a better way. After checking email, making coffee, and piddling through my daily routine, I found an email from filmmaker Marie Trigona from Grupo Alavio and Agora TV.

She had written an article about Spanish anarchist Lucio Urtubia, a master of expropriation. Lucio engaged in a variety of bank robberies and most notably a check-writing scam that cost CitiBank (an organization that has expropriated the hell out of my pocketbook) millions of dollars. Clearly, Lucio's life as a revolutionary, a mass expropriator, and a bona fide anarchist is inspirational to all who believe that banks have stolen from the people. For those who believe capitalists wealth could be better used by popular struggle, you will love Trigona's story.

Lucio defines the anarchist as follows: "The anarchist is a person who is good at heart, responsible." As we determine how to liberate ourselves from this ecologically catastrophic police state known as The United States, expropriation may be one of the only ways to allow our movements to avoid being manipulated by wealthy people through foundations, major donations, and bribery.

Free Chip Fitzgerald - Longest Held Black Panther Political Prisoner

Chip Fitzgerald, the longest held Black Panther political prisoner, will go before the California Board of Parole Hearings on July 2nd, 2008. The Committee to Free Chip Fitzgerald is working around the clock to get petitions to the board of parole to free Fitzgerald. After 38 years in prison, enough is enough. Get it together and sign the petition to free this revolutionary whose life has been dedicated to the struggle for liberation. Below is a letter from Elaine Brown encouraging people to get involved.

My dear Sisters and Brothers,

Help us FREE CHIP FITZGERALD! Chip has been in prison for over 38 years now! He will go before the California Board of Parole Hearings on July 2, 2008.

Chip was a member of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1969 when he was shot and wounded by police.—This was the year the FBI pledged to wipe out the Party, the year the Party's L.A. office was assaulted for over five hours by several hundred members of the LAPD's new SWAT Team, the year so many Party members were killed by police, including Walter Touré Pope and Fred Hampton.—Over a week later, Chip was arrested and charged with assault on police and the murder of a security guard. He was sentenced to death. When the death penalty was outlawed in California, his sentence was commuted to life with the possibility of parole.

Chip continues to believe in the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people, and, despite the hardship of all these years of incarceration, heroically recognizes that his captivity is the result of his dedication and commitment to that struggle, a result we welcomed when we dedicated our lives to the Party and the Struggle.

On behalf of the Committee to Free Chip Fitzgerald, I'm asking you to sign our online Petition to the California Board of Parole Hearings advocating for Chip's parole. The Petition can be easily accessed on our website: www.freechip.org. And, I'm asking you to pass it on, send out this email to every single person and organization you know, to all your email lists, urging everyone to sign the Petition and pass it on to their contacts! We want 100,000 signatures by June 30, 2008!

With love for the People,

Elaine Brown

Creepy Capitalist Candidates: Obama Vs. McCain

Well, the Presidential Farce begins and the creepy candidates are running out of the gate! McCain is appealing to people who believe in the privatization of education, war mongering, Anti-Arabic racism, anti-immigrant policies, the defunding of key government programs, the destruction of individual civil liberties, the right to reproductive choice, the bolstering of NASA/NSA style spying, and the further privatization of the health care system supporting Big Insurance companies. On the other hand, Obama is fueling his campaign with so much "hope" and "belief" that many smart thinking people wrecked by neoliberalism are ignoring his unfettered belief in the so-called "free market." When you look at the number of homeless folks on the street, poor people around my neighborhood, and ever wealthier rich populations it is quite clear that the "free market" system is screwing most people over. Just because the savagery of capitalism is packaged in a rhetoric of hope and belief does not make it any less damaging to the wage-slaves dying throughout the world for the profits of a few CEOs. Until we have a candidate demanding an end to the barbaric system of capitalism, I refuse to entertain false hope. Furthermore, I will not call a person president who believes that some people should earn more than other people. The hording of wealth and power, in and of itself, is violence. I will take my leadership from those most victimized by the violence of our oppressive system.

The Religion of Poetry

I always loved Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. There's
something about the rhythm, the insistence, the power of pain and endurance expressed.

Embarrassingly enough, I first learned about the poem in Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School, a film I watched countless times on long sick days in middle school. Sad that it took trashy boob comedy and an absence from school to introduce me to great poetry. I remember crying as he recited the poem proudly at the end of the film.

Years later I sat on the corner of Chicago Avenue, drunk with my friend Anika. She begged me to read the poem and after a long performance of bashfulness, I obliged. I read it to her because of her rigorous passion for life. Together we screamed it out loud and cried. I think it rained that night. Hot raindrops plopped on my hairy legs.

For me, poetry is like a religion. Rereading lines like hymns, I feel close to the dead, to the earth, to our commonalities and our few differences. In poetry, I feel humanity's struggle for possibility, love, and joy in a world gone terribly out of balance. The glimmers of liberation shimmering in the hearts of all feed us during awful times and help us continue to move forward.

Poetry can liberate our souls from quotidian drudgery and compel us to act from a place of joy and possibility. Why do we spend so much time listening to the calculated cruelty of corporate news hacks and so little exalting the creativity of each other in our daily lives? One poem speaks a thousand times more truth than an entire year of journalism. For this, we should worship great poets.

Lunch and Anarchist Studies

I just got away from the office for a bit for a delicious lunch with my friend Jared, a young punk, dedicated anarchist, and absolute romantic. Struggling with the loss of my cousin has been difficult and spending a bit of time with a young, dreamy, struggling intellectual with heart felt good. Jared talked of his struggles but also spoke of his quest for community. As a young intellectual, part train hopper part aspirant academic, I thought he'd be interested in going to Renewing the Anarchist Tradition put on by The Institute for Anarchist Studies. His eyes lit up when he found out about the event and the IAS and he said he'd go. For those who've never been, RAT is an incredibly supportive event for anti-authoritarians and anarchists who are interested in developing anarchist theory, history, and academic work.

Corrupt Media Demonizes Chávez and Ignores U.S. Fascism

According to the article, Chávez Decree Tightens Hold on Intelligence by Simon Romero in the June 3rd, New York Times, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is busy consolidating power from Caracas. While I have no desire to defend any President of any nation, I must say, it is ironic that this newspaper is wasting space worrying about Chávez as our government continues to engage in ever increasing, bipartisan supported spying initiative.

While the United States government subpoenas environmentalists and coerces them to rat on each other for fighting corporations and saving the earth, the Times focuses its rage on socialists demanding economic equality. While I cannot support Chávez or any other politician carte blanch, his intentions verses the intentions of the United States government are superior. If his heavy handed state socialism is designed to create economic equality and destroy free market capitalists, is this not more equitable and just than the United States who spies on people to protect the interests of the ruling class, the capitalists, and the property owners with absurd legislation such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, The Patriot Act, and dozens of fascistic executive orders?

Romero critiques Chávez for supporting community activist groups designed to spy on each other without mentioning the Homeland Security "safety" trainings our government sponsors in cities throughout the United States converting citizens into spies. While I am opposed to all government, I prefer one that imposes its power for the economic security of the majority over a government like the United States who empowers the rich to get richer and imprisons the poor while stiflingly free speech through corporate control and FCC regulation.

The New York Times has a lot of audacity to editorialize against Chávez in so-called news reports while failing to attack the rise of fascism through the neoconservative movement and allowing the United States to continue to murder and imprison people at home and abroad in record numbers without check.

We should not be surprised by the bias of Romero and the New York Times. Capitalism has maintained its power through the domination of the media. This fact alone makes this week's National Conference on Media Reform so important. Sadly, I will be unable to attend; however, I hope you can make it!

Of course, as my friend Jared says, there is something troubling about being in a room full of reform-minded people. What we truly need is a Global Conference on Autonomy and Revolution. Perhaps one day, media activists will serve this larger goal.

Art in a Time of Collapse

New catastrophic figures come in daily about the destruction of species, the toxicity of the basic elements, the escalation of violence within communities and against communities. Whole groups of people have already been eradicated and many more face eminent destruction due to the cruel neglect of capitalism. Many predict complete environmental collapse in the near future. As we face what some refer to as post-industrial collapse, artists have a difficult task--what is the role of art in the face of the decline of so-called "civilization?" Should artists support political struggle, revolutionary struggle, or simply document the horrors of the contemporary world? Should we raise questions or attempt to answer them? Should we use our tools to organize or use our tools to challenge contemporary, destructive, grotesquely optimistic modes of thinking? These are questions we have to answer through our practice. I am not sure of the answers in my own work; however, I am sure that all too often people feel too secure, too knowledgeable, and too confident while facing global horrors. By distracting us from acknowledging our role in perpetrating global violence, capitalism succeeds in turning us into weapons. Perhaps the most important role of art is to disturb us, terrorize us, remind us that security is a destructive illusion. Perhaps art should move people to ask questions and take action, direct action, and struggle for liberation.

Beauty, Loss, Survival

I got a call today. Another person in my life lost to mental illness. In a world of great tragedy, pain, and suffering, many choose to opt out.

Thankfully, right after I got the call, my friend Kevin drove me up to the woods with two other friends. We hiked a beautiful trail filled with plants, insects, and panoramic views of the mountains. He showed me the vanilla smell of the ponderosa Pine, sage, wild roses, raspberries, hemlock, juniper, prickly pear, and gooseberries. We sat for awhile by a gentle creek. I watched the water rush by, thinking about all the people who've lost their lives to suicide, how water connects all living things, beings, spaces, and time memorial. I thought about the violence of our society, the hatred my European ancestors had for nature, people, and beauty itself. I thought about how beautiful flowers smell and how important it is for us to fight for the possibility of life against the brutal, industrial machines of capitalism that compromise ourselves and generations yet to come. The world is a beautiful place filled with horror and possibility.

For those involved in the struggle to choose whether to live or die, particularly those struggling with Bipolar, Manic Depression, elevated and low moods, however you want to put it, I recommend connecting up with the amazing Icarus Project.