Zenger's Newsmagazine

San Diegans Rally Against Citizens United Decision

2012-01-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

Homeland Security Agents Force Protesters Away from Frontof Building

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

When 100protesters from Occupy San Diego, Activist San Diego, Common Cause, the Leagueof Women Voters and a wide variety of organizations arrived in the morning tohold a rally outside the Federal Building in downtown San Diego to protest theU.S. Supreme Court’s two-year-old Citizens United decision, they were in for a rude awakening. A phalanx of agents fromthe U.S. Department of Homeland Security had parked four trucks outside thebuilding — three ominously labeled “Homeland Security Federal ProtectiveService” and one, unmarked, topped with a satellite dish — and stationedthemselves outside the building to ensure that the rally could not take placethere. Instead the Homeland Security agents unilaterally moved the rally to analcove by the side of the building two blocks away, in a far less visiblelocation.

The rally wenton anyway, with featured speakers Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas JeffersonCollege of Law and former head of the National Lawyers’ Guild,; Lori Saldaña,former California State Assemblymember and current candidate for Congressagainst Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray; and Tara Ludwik, a 37-year-oldsingle mother from Point Loma who described herself as “amazingly moderate”politically until last September, when she joined Occupy San Diego.

Between theHomeland Security forces moving the event away from its scheduled location infront of the Federal Building on Front off Broadway — where political rallieshave regularly been held for over 30 years — and a brief, failed attempt by thecity to shut down that evening’s Occupy fundraiser at the World Beat Center inBalboa Park on the ground that World Beat Center chair Makeda Cheatom didn’thave a “promoter’s permit” (she’s been promoting concerts and other events bothat the World Beat Center and other locations for 30 years), attendees with asense of history might havewondered whether San Diego was celebrating the 100^th anniversary ofthe Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Free Speech Fight in San Diego byre-enacting that notorious event.

“I don’t know ifany of you have been by the Spreckels Theatre,” Ludwik said, “but the marqueedisplays the 100-year anniversary of the theatre. And that brought back to mymind the Free Speech Fight of 100 years ago, where the IWW, one of the firstinternational unions, put up soapboxes, real soapboxes, along ‘E’ Streetbetween Fourth and Sixth Avenues. They were protesting the economic injusticeof the 1 percent back then, specifically the Spreckels family. And here we areagain, 100 years later, fighting that same fight.”

Ludwik pointedout the similarities to the way the IWW’s soapbox orators were treated by theSan Diego city government and police department in 1912 and the way Occupyprotesters are being treated today. “The city leaders quickly passed a localordinance banning free speech in the Gaslamp Quarter,” she explained. “With thehelp of citizen vigilantes — whom we now call Right-wingers — the San DiegoPolice Department used harassment, intimidation, detained and brutalized themembers, and even killed members of the Wobblies [IWW].”

According toLudwig, California’s then-Governor, progressive Republican Hiram Johnson,appointed Commissioner Harris Weinstock to lead an investigation into SanDiego’s systematic destruction of free-speech rights. “Weinstock reported, ‘Theright of free speech should be inviolable, and it should not be left to thepolice and their discretion to prevent men from exercising this Constitutionalright. Your Commissioner, Governor, finds the Police Department of the City ofSan Diego has gone beyond its legal limitations in forbidding men and womenfrom holding street meetings.’ Does this sound familiar? It did to me, too.”

Ludwik said thatin the modern era, “we’re still fighting for our free-speech rights. They’vebeen hijacked by corporations and the billionaire families of today. They arestill using the police department to suppress our free speech, again withharassment, intimidation and illegal detainment without charges. We see historyrepeat itself again in the streets of San Diego.” Ludwik drew anotherhistorical parallel to the murder of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who atthe time he was killed was planning to lead a Poor People’s Campaign, settingup a tent city in Washington, D.C. to call public attention to economicinequality and injustice — essentially an Occupy-style campaign in 1968.

The two otherspeakers, Cohn and Saldaña, focused more on the specific facts of CitizensUnited and its impact on the 2010 and 2012 elections. “In Citizens United, a five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Courtgutted campaign finance laws, saying they violated corporations’ freedom ofspeech,” Cohn explained. “The Court ruled it was unconstitutional to limit inany way the money corporations spend in attack ads or other electioneering toinfluence a political race. Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited ‘independent’election expenditures by corporations … and made it harder for citizens to knowexactly who’s behind it.”

That, Cohn said,is because the primary vehicle by which corporations are using their new-foundpower to control our politics is through so-called “super-PAC’s” (“PAC” standsfor “political action committee”), which can raise and spend unlimited amountsof money to support or oppose particular candidates and, unlike the candidates’own campaigns, don’t have to disclosewho their donors are. The only legal restrictions on super-PAC’s is they maynot “coordinate” their activities with the official campaigns of the candidatesthey’re supporting — and even that limit, Cohn said, is honored more in thebreach than the observance. She cited Stephen Colbert’s satirical attempt toget on the Republican Presidential primary ballot in South Carolina with theaid of a mock super-PAC run by Jon Stewart, who hosts the show that runs justbefore him nightly on the Comedy Channel — but who, according to the way CitizensUnited defined the law, has only a “passingacquaintance” with Colbert.

“Super-PAC’shave changed elections,” Cohn said. “Over 1/3 of all outside ad spending in the2010 Congressional elections came from secret sources made possible by CitizensUnited. Super-PAC’s gave Republican[Presidential] candidates who lost badly in Iowa and New Hampshire the money tokeep going. Usually they’d be out of the race by now, but super-PAC’s aremaking everybody spend moremoney.” She also quoted retired Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in CitizensUnited, which mocked the majority opinionby saying, “While our democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of thisCourt would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money inpolitics.”

Cohn alsoexplained how corporations became legally acknowledged as “persons” in thefirst place. It happened in 1886, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard a casecalled Santa Clara County v. SouthernPacific Railroad. “A passing remark made bythe Chief Justice before oral argument that corporations were entitled toprotection under the Fourteenth Amendment was recorded by the court reporter,”Cohn said. “That passing remark was picked up in later Supreme Court decisionsaffirming that corporations have constitutional rights.”

Saldaña recalledher own experience running for the California Assembly as a political noviceagainst highly connected opponents in both the Democratic and Republicanparties. “In my first campaign I signed the clean elections pledge, whichlimited my total spending to $350,000,” she recalled. “I was told I had nochance to win. I won 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic Party. I wasoutspent by over $1 million in that campaign, and people who were doing theanalyses afterwards were scratching their heads wondering, ‘What happened?’ Thepeople spoke, and the people overwhelmed the money.”

Though defendersof Citizens United have argued that itwas fair because it freed labor unions, as well as for-profit businesscorporations, to make unlimited donations to political campaigns throughsuper-PAC’s, Right-wing activists have qualified so-called “paycheckprotection” initiatives for the November 2012 ballot in California and otherstates that would effectively kill union political activity by requiring unionsto get signed permissions from each of their members, every year, to use sharesof their dues for political activity. Meanwhile, says Saldaña, in the financialindustry it’s just the reverse: financial corporations can spend any of theirmoney on political activity any way they wish, but their employees areforbidden from contributing their own money as individuals unless they getpermission from their bosses first.

“Money should never equal speech,” said Saldaña. “You see that in CivicCenter Plaza, where people are being told they cannot put up a soapbox andspeak. We need to organize not only in defense of the right to speak, but alsothe right to vote. We have a government ‘of the people, by the people and forthe people’ who vote. Get outthere and show that the people can overturn money.”

The people’spower to overturn money is, according to some legal scholars, under threat froma broad-based offensive by a Right-wing U.S. Supreme Court. Citizens United, they argue, is just the start of a movement toreturn the Supreme Court to its position from the 1880’s to the 1930’s, inwhich it declared in case after case that any government interference with the workings of theprivate economy deprived corporate “persons” of their rights to equalprotection and due process under the 14^th Amendment. While, as Cohnpointed out at the rally, the 14^th Amendment was passed three yearsafter the end of the Civil War (1868) and its purpose was “to protect the newlyfreed slaves,” a Republican Court majority soon seized on it to protectcorporations against minimum-wage laws, regulations protecting workers’ healthand safety, and virtually anyregulation that might interfere with corporations and their ability to maximizeprofits.

The mostnotorious of these cases was Lochner v. NewYork, decided in 1905, in which the Courtinvalidated a New York state law setting maximum daily and weekly hours forbakers. As Jedediah Purdy explained in “The Roberts Court vs. America,” anarticle in the winter 2012 issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (available online at http://www.democracyjournal.org/23/the-roberts-court-v-america.php),the Court ruled in Lochner “that the law violated constitutionally protected ‘libertyof contract,’ the freedom of both employees and employers to make whateveragreements they saw fit.” Between the 1880’s and the 1930’s, Purdy explained,“the Supreme Court struck down more than 200 pieces of state and federallegislation as violations of ‘economic liberty’” — including minimum-wage lawsand laws guaranteeing workers the right to join unions.

Today, according to Purdy, the Right-wing Court majorityhas the same reactionary economic agenda as the Lochner court but has adapted its strategy for a different sort ofeconomy. Instead of the 14^th Amendment, Purdy argued, it has seizedon the First Amendment and has essentially overruled a 1942 case that “purelycommercial advertising” did not constitute constitutionally protected “freespeech.” Indeed, one quite remarkable passage in Citizens United — written not by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote themajority opinion, but by Antonin Scalia in a previous case Kennedy was quoting— says that restrictions on corporate speech “muffle the voices that bestrepresent the most significant segments of the economy.” This suggests that tothe current Supreme Court majority, corporations are more important economicactors than flesh-and-blood humans and therefore should have more speech rights.

Justice Kennedy appeared to endorse this position in 2011,when he wrote the majority opinion in Sorrell v. IMS Health, inwhich the court threw out a Vermont law barring the sale of information onindividual doctors’ drug prescription records to pharmaceutical companiesunless the doctors specifically gave permission for their records to be sold.Kennedy, Purdy explained, “wrote that the law was unconstitutional because itburdened speech — i.e., marketing — based on the identity of the speaker(patent-holding pharmaceutical companies) and the content of their message(advertising of drugs). Kennedy described the issue as follows: ‘The State maynot burden the speech of others in order to tilt public debate in a preferreddirection.’ … There is, of course, something otherworldly about describing as‘public debate’ companies’ targeted pitches to physicians. … [T]he caseextended First Amendment protections beyond anything recognizable as speech.”

Purdy summed up the Right-wing economic ideology behindboth Citizens United and Sorrell as follows: “[M]arkets are the best way … of capturing andmaximizing … value. Therefore, elections and other institutions should come toresemble markets as much as possible. The one incontrovertibly valuable kind offreedom, then, is freedom that makes markets work. It is in this market-fixatedclimate that courts can declare that spending is speech, advertisement is argument,and the transfer of marketing data is a core concern of the First Amendment.…Whether in elections or in marketing and the vast data economy behind it, themarket itself, with all its inequality, is ever more thoroughlyconstitutionalized as a realm of freedom.”

As on so many issues, the Left has been divided on how torespond to Citizens United. Reformistliberals have called for legislation narrowing the scope of the opinion,perhaps by subjecting super-PAC’s to requirements that they disclose theircontributors, just as candidates’ official campaigns have to do. Others havecalled for amending the Constitution itself, though they split on exactly howthey would want to change the Constitution. Some would simply reverse thedecision and add to the Constitution a provision that money does not equalspeech and therefore the government can prevent corporations from donating tocampaigns and enact limits on contributions and expenditures.

But the one essentially endorsed at the January 20 eventwas a far broader proposal from a coalition called “Move to Amend,” whosebanner was posted as a backdrop to the speakers. Move to Amend wants to changethe Constitution to “firmly establish that money is not speech, and that [only]human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights;guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes andparticipation count; [and] protect local communities, their economies anddemocracies against illegitimate ‘pre-emption’ actions by global, national andstate governments.”

Democrats Are Not Evil

2012-01-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN, Editor

“Why werethere no progressives settling the Old West?”

“Becauseevery time the progressive wagon train was attacked, they put the wagons in acircle and shot inward — at eachother.”

— Old saying

In Germany inthe early 1930’s, the Left was faced with an existential threat. A Right-wingpopulist party called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — better knowntoday by its initials, “Nazi” — skillfully exploited Germans’ long-standingracial prejudices and anxieties about the country’s economic collapse to becomethe largest party in the German legislature. Germany’s two largest Leftparties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, responded not by joining together to fight the Nazis, but byattacking each other. The Communists even put out propaganda calling the SocialDemocrats, not the Nazis, “the real enemy.” We all know how this history turnedout: the Nazis took power, annihilated the German Left, and ultimately murderedmillions of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, Queers and other “undesirables” in theHolocaust as well as launching a campaign to conquer first Europe, then theworld, that led to the deaths of millions more in what became known as WorldWar II.

Unfortunately,all too many people on the Left in the U.S. today are not only following in themisbegotten footsteps of their German forebears, they are actually irrationallyproud of doing so. U.S. liberals,progressives and radicals alike are faced with an existential threat in thecombined forces of the Republican Party and the Tea Party — a movement whichalready controls the U.S. House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, andif it wins the Presidency and the Senate in this year’s election it will beable to implement a scorched-earth agenda including the final destruction ofthe U.S. labor movement, the abolition of the welfare state and of SocialSecurity and Medicare as public programs, an adventurous imperialist foreignpolicy that will require even more swollen military budgets and make the U.S.even more of an international-law scofflaw than we were under the secondPresident Bush, wholesale destruction of the environment and elimination of all regulations and controls on corporations, with theresult that the “1 percent” the Occupy movement likes to talk about willcontrol even more than 50 percentof America’s wealth and income.

Under thistransformation — which I call the replacement of the USA with TPA, Tea PartyAmerica — this country’s workplaces will become hellholes and sweatshopsrivaling anything Charles Dickens wrote about in 19^th centuryBritain. The middle class will become a distant memory. So will the minimumwage and any other protections for workers’ rights. Human-caused climate change— which both the Republicans and the Tea Party deny even exists — willaccelerate to such a level that, as one long-time environmental activist hasput it, it will be “game over for the climate.” Corporations will be “above thelaw” in a way even beyond what they are now. TPA will be a sort ofneo-feudalism in which we will be continually at the mercy of our corporateoverlords, who — without any government regulations or labor unions to restrainthem — will do what unrestrained capitalists always do: drive down wages tobare subsistence levels and create a society with a tiny handful of super-richat the top, a huge mass of barely surviving super-poor at the bottom, andalmost no one in between.

You don’t haveto believe me. If you want to see what TPA will look like, look at the programsRepublican governors and legislatures have pushed in states like Wisconsin andOhio, where they’ve had total control of the government and have used that todestroy organized labor, vote huge tax breaks to businesses and run the economyinto the ground. They’ve told the people ignorant or crazy or misguided orbrainwashed enough to vote for them that slashing wages, public schools andsocial programs and giving more and more tax breaks to the 1 percent will“trickle down” — oops, I mean “unleash the private sector” — and create jobs.It didn’t in the 1930’s, it didn’t in the 1980’s and it won’t today. Businessesdon’t hire people because they get tax breaks from government; they hire whenthere are people with the money to buy things — and the more Republican and TeaParty governments impoverish the 99 percent, the more corporations willcontinue to sit on great wads of cash while real live people face ever-lower incomesand ultimately impoverishment and even homelessness.

And what is theU.S. Left — whatever it calls itself, “liberal,” “progressive” or “radical” —doing to stop the total takeover of America and its transformation into TPA?Having the same old destructive battles that destroyed the German Left in theearly 1930’s and have rendered the U.S. Left essentially impotent for the last40 years. While the Right gets ready to use the electoral system to achieve thefinal triumph in a campaign it’s been waging since the 1930’s — since thecurrent Right-wing revolutionary (misnamed “conservative” when in fact there isnothing conservative about it: far from wanting to preserve existinginstitutions and traditions — the basis of modern conservative philosophy sinceEdmund Burke founded it in the late 18^th century — it seeks asradical social transformation as the French and Russian revolutionaries, onlyin the direction of greater inequality)movement began as a reaction to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal — the Left still can’t get its act together. Its members still can’tdecide whether to engage with electoral politics at all, or whether to do sowithin the Democratic Party or chase the will-o’-the-wisp (in the context ofthis country’s single-member districts and winner-take-all politics) ofalternative parties.

For me, thestrategic conclusion from logic and history is clear: America’s Leftists mustunite behind and within the Democratic Partyand must do so clearly and resolutely, not because the Democrats areparticularly progressive (they aren’t) but because they remain the onlyorganized force standing in the way of the Right’s replacement of the USA withTPA. The Democratic Party in the U.S. today is basically what the SocialDemocratic Party was in Germany in the early 1930’s: deeply compromised,largely in thrall to powerful business and military interests, but also theonly realistic vehicle by which progressive candidates can win public officeand progressive organizers working outside the electoral process can have sympathetic, or at least potentiallypressurable, politicians in office with whom they can work.

I’ve presentedthis analysis at several public meetings of groups like Activist San Diego andthe San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.), whose members andtheir contributions I have the highest respect for, and in every case I’ve gotthe same reaction. No one has actually debated me on whether my analysis iscorrect. No one has used logic or reason to question my analogy between the Nazisin early-1930’s Germany and the Tea Party in the U.S. today. Instead they’vereacted with a shocked emotionalism and a visceral disgust that anyone within their ranks would dare suggest that they sinkso low and compromise so much as actually to support the (ugh!) Democrats. In their rhetoric they call the Democratic Party“the lesser of two evils,” while strategically they act as if they regard theDemocrats as the greater evilthan the Republicans.

When FrankGormlie of the O. B. Rag organized aprotest against the provisions of the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) that allow the President to declare U.S. citizens “terror suspects” andhold them anywhere in the world without trial and even have them summarilyexecuted, he didn’t target the headquarters of the Republican Party. Instead,he staged his protest at the headquarters of the Democratic Party, even though virtually all the bad stuff inthe NDAA was put in by Republicans who forced the Democrats either to accept itor bring the entire U.S. Defense Department to a screeching halt. Blaming theDemocrats for what’s wrong with the NDAA is like blaming your partner for beingraped.

Just abouteveryone who has publicly taken me to task for urging that we work with theDemocratic Party has done so from so viscerally emotional a level that I’vecome to realize it’s become about more than politics, more than electoralstrategy, more than learning from and following previous eras’ models of howyou achieve social change. Instead it’s become a way of redefining oneself notonly politically but personally, a sortof secular Left equivalent to the Right-wing experience of becoming a“born-again Christian.” For all too many Leftists, what should be matters ofpolitical strategy have become moralissues. Plenty of people on the American Left have separated from the two majorparties — and in some cases, notably the anarchists within the Occupy movement,from any involvement with electoral politics whatsoever — not caring that that effectively deals them out of any effecton U.S. politics at all. Instead they go forth with a misguided sense of pridein their “moral purity” — while the dedicated grass-roots organizers of the TeaParty and the members of the 1 percent that fund them, if they think about usat all, smile and chuckle that our naïveté is making things so much easier forthem.

In my previouseditorials I’ve urged the U.S. Left in general and the Occupy movement inparticular to move beyond “consensus,” “non-hierarchical” or “horizontal” decision-makingand realize that, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the October 4, 2010 NewYorker, “If you’re taking on a powerful andorganized establishment, you have to be a hierarchy.” Now I’m saying that thephrase “lesser of two evils” to describe either of America’s two majorpolitical parties should be thrown on the same scrap heap as “consensusdecision-making.” A look at the Obama presidency so far confirms that, as muchas he and the Democrats in Congress have fallen short of progressive ideals,this country is still better than it would have been had the Republicans hadtheir way.

The economicstimulus package — though too small by half to generate a real recovery — atleast saved hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide and prevented the Bush IIrecession from becoming a full-blown depression. The bailout of the autoindustry, which like the stimulus was almost unanimously opposed by theRepublican party, salvaged a major sector of the economy and kept hundreds ofthousands of people employed. On environmental issues, Net neutrality (if theRepublicans have their way the Internet will be turned into as total atransmission belt for only Right-wing ideas as talk radio), women’s rights andQueer rights, Obama hasn’t been a fast friend but he and CongressionalDemocrats have offered major advances. To take just one example, whereas theRepublicans in 2011 held the National Defense Authorization Act hostage inorder to slip in provisions to destroy due-process rights for so-called “terrorsuspects,” the Democrats in 2010 held it hostage to get rid of the “don’t ask,don’t tell” policy that prohibited Queers from serving openly in the U.S.military.

Part of theproblem is that the Republican Party has become so doggedly ideological, sothoroughly Right-wing revolutionary, that it’s long since ceased to be analternative for progressives. That wasn’t always the case. The Republican Partywas born in 1856 as a progressivealternative to the Democrats, who then were so closely aligned to the Southernslaveocracy that they literally would not allow the issue of slavery even to bedebated in Congress. After theCivil War the Republicans largely took the place of the Federalist and Whigparties as the representative of Northern business interests and the capitalist“robber barons” who were the 1 percent of the 1880’s and 1890’s — but a strongstreak of liberalism and even radicalism remained within the GOP. It began tofade, ironically, exactly 100 years ago when it refused to renominate TheodoreRoosevelt (a far more progressive candidate than either major party would run today!) for President — but aslate as the 1960’s the phrase “liberal Republican” hadn’t yet become theoxymoron it is now. In the early 20^th century progressives had anoption they don’t now — to play bothmajor U.S. parties against each other for the best deal we could get fromeither — and now that the Republicans have become so extremely ideologicallyRight, the Democrats have become the only game in town for progressives andtherefore they don’t have to do as much for us as they would if the Republicanswere serious competitors for our hearts, minds and votes.

But the mainproblem is that the American Left has totally forgotten that achieving socialchange in a representative republic like the U.S. requires a coordinatedstrategy involving both electoral andnon-electoral activism. We used to know that in the 1930’s, when mass movementsfrom the Left — not only organized labor but Huey Long’s Share-the-Wealthcampaign for redistributive taxation and Francis Townsend’s for old-agepensions — pushed Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress much fartherLeft than they would have wanted to go and created Social Security, the legalrecognition of organized labor and massive public employment programs. We stillknew it in the 1960’s, when the civil rights movement and the bodies it put inthe street pushed John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson farther than they wanted to go and led to the end of legallysanctioned racial segregation and equal voting rights for Americans of color.Now it is the Right thatunderstands the connection between electoral and non-electoral politics —between the grass-roots demonstrations of the Tea Party and thecorporate-funded campaigns of Republican Congressional candidates — and theyare using it to shift American politics and social policies so far to the Rightthey threaten to undo all the progressive gains of the last 130 years.

From 2013 to2017 the President of the United States will be either one of two people.Either it will be Barack Obama, whose strengths and weaknesses we have becomeall too familiar with over the last three years, and who — undoubtedly becausehe’s felt the kind of pressure from the Occupy movement that grass-rootsactivists are supposed to put on politicians— tried four times in the lastthree months to get the U.S. Senate to approve higher taxes on millionaires tofund Social Security payroll tax relief for working people, and got sandbaggedby unanimous Republican opposition. Or it will be Mitt Romney, who epitomizeseverything the Occupy activists say they hate: a charter member of the 1percent, a former hedge-fund manager and serial job destroyer who proudlyboasts that he enjoys being able to fire people and who has publicly said that“corporations are people” in a tone of voice that shows he can’t conceive ofanybody seriously believing that they aren’t. How any reality-based person canpossibly still say that there is “no difference” between the Democratic andRepublican Parties when faced with a choice like that is simply beyond me.

I’m not sayingthat we should take the Democratic Party as we find it and accept whatevermeager rations it’s willing to dole out to us out of fear that the alternativewould be far worse — although the alternative would be far worse. What I’m saying is that we should beseeking to copy the Tea Party by fighting both inside and outside the electoralarena. We should be marching and demonstrating against every abuse of ourrights as citizens — every massive environment-destroying boondoggle like theKeystone XL pipeline (which the Republicans want to rush through and Obamawants at least to delay, if not block altogether), every restriction on women’sright to reproductive choice, every attempt to enshrine anti-Queerdiscrimination in the U.S. Constitution, every attempt at further deregulationof the economy and tax cuts to enrich the 1 percent even more — no matter howmuch support it has either from Republicans or Right-wing Democrats. Indeed, weshould be emulating the Tea Party by running primary challengers against themost egregious pro-corporate, anti-choice, anti-labor, anti-environmentDemocrats and replacing them with genuine progressives.

What we should not be doing is either abandoning participation in electoralpolitics altogether or voting for minor-party candidates, which under the U.S.system amounts to the same thing. Just as every progressive German in the early1930’s who did not vote for theSocial Democrats was effectively voting for the Nazis, every progressiveAmerican who does not vote for everyDemocrat over every Republican inthe 2012 elections is effectively voting for Tea Party America and itspro-corporate, pro-1 percent, anti-labor, racist, anti-woman, anti-Queer,anti-environment, anti-opportunity, anti-American Dream agenda. It’s time forthose in the American Left who see some weird virtue in avoiding what theyregard as moral contamination by the Democratic Party to look at thingslogically and realize that by dropping away from the Democrats, they arehastening the triumph of the Republicans and the Tea Party and digging theirown “virtuous” progressive graves.

It Didn’t All Start at Stonewall!

2012-01-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

Activists Hear from Pioneers of San Francisco’s QueerRights Movement

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

PHOTO: L to R: Pat Brown and Leo Laurence

“In themid-1960’s I led a double life,” pioneering Queer activist and Zenger’s associate editor Leo E. Laurence told members andsupporters of Activist San Diego (ASD) at the Pleasures & Treasures adultstore in North Park January 16. “By day I was a reporter for KGO-TV” — the SanFrancisco affiliate of ABC — “and by night I was a writer for the BerkeleyBarb,” the Bay Area’s pioneering“underground” paper. Laurence also led a double life of another sort — as acloseted Gay man in an era when almost nobody was “out” in the modern sense —until March 1969, when the firing of a friend with whom he’d appeared in aprovocative Barb photo led him tofound the Committee on Homosexual Freedom (CHF) and lead the first protests inU.S. history against a private employer for firing a Queer employee.

In the late1960’s Laurence was volunteer editor for Vector, a monthly magazine published by a conservative Queer organizationcalled the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). Laurence had met a young mannamed Gale Whittington and asked him to do a photo shoot for Vector; he also invited Whittington to write a monthlycolumn on Gay fashion for Vector.

“He and Iarranged a photo shoot in his bedroom,” Laurence recalled, “and for some reasonI invited Ron Hoffman, a photographer for the Barb, to be at the shoot. After I got the photos I wantedfor Vector, I turned to Ron andsaid, ‘You know, I’d like a shot with Gale.’ He said, ‘What do you want?’ Ijust went up to Gale, who didn’t have a shirt on, put my arms around him andsaid, ‘How about this?’” Hoffman’s photo was published in the Barb, illustrating an article by Laurence called “Don’tHide It,” and the Barb editorcropped the photo to make it look like Whittington was naked.

In March 1969, afew days after the Barb came out withthe photo — and three months beforethe riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that are commonly consideredthe birth of the Queer rights movement — Whittington called Laurence at 11 p.m.and said he’d been fired from his job in the mailroom at the States SteamshipLine after someone at work had seen the picture. Tearing up at the memory,Laurence recalled to ASD, “I told him, ‘We have to do something big.’ I wasusing the word ‘big’ in a sense that the Gay community never knew before. Weweren’t planning on launching a worldwide movement, but that’s basically whathappened.”

What they didwas mount a picket outside the States Steamship headquarters from noon to 2p.m., Monday through Friday. Laurence recalled that his group started with 13“core” members and ultimately grew to about 25, plus other people on a contactlist they could bring out for the States pickets and other demonstrations.Brown recalled that he was made picket captain “because I already hadexperience leading demonstrations with the anti-Viet Nam War movement.” Hesought out training from the American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC) on howto do nonviolent protesting, but that group — which, Brown recalled, had“organized in the South and risked their lives for Black civil rights” —refused to help a Queer group mount a protest. So Brown bought a dozen copiesof the AFSC’s instruction manual on nonviolent civil disobedience and thegroup’s members taught themselves.

The nascentQueer rights picket also needed an organizational name, and Laurence recalledbrainstorming one on his own, writing on a napkin at a coffeehouse at midnight.His first thought was to call it the “Homosexual Freedom Committee” — at thetime the few Queer activists there were called themselves either “homosexual”or “homophile” for public consumption, and the word “Gay” was private communityslang almost never used in the outside world — but then he realized theinitials “HFC” were already being used by the Household Finance Corporation, alocal Bay Area savings-and-loan. So he changed the order of the words andcalled the group CHF, for “Committee on Homosexual Freedom.”

“The firstmeeting was held in Leo’s house,” Brown recalled. “People had seen it announcedin the Barb. [Barb publisher] Max Scherr had been a labor lawyer, andthe Barb was distributed on theEast Coast. The protests had spread to Los Angeles, where Rev. Troy Perry [thefounder of Metropolitan Community Church for Queer and Queer-friendlyChristians] was leading pickets against the States Steamship offices in L.A.Before we started, the only [Queer-rights] picketing going on was one time ayear outside the White House on the Fourth of July. We did the first long-term,consistent picketing because we realized wehad to.”

According toLaurence and Brown, it was that organizational consistency that differentiatedtheir activities from the Stonewall riots and marked their group as the realfounders of the ongoing Queer liberation movement. “Stonewall was a clashbetween Puerto Rican drag queens and the police,” Laurence said. “What washappening in San Francisco was a carefully planned civil-rights action.”Indeed, Laurence said that the first he heard of the Stonewall riots was from afriend in New York, accountant John Marks, who lived across the street from theStonewall Inn and, while the riots were going on, called Laurence “and said,‘We like what you’re doing, and we’re doing it in New York.’ So it’s safe tosay the inspiration for Stonewall was what happened in San Francisco.”

“Stonewall wasthe spark that set the fire, but we were the bricks and mortar,” said Brown. Wepicketed every workday from noon to 2 p.m. to get the lunchtime crowd. We werethere from late March until mid-July 1969, two weeks after Stonewall. I knew wehad to maintain order on the picket line, and it was always present in my mindthat [the police] could just come in and wipe us out.”

Why didn’t they?“The police had quite a few people on the other side of the street from us,”Laurence recalled. “I walked up to the police sergeant — which I could do sinceI had a media pass from ABC — and asked him, ‘Why are you on the other side ofthe street? If this were the Black Panthers, you’d be right on top of them.’ Hesaid, ‘We can’t touch them. If we do, we’ll become them.’”

Whittingtonnever got his job back at States — and neither did Laurence when he was firedfrom KGO-TV in 1971 — but according to Brown, they did win back the job of a Gay employee at Tower Records(then the largest music retailer in the Bay Area) who, ironically, probablydidn’t deserve it. “We opened another front and picketed at Tower, and in twoweeks they buckled and took him back,” Brown recalled.

Seeking — and Finding —Allies

Like more recentQueer activists, Laurence, Brown and the other CHF founders realized theyneeded allies — and they looked for them in the same places modern Queeractivists often do: the militant organizations of people of color. In 1969 thatmeant the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers (UFW). Laurence andBrown recalled how CHF joined the UFW’s pickets outside Safeway supermarkets toget people to stop buying grapes. In addition to signs with the UFW’s slogans,they also carried signs reading “Gay Is Good” and other messages from the newQueer movement.

Not everyone onthe UFW picket lines liked the idea of marching with a group carrying “Gay IsGood” messages. So, Laurence said, they went right to the top. “We called [UFWpresident] César Chávez, and he said, ‘Let them picket.’”

Later Laurencegot a call from the Black Panthers, who essentially wanted him as a humanshield to forestall a police raid on their headquarters they’d been tipped wasabout to happen. “They wanted some white people there,” he recalled. “I wentdown and it was obvious that I was Gay. The Panthers were impressed, and theytaught us. For example, one lesson we learned from them was that when you do astreet march, do it completely legally. Don’t even jaywalk.”

Laurence saidtheir training and relationship with the Panthers stood them in good stead whenthey started targeting Right-wingers and businesspeople within the Queercommunity. “The closeted ‘homophile’ community opposed us,” he said. “There wasone very elegant Gay bar in San Francisco where one of our members was refusedservice, and we decided to stage an action there. When the Black Pantherswanted to intimidate people, they would stand with arms locked across theirchests and not look around. We went in that bar and stood there in the Pantherpose, and the bartender threatened to call the police. We emptied that bar in threeto four minutes. People did not want anaction in a bar, and before the police arrived, we were gone.”

The next dayLaurence heard through the grapevine a wildly exaggerated account of the actionin which the members of their group had supposedly entered the bar carryingguns. “We would never think of using guns, but the Panthers would,” herecalled. “They gave us a phone number and told us to use it. I always knewthat if this got heavy and one of us feared for their safety, they would bethere. The Panthers told us we were more revolutionary than they were, becausethey couldn’t change the color of their skin — but we didn’t have to come out.”

The Forgotten History

Notsurprisingly, both Laurence and Brown are at least somewhat bitter that thepioneering efforts of the CHF have been relegated to footnotes — or ignoredcompletely — in the depoliticized, New York-centric orthodox view of how theU.S. Queer movement got started. They’re also appalled at the changes in howthe community named itself. While they applauded the abandonment of the words“homosexual” and “homophile” and their replacement with the term “Gay” in theearly 1970’s, they haven’t supported the addition of the word “Lesbian” and areeven less enamored of the initials “LGBT” — for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,Transgender” — that has become the standard term now.

“I remember whenthe Daughters of Bilitis [the pioneering group founded by Lesbian couple DelMartin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in the 1950’s] went through the namechange, and a number of older Gay women said, ‘Aren’t we Gay anymore?’,” Brownrecalled. “This was concocted at a Socialist Workers’ Party convention in NewYork, and I think it deprived Gay women of a common same-sex humanity.”

“One of the mostdifficult days of the year for me is the annual Gay Pride Parade here, now,”Laurence said. “To the local [LGBT] Center, Pat and I are invisible. TheCenter’s director won’t even speak to me. There are some books which refer tous in two to three paragraphs. One problem with Gay historians is they preferto print the myth, and they continue to refer to Gale and I as lovers — whichwe were not. I lost my job at ABC and went through a lot of emotional hell, andit’s difficult when Gay Pride rolls around and people won’t even acknowledgethat things happened in San Francisco before Stonewall.”

“They did eclipse everything we did, but New York City is thecenter of the news and entertainment industry,” Brown ruefully added. “To callthe San Francisco Gay Pride Parade ‘Stonewall West’ is a grave miscarriage ofnomenclature. It’s just outrageous. We didn’t try to make any mileage or getourselves set in stone as the ‘founders’ 43 years ago. In fact, we wererelieved when Stonewall happened, fired the public imagination and spread themovement.”

Brown said that“we really haven’t protested” the enshrinement of Stonewall as the official“founding” of the Queer rights movement. “I have friends who were at Stonewall,including Jimmy Fouratt, whom I just saw for the first time in 30 years.Stonewall had its role, but the history should show that we were the brick andmortar, and we were completelynonviolent. It’s easy to throw rocks and bottles at the cops, but what reallyworks is peaceful, consistent, continuous activity.”

Occupy 2.0

2012-01-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

Movement Switches from Fighting Police to Making Demands

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

PHOTOS: Occupy San Diego march January 7

The occupationis dead but Occupy San Diego lives on. That was the message in the streets ofdowntown San Diego on January 7 as members and supporters of Occupy San Diegostaged a march from Children’s Park on the Embarcadero to Civic Center Plaza.The march was called to commemorate the three-month anniversary of the originaloccupation — and was advertised with a similar-looking leaflet — but it took aconsiderably more circuitous route, going out to the entrance of SeaportVillage (where police formed a human barrier to keep marchers from going in),then turning and walking along the Embarcadero to the Broadway Pier and goingup Broadway and into the Gaslamp Quarter.

That was alsothe message of John Kenney, who in a movement that prides itself on being“leaderless” nonetheless emerged into prominence when he staged a 36-day hungerstrike to protest the San Diego City Council’s refusal even to vote on, muchless approve, a resolution supporting the occupation as the city governments ofSan Francisco and Los Angeles had.

“Clearly, PhaseOne is over,” Kenney told Zenger’s in anexclusive interview January 16.“We are no longer occupying spaces like Civic Center Plaza across the nation.We’re more into occupying the mind, occupying places like banks, places likeforeclosures. We don’t want the focus to be on occupying that space — which wecan’t do right now — or the daily rugby match with the police here. This isn’tabout fighting the police. We really have a bigger movement and a lot morethings to say.”

The day beforethe January 7 march, Kenney had an article in La Prensa, a long-existing bilingual San Diego publicationtargeting the Latino community, describing what Occupy San Diego and an alliedorganization called Ocupemos el Barrio/Occupy the Hood are doing to reach outand address the concerns of people of color in general, and African-Americansand Latinos in particular. Kenney quoted Carlos Pelayo, president of the SanDiego/Imperial Counties Chapter Labor Council for Latin-American Advancement,as saying, “This foreclosure crisis was a wake-upcall for many in my community … [Foreclosures] really are making people awareof their 99 percent consciousness, and making them wake up to the actions ofthe 1 percent. This crisis will serve to get our communities together andactivated to fight this travesty.”

The Occupy movement is also moving away from its initialdecision not to present actual demands to the political system. Occupy SanDiego and its sibling organizations have scheduled an “Occupy San Diego CountyStrategic Summit” Saturday, February 4, noon to 6 p.m., at the Centro Culturalde la Raza, 2004 Park Boulevard in Balboa Park. “We’re trying to call anyonewho’s been involved with the Occupy movement since its inception to this date,”Kenney explained, “as well as outreach to various communities of color. The[San Diego/Imperial Counties] Labor Council is working on it in a big way. Theyhave a representative who comes to all our meetings. [We’re doing] outreach tomany women’s groups, LGBT [Queer] groups. The Radical Feminist Committee isworking with us.”

Along with a moratorium on foreclosures, Kenney said, otherspecific demands the Occupy groups are coalescing around include a call forlocal governments to “divest from huge financial institutions and allowmodifications on credible debtors for 80 percent of the current value, not theinflated prices they bought their homes for” during the boom. In addition,Kenney explained, “We are for Move to Amend, which is the campaign to amend theU.S. Constitution to eliminate corporate personhood. We are against theNational Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the PATRIOT Act, and we wantmoney out of politics. So we have four different resolutions sitting in frontof our City Council.”

Kenney doesn’t have much hope that the San Diego CityCouncil will endorse any of the Occupy positions. After all, they had shownthemselves perfectly willing to let him starve himself to death rather than somuch as consider a resolution allowing the occupation of Civic Center Plaza.(Kenney said he ended his hunger strike at 36 days because that was “as long asCésar Chávez did.”) “We expect almost the same deal as we got out of them thefirst time,” he explained. “We presented Move to Amend to our City Council onDecember 6, the very day the Los Angeles City Council passed the resolution. Our guys won’t even look at it. Surprise,surprise.”

One week after the Strategic Summit, on February 11 or 12,at a location to be announced later, Occupy San Diego is planning to host an“Occupy Southern California Conference” in San Diego as a follow-up to one inLong Beach January 14 and 15. The Conference is also targeting the CaliforniaDemocratic Party convention scheduled to take place in San Diego the sameweekend. “We’ll try to formulate some direct actions, like a march, maybe a miccheck or something like that, while the Dems are in town, as well as outreach.A lot of our issues are the same as theirs. We both have big umbrellas. We hopesome of the Democrats come and join us. That being said, we have disparateelements in our Occupy movement, including some anarchists who want nothing todo with representative government. But we’re dealing with that.”

Four activists with Occupy San Diego — Mike Garcia,Tahra Ludwig, Tito and Chris McKay — are facing felony charges of conspiracy todisturb the peace when they disrupted Mayor Jerry Sanders’ state-of-the-cityaddress January 11 with a “mic check.” “That was justabsurd,” Kenney said. “They’re charging them with ‘conspiracy’ for expressingtheir right to speak under the First Amendment. This is what they [the SanDiego city government and police department] have done straight from theget-go. They have clearly targeted us. We have a federal suit in. Not onlythat, they have deliberately ratcheted up the charges so we would have evenhigher bail bonds” — according to the Occupy San Diego Web site, bail was setat $10,000 for each defendant — “so it would drain our resources as well.”

According to Kenney, the San Diego city attorney’s officedoesn’t have to present the charges immediately. They have one whole year todecide whether to go to court with the original charges, reduce them or dropthem altogether — and, Kenney said, they’re using that to put Occupiers in“legal purgatory” for a year. “They can press those charges against you anytime for a year, so basically you’re in legal limbo,” Kenney explained. “Soit’s very difficult to carry a civil suit. They’re clearly targeting us. We’realmost going to have to wait a year out to press a civil suit against them.”

Kenney called the disruption of the Mayor’s speech “aspontaneous direct action of those individuals, not of our entire movement,”but added, “We stand behind the fact that they shouldn’t have been arrested onthose trumped-up charges. It’s just indicative of what they’ve been doing fromthe get-go.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the form in which the abovearticle appears in the February 2012 print edition of Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Since then, Zenger’s has been informed by Occupy San Diego member WilliamJohnson that the February 4 and 11 events mentioned by John Kenney had not been“consensed to” — i.e., approved — by a general assembly of Occupy San Diego,and therefore they should be regarded as John Kenney’s personal projects ratherthan official Occupy San Diego events.

“The Hard Edge” Comes to San Diego Jan. 26-29

2012-01-20T20:40:00.000-08:00

Workshops for Experienced Leather/BDSM Players in SecondYear

PHOTO: Christi Campbell

The Hard Edge, the four-day series of Leather events andworkshops sponsored by Ms. San Diego Leather 2009 Christi Campbell, will takeplace Thursday, January 26 through Sunday, January 29. Online registrationswill be open until Wednesday, January 25 at http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=932418. Registrations can also be made in person at Pleasures& Treasures adult store, 2525 University Avenue in North Park, and at theopening event: an introduction and reception for the presenters Thursday,January 26, 7 to 9 p.m. at 428 Fourth Avenue, suite C downtown. Locations forthe other events will be given out onlyafter people register. The fee for the entire four days is $125.

The scheduled workshops and their presenters are:

Shit or Get off thePot

Friday, January 27,8:30 to 11:30 p.m.

Spiritual liberation orjust a shitty idea; digesting, creating movement, and releasing for the purposeof cleansing oneself of the waste that no longer serves. There are many ways toachieve transformation. During this workshop we will explore some oftenmisunderstood means to achieve such release.

Presenter Tommie StarChildhas been an active member of the San Diego Leather community for 11 years. Inaddition, he has been in the D/S, BD/SM lifestyle for 22years. He lived 24/7 ina DS relationship for 6 years, was Padric Halls’ boy for 1 year and grandson toJo Blas. He was under the teaching of Ms. Cynthia for his 3rd year, andassisted for 2 year. In addition, he is a priest of the Anderson Feritradition, has been practicing the magic arts for 18 years, and now owns MyAuthentic Self where he works as a spiritual counselor, Reiki Master, healer,teacher, artist, and crafter of magical jewelry.

Forgive Me, Father,for I Have Sinned

Saturday, January 28,11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

This workshop, “Bless meFather,” is an example of the guilt/absolution interplay between a Priest(authority figure) and an altar boy (poor little sinner who doesn’t have achance in hell of doing anything right) as the Priest sets up the Altar Serverand then exacts an appropriate penance for the sins committed.

Presenter MistressMelissa, Southern California Leather Woman 2011-2012. is aProfessional/Lifestyle Dominant that has been in, on, and around the BDSM sceneover 15 years. She’s worked as Head Mistress at the Chateau and Bar Sinisterwhere I was the Head Mistress, and you may have seen her at The Dominion. She’sbeen on HBO, MTV, The WeNetwork, and many other publications.

Assistant Domina Angelinafocuses on lifestyle education, with numerous workshops at Dungeon Servitus,skill training for select Dommes, as well as workshops for the local LGTBQ andLeather communities. Domina Angelina is the head of the Servitus F/family, adiverse group of Lifestyle Dominants, Switches, submissives, Tops, bottoms andfetishists. Domina Angelina is also a proud Poly Partner with Steve Hayworth.

WTF!?! A journey fromA to Z and everything fucking imaginable in between …

Saturday, January 28,2:30 to 5:30 p.m.

On this road we willexplore the concept “WTF!?!” A to Z in definitions, terminology, protocols, andinstructions on many absolute methods to get the proper answers to the “WTF!?!”questions at hand.

Presenter Mistress ShaeFlanigan has been a Lifestyle player for the past 15 years and a member of theLos Angeles and San Diego Kink and Leather communities since landing inCalifornia from the Pacific Northwest a little over five years ago. To learnmore about Mistress Shae and her classes or professionalwork, please check out her sites: www.MistressShae.com and www.shaeflanigan.com. For information about her life coaching, please visit www.choosethepathlesstraveled.com

Presenter Temptrx comesfrom a long line of perverted and twisted folk. She has over 20 yearsexperience in the Leather ommunity and was trained in the old schooltraditions. She loves sharp and shiny objects and the sight of blood, whetherher own or that of a tasty victim, brings out her very, very long fangs.

Assistant Astrid is aservice-oriented versatile who plays and blurs lines between gender, power, andsensation. Shie plays hard and works hard at learning how to play. She likes tobe aware of the risks, as safe as possible and always with consent (even if itmay not sound like it to the casual observer).

If It Didn’t Hurt, IWouldn’t Do It Because In Doing It I Bring You Joy

Saturday, January 28,8-11 p.m.

Rough body punching is aninteractive workshop that has been presented by Master Z at numerous events andvenues around the country. A thorough explanation and demonstration on the artof rough body play is presented and hands-on experience will also be availableto the participants of this energizing and sexy workshop. How to body punch,kick and face slap safely will be covered in detail.

Master Z of Texas is awell known Dominant, Presenter and Leader in the Leather and BDSm scene. He isthe International Master 2004 and travels all over the United States and Canadamaking presentations on the Master/slave-Leather lifestyle and BDSm technique.He has also served as a popular Keynote Speaker and Emcee for a number ofevents. He is the Owner of slave bill and slave kiki.

Mums, the Word inMummification...Lessons From The Tomb

Sunday, January 29,10:15 a.m. to 1:45 p.m.

The mystery of the Mummy.Who or what lay buried beneath those wrappings? This workshop will show variousforms of wrappings for mummification and different techniques for both theenjoyment of the Top and bottom roles. Wrapping of the body fully in materialsfrom head to toe is mummification. This is one of your Edgier play scenes.

Presenter David Janischhas been active in the Leather community for over 30 years. David started hisinvolvement with Club X in 1994, served 2 years on its board X, volunteered forLeatherfest San Diego for five years and co-directed Leatherfest IX. He wasHeadMaster of SM-University for LF X and was Workshop Coordinator of over 60workshops for Leatherfest XI. David has served on several judging panels andhis workshop talents have taken him to Denver’s “Thunder in the Mountains,”Odessey 2000 in San Jose, Realm of the Leather Spectrum @ S.D. pride for 3years, the Pain Guild & numerous Club X & Leather events. His mostrequested workshop is mummification.

Assistant Peter Gieblewicz’ involvement withthe Leather/kink community has taken him fast forward in the last 10 yearswithin the confines of IML, MIR, Southern Decadence, Hellfire Inferno &Folsom St. Fair in San Francisco, to name a few. He is a strong experiencedbondage aficionado, a talented man who can give and receive in an equalbalance. His motto is, “Bondage, bondage & more bondage.”

FABIO A. ROJAS:

2012-01-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Immigrant Musician, Producer, Activist in San Diego

interview by MARKGABRISH CONLAN

Fabio A.Rojas has certainly packed a lot of living in his 20-something years. He’s beenmaking music ever since he was four or five years old, when he formed a familysinging group with his older sisters in his native Colombia. His parentsbrought the family to Miami to get away from Colombia’s unrest, particularly thethreat of kidnapping, and after studying music in Minnesota he ended up in SanDiego. At present he’s the owner of Refugio Roots Music, a combinationrecording studio, performance space and art gallery at 906 21^stStreet in Golden Hill (it’s a corner building and the entrance is on “E”Street). He’s also recording progressive events for Activist San Diego’sunder-construction radio station, KNSJ 89.5 FM in Descanso, and he recentlyreturned from a tour with the popular, long-lived (17 years) Latino rock bandthe B-Side Players. Rojas can be reached online through Facebook at Facebook.com/Fabioalejo,or via e-mail at pentafabio@hotmail.com

Zenger’s: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourbackground, your history, and how you got into music?

Fabio A.Rojas: I was born and raised in Bogotá,Colombia for the first 15 years of my life. My family raised me with thetradition, culture, values and style of living of a typical Latino. My dad wasvery passionate about music. He had sung as a very young man, but because ofmoney-related issues and stuff like that, he couldn’t really pursue the dream.He owned his own company — not too big, not too small, a very medium way ofliving. So we struggled at the beginning, but by the end of the day he alwaysgot us into school, into some music classes here and there.

I startedsinging when I was a baby. I’ve sung all my life, ever since I have beenconscious. My dad took us to the churches and the local spots to perform withmy sisters. He would train us to do harmonizing and play the guitar a littlebit, like a couple of chords. And he would get us a teacher. We couldn’t standit. We wouldn’t have a teacher for more than two or three months because wewould somehow find a way to get them fired. I guess, because We wanted a way toplay our own stuff, or we just couldn’t stand to have a teacher.

My sisters and Iended up doing an album of traditional Christmas songs, ones we all liked, like“Feliz Navidad” and stuff like that. We were 8 or 9 when we recorded that. Wewent around the country, did a couple of tours there, and a famous producer whowas in charge of the project said he wanted to do a TV special showing usrecording an album. We ended up recording in the best studio Colombia has,working with top-of-the-line recording equipment in a million-dollar studio.

So you reallyget impressed. You’re a kid, you see how everything’s getting recorded. It’sgot pots [volume controls] and buttons and clicks and ProTools technology.You’re in an amazing booth, comfortable, perfect temperature, everything’sfine. You feel like you want to pursue that. You feel like this is music, it’scapturing music, so this is an art.

I started outdoing my own recording when I was 10, since I had some kind of knowledge with acomputer. I still remember Windows 95 really well, which was my beginning,really. I definitely started recording with little microphones and doing stufflike that when I was 13. Through all those times, in school I was always thetop student in music, because it was like my favorite class. And when you putpassion into something, you become the best you can get. When I was 12 Istarted playing in programs, in commercials, in TV, whatever I could get myselfinto. My sisters would back me up sometimes, and I would back them upsometimes.

We finally leftColombia for two reasons. One was we thought there would be more opportunitiesin music in Miami. The other was the bullshit, if I may say this in aninterview, all the terrible things that happened in our country sometimes.Colombia is a beautiful, amazing country with wonderful values and people. Butmy father’s company was becoming bigger, so he was making a little more money,and so we started receiving letters and people threatened our lives.

My dad feltlike, “My family’s in jeopardy, because for some reason we travel a little bitwith our kids, and they know that they’re singing and we have a little bit ofmoney, so they want to do something to us.” All that social struggle over the60 years of guerrillas, of wars, offalse leaders, caught up to us, to the point where my family would watch TV,and all you would hear in the news was 10 more killed, 20 more killed. We wereespecially afraid of being kidnapped, because they were talking aboutkidnapping and doing something to us.

So my dad took adecision for both the music and for our lives, and we decided to move to Miamito start a new life. That’s true. That’s why people come to this country. Thisis a beautiful land of opportunities. It started with immigrants. I didn’tunderstand that back then, but of course I didn’t want to because I was 15. Ihad my friends and all my people there, but when you’re 15 you still don’t havemuch to say. You still have to go with your parents. You might have a lot ofthings in your mind, but you still have to be with your family.

We ended upmoving to a retirement village called Cape Coral, two hours away from Miami,which was very cool. My father fell in love with it. He’s a very laid-back guy.He works a lot. He taught me a lot in life, but we still have a little bit ofproblems with each other because we both have that passion, that revolutioninside, of like saying what we have in our minds. And if he’s right, we go forit. So I ended up moving out of my house when I was 17. I started looking foropportunities, went to Miami and recorded a couple of tracks with differentpeople there. I started working with a radio station there, doing the jingles,cutting up tracks. Sometimes the radio station needed a short clip, so I wouldedit it or do something with it or try to find a way to get involved.

Zenger’s: So you were both performing and doingengineering and technical?

Rojas: Yes. Yes, sir. When that started happening, I foundthat my voice was changing late. Most people’s voices start changing whenthey’re 14 or 13. I started it when I was 16 or 17 because I took good care ofit, so that made me stop a little bit as an artist, as a singer and stuff. ButI kept developing the keyboard and the piano, and the guitar, and otherinstruments like percussion. I always had my hands around because in Colombiait’s always like you’ll never miss a plate of food or an instrument in thehouse. There’s always an instrument and there’s always a family member orsomebody that comes from out of town.

I starteddeveloping more on guitar and piano, and music overall. I graduated from highschool in a music school. It’s called Cypress Lake Center for the Arts HighSchool, located in Fort Myers, and I’m a 2005 graduate with honors in music. Iwas a tenor in the choir. I did some jazz and some Latin. Definitely I was incharge of the Latin section. I remember there weren’t too many Latinos, but wekind of took over with the band.

Zenger’s: In Florida? That’s a bit of a surprise.

Rojas: Well, it’s just that it was two hours from Miami.It was a retirement community, and most of the people were in their 60’s and70’s, retired people, American people, people that had lived here all theirlives, U.S. citizens, not too many Spanish speakers. But I would travel toMiami constantly, I would have to say every month. It was so close. It was justan hour and 45 minutes.

Then I starteddeveloping a lot of contacts with Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans. My accent isvery Colombian, but sometimes if I am talking to a Dominican or Cuban or PuertoRican, I could pretty much pass as a Puerto Rican or a Dominican becausethere’s so much unity.

I started doingand listening to music that was very real. I mean, saying things about socialand political stuff. They don’t just stay quiet about it. They don’t just gopop and whatever is hot, whatever is cool, but when people actually want to saywhat needs to be said through the songs and through music.

The localnewspaper had a Spanish section, and I would write little things like howDominicans thought about the new law that the government was putting in, or howPuerto Ricans have approached that since they’re part of the U.S. They’re acolony of the U.S., and so how does that relate to them?

As soon as Igraduated from high school, I went to a college of music called McNally’sCollege of Music. Back then it was called Music Tech. These days, they changedthe name to McNally’s. Very popular, one of the top 10 recording schools in thecountry. Very nice, because it had a lot of free time to record, so I happenedto be in amazing studios for a long time.

Zenger’s: Where is that?

Rojas: This is in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities,Minneapolis and St. Paul. I would perform every Friday and Saturday. Of course,Minneapolis and St. Paul don’t have too many Latin people concentrated in theareas. You actually have to find the clubs and where they go.

There were twoclubs, two very popular clubs, in downtown Minneapolis. Conga Bistro was one ofthem. I used to play there with a band that would just come together everyFriday or Saturday. That’s how we got our money to survive. I started producinga little bit, of course, just right away, because the first months that youstart going to a school of production you don’t know very much, if anything,about the art of recording.

But since Ialready had my ideas since I was 13, working with my computer, that gave me alittle bit of extra kick. So that way I was able to start recording from myvery first semester, start making myself noticeable. The course was usuallythree years; I ended up finishing it in two. I took a full-time schedule, 8 inthe morning until 12 at night, very constant and very focused on that.

I took an extramonth of broadcasting, and I took a little bit of contracts and stuff like thatbecause I wanted to be a little more into the business side, and understand howto make a living out of it. I also had to show clear results that will produceand will make sense, as far as putting yourself out there. My dad was verystrict on that all my life, because he was a businessman. He was a salesman. Hewould take me around the country, selling and showing me how to make thingsrun, as far as his business.

So he wouldalways say something to me, “Not everything in life is music, mi’jo. Not everything is music. Remember that.” And thatalways sticks in my mind, because it’s true. Not everything is music. I alwayswanted to make it in music. I wasn’t having fun if I wasn’t making music.Sometimes I wouldn’t even think about anything but just music. And, you know,you’ve got shirts to do. You’ve got to clean your room, and you’ve got to go towhere you can help the family, especially when we came to the U.S.

When we came tothe U.S., I remember working construction, working in restaurants, cleaningbathrooms. I put in a tile floor. I did air conditioning. I mean, we all had tohustle when we came for the first time, because when we came for the firsttime, all the money we had, of course, those were thousands of dollars, ofcourse, to bring five people to the U.S., and to make — try to find a way tomake them [documented] residents and go through the whole bullshit and scamthat it is. There’s a lot of money involved.

I went tocollege to get my degree, came back to Florida, lived in Tampa for about sixmonths, graduated with a diploma in business and stuff like that — it was ashort program, five or six months — and that gave me the idea of going toColombia and starting a recording studio, because it made sense to make it abusiness. So I said I’m going to take this to the next level, hopefully.

I went toColombia. I didn’t find what I was expecting, obviously — a lot of closingdoors — but thank God that I already had the language. In those five or sixyears that I was already here, I learned most of the English I’m speaking rightnow. Knowing English in Colombia — or any Latin country — is very important,because we do a lot of business in the international language, which isEnglish. They wanted teachers that could teach in both languages.

So I startedworking in a very popular pre-school over there that has a lot of kids that arefrom people that are in good and in bad positions. It’s a big school that’sfunded by the government, so I was able to get into teaching English throughmusic. I was a teacher for about two years. But then I started receivingletters from the U.S. again, and it was like if you want to be able to be inthe U.S. and stuff like that, you need to be here. You need to report yourselfevery three months from now on. Then it became every three weeks, and it becameterrible. I didn’t want to take the chance of not being able to see my familyfor years, so because I didn’t want to take that chance, I decided to come backto the U.S.

A wonderful thinghappened to me. As soon as I came back, a recording deal happened in L.A.Somebody that I knew had won a recording contract, and he included me in therecording deal. They flew me to Miami. I recorded with Sony Music some tracksof this up-and-coming artist, and I was part of the production, ready to goback to Miami when they had closed for 15 days. Then I went to a concertfeaturing the B-Side Players. I met them and we talked. They liked the way Iplayed and we had a good energy going. So I ended up in San Diego, and I’m nowin my 13^th or 14^th month here.

I know I have alot of things ahead of me to learn. But now I can see a little bit more clearlyas, for example, this beautiful place we are in right now, in the Activist SanDiego movement and Occupy San Diego, and all these amazing things that arehappening lately, are because I think this is the real deal. These days peoplewant to stay real. People want the truth, and they’re trying to look for thattruth.

I think this isthe time to say what we need to say, at all cost, because then if we allow thenext thing to happen — the revolution to stop at this point — then how muchmore time are we going to have to wait before we have some open channels? We’regetting to the point where we need to take the little channels that the peoplein power, the people in the government and the people who call themselves“leaders” and stuff like that, haven’t yet closed. This is the time to strikehard. And I think the media are the most effective way of making a statement ofwhat’s happening out there.

Zenger’s: So what are you doing now?

Rojas: When I first came to San Diego, it was rough. I’mtalking about anybody who starts somewhere new, sleeping in the car, sleepingon couches, trying to find myself in a stable position, trying to stablemyself. Finally, I started working with different bands around San Diego, sothat it gave me a little bit of extra income so that I could pay for my rentand stuff like that.

One of the mostbeautiful things that has happened to me lately to me is opening Refugio RootsMusic, which is something I started with in Colombia. We have an idea: Unidosproduciamiento arte. That is, “Unitedproducing art.” I wanted to find something that included my passion for music,which I know how to do, and which has given me my living for the last year atleast.

Refugio RootsMusic has been able to stay open because I work with three non-profitorganizations, not only providing some of the furniture and equipment, but alsosome of that inner power, that thing that says, “Yes, we can do it. Let’s opena recording studio that’s community-based.” My passion about the recordingstudio is not just, oh, I want to make money, and I just want to make it for meand to make my music, or to just make profit out of it.

My main passionabout the studio is how to work with the community, how to work with thenonprofits and people who have a real and clear message, such as Activist SanDiego I want to use the media and what I know how to do, which is produce andrecord jingles, tracks, record live events, even graphic design. you have acomputer with good software — ProTools, Prism, Flash, Photoshop and stuff likethat — you have a powerful machine. Now you have a way of saying something tothe masses.

We have done graphicdesign at Refugio Roots Music. We have done art gallery events, because I havea space for them. We have done live recordings. We have bands that have comethere, recorded on the spot, and then they play them back so that people canget involved. Everybody in the room is recording at the same time, with alaugh, with a clap, with a joke, with movement — because everything you do inthe room is getting recorded. It’s kind of like a concert that I’m puttingtogether, just like recording whatever is happening with a band, so everybodycan get together and record right away, on the spot.

The second partof my life that is really amazing lately is Activist San Diego and the Occupymovement. I think we’re right in the middle of la oja, like where you cook food. It’s like a pot. We’reright inside of the pot, and we either find a way to bring the heat down fromthe pot, so we can have some good-tasting food — or we just stay quiet anddon’t do anything. And of course that’s not the option I took. I’ve taken theoption of saying it, because of everything we have spoken about.

Zenger’s: You mentioned earlier the kind of music that’spopular today versus what you’re trying to do, trying to write songs aboutsocial issues and raise people’s consciousness. Were you ever tempted to goafter being a pop star and making a lot of money?

Rojas: Not at all, not at all. I’ve realized if I’m goingto sacrifice my art, I’d rather not even do it. It makes me actually mad thatpeople have such an amazing talent and they’re talking bullshit. They selltheir souls. They sell their souls. They sell their lives. They’d sell theirmama trying to get to a status and to a position of, “Oh, we got money and wegot the jewelry and we’ve got the cars.” That’s terrible. That really makes meunderstand how bad a condition we are in, how people sell themselves.

I know there areso many people who want to do good, but they took a decision earlier in theirlives, so these days they don’t even have a way back. They got into thecraziness that comes when they try to make it very successful, and they decidedto sell their soul, sell their art. There’s all kinds of private organizationsthat are behind the media that are trying to corrupt you, because that’s howthey get in the minds of the youth. And if the children and the youth learnbullshit, what are they going to become in the future? They’re going to becomea bunch of shit. They’re going to grow up to be a bunch of people talkingnonsense.

I prefer not tosell one album but to be heard, to have something to say, than to sell millionsand have nonsense in my music. That’s something I have not even questioned,ever.. I really don’t care what car you drive or what you’re doing with it. Iwant to see what you’re actually doing with people that are coming right behindyou. What are you leaving? What are you saying? How are you putting this outthere so that people learn something? You don’t have to be a teacher or arevolutionary messenger, or a “souljah,” as they say. Just be real.

I’m hoping to releasemy album in 2012, sometime in June or July, and I think I’m very close to that.Somewhere between June or July or something like that. That’s when people aregoing to hear the music, and as we all know, music speaks so much more than aregular conversation. You can say so much more through a tune, through a song.Then probably it will make more sense to find me as a musician, as a composer,as an artist, as an activist, whatever you want to call it.

It Didn't All Start at Stonewall!

2012-01-02T21:53:00.000-08:00

Meet Two of the REAL Pioneers of Gay Liberation

Monday, January 16 • 7 p.m.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Location of this meeting has been changed!

Pleasures & Treasures Store, 2525 University Avenue, North Park (across the street from University and Arizona)

Three months before the Stonewall Inn riots in New York city in June 1969 which are commonly — but wrongly — thought to be the start of the Gay liberation movement, a group of Gay activists in San Francisco started the nation’s first Gay Liberation Front. After one of their members was fired from his job for being Gay and “outing” himself via a photo in the Bay Area’s legendary underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front mounted the first Gay-rights demonstration against a private employer in U.S. history in March 1969. Later on the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front built a coalition with other radical groups in the Bay Area and ultimately got the Black Panther Party to endorse the Gay rights movement. Two participants in this history live in San Diego today and will be speaking to Activist San Diego at its January 16, 2012 general meeting. They are:

• Leo E. Laurence, co-founder of the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front and its predecessor organization, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, and currently associate editor of Zenger’s Newsmagazine and activist with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (L.E.A.P.), supporting an end to laws against marijuana; and

• Pat Brown, a participant in the early actions of the Gay Liberation Front who is currently active in the anti-circumcision and alternative AIDS movements.

Come to Activist San Diego's January 16 general meeting and hear a slice of Gay movement history that has been ignored or swept under the rug by East Coast-centric historians who have a hard time accepting that the roots of the Gay movement are in California. Hear from two of the pioneers who are both still active in human rights struggles. For more information on the history of San Francisco’s Gay liberation pioneers, visit http://www.galechesterwhittington.com/beyondnormal.html, the Web site of Gale Whittington, the man who appeared with Leo Laurence in the Barb photo and whose firing by the States Steamship Lines sparked the first Gay-rights demonstration ever against a discriminatory private employer in the U.S.

Arrested for Voter Registration

2012-01-02T21:45:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN, Editor

When I wrote“America’s Unequal Heritage,” my column in this space in last month’s Zenger’s, I had no idea that the San Diego Police Departmentwould so quickly prove my point! But that’s just what they did on the morningof November 29, when they arrested Occupy San Diego media spokesperson andformer Congressional candidate Ray Lutz for setting up a table at Civic CenterPlaza in order to register voters.

In my earlierpiece, I noted that while the Tea Party movement has come up with some realhowlers in their attempts to link their points of view with those of theFounding Fathers — notably their preposterous claims that the original 1789version of the U.S. Constitution was “divinely inspired” (if we could bringthem back, the Deists who wrote it would either be angry at that or find ithilarious) and the First Amendment really didn’t provide for the separation ofchurch and state — there was one aspect of their thought that was shared by the authors of the original Constitution.

It was the ideathat the U.S. should be, not a democracy, but a republic — and one in which theright to vote should be restricted to a carefully selected few. James Madison,the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the only President besidesGeorge Washington who actually was at the convention that wrote it, made thepoint very clear in #10 of the Federalist Papers, when he argued that a representative republic would be a healthiersystem than a true democracy because a republic would “refine and enlarge thepublic views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whosepatriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it totemporary or partial considerations.”

What this meantin practice was a system in which no office higher than a member of the Houseof Representatives would be directly elected — Senators would be elected bystate legislatures, and the President would be chosen by electors pickedhowever the state legislatures decided — and the vote would be limited topeople with “property,” i.e., white male landowners. Though activists from the1820’s through the 1960’s challenged this elitist system and eventuallyexpanded the franchise (first to all white men, then to people of color, thento women and then to young people) and amended the Constitution to allow peopleto vote directly for Senators, the Tea Party openly has called for a return toa more restricted franchise and for returning Senate elections to statelegislatures.

Republican state governorsand legislators have aggressively been pushing for measures to make voting harder. In Maine, a Republican governor and legislaturerepealed same-day voter registration — though Maine voters were able to pass areferendum to restore it. In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker hasalso ended same-day voter registration and, according to Elisabeth Pearson ofthe Democratic Governors’ Association, “said students could only vote with acollege ID that meets certain criteria — criteria that almost no schools meet.Now they’re saying technical college ID’s don’t count. And in the six monthssince he’s passed his voter suppression laws, they still haven’t updated theonline forms that say to get a voter ID you need a birth certificate, which youcan’t get without a photo ID.”

In my earlier article, Iquoted Florida State Senator Michael Bennett (R-Bradenton) as calling voting “ahard-fought privilege” — not a right,but a favor government giveth and government taketh away. And at Civic CenterPlaza the idea that voting is a “privilege” has been enforced by the San DiegoPolice Department and used as an excuse to put Ray Lutz in jail.

Not that that’s what they said they were doing. In the two-minute video of Lutz’sarrest, one of the cops taking him into custody said that they had no objectionto him registering people to vote, merely to setting up a table so he could doso. That’s one of the many mind-numbingly absurd regulations the police havesubjected the Occupiers to from day one, often seemingly made up on the spotand all based on the idea that the police and the city government “own” thesquare and allow anybody else to use it or not at their whim. Since theOccupation started October 7, the law in Civic Center Plaza has beenessentially whatever the police say it is at any given moment — and when thepolice are allowed to make up their own laws on the fly, it means you’re livingin a police state.

What’s more, the citygovernment had already made it clear that they considered the Occupiers as agroup apart from the “legitimate” citizens of San Diego. A reporter for SanDiego CityBeat wrote that when he had takena group of people from the Occupation into the Mayor’s office to fulfill theirlegal right to inspect city records, a security person told them that “Occupypeople” were not welcome into the Mayor’s office. In other words, because theyhad congregated in Civic Center Plaza to fulfill their First Amendment right “peaceablyto assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” theywere not allowed into the Mayor’s office to petition the government for aredress of their grievances.

The arrest of Ray Lutzwasn’t simply the enforcement of the arbitrary will of a handful of policeofficers. It was a clear class statement on the part of the rulers of San Diegothat they don’t want the “wrong” people, the “Occupy people,” to be able tovote at all. Ironically, the Occupiers themselves are divided on the issue ofvoting; some believe that republican institutions are inherently corrupt and only direct democracy is a legitimate form of governance(the exact opposite of James Madison’s position), while others understand thatpolitical power in a republic goes to whoever is on top when the votes arecounted (accurately or otherwise), and therefore people seeking social changenot only should but must involvethemselves in some manner with the electoral system.

That, no doubt, was the point RayLutz — whose other social-change project besides Occupy San Diego is a Website, www.citizensoversight.org,that aims to make it easier for San Diego residents to hold their electedofficials accountable — was trying to make. His table was intended as amessage to the Occupiers themselves that, despite their legitimate criticismsof the electoral system as too dominated by corporate money and power, theyshould still exercise their right to vote. An Occupy movement that rejectselectoral politics altogether is one the powers that be don’t have any reasonto fear; an Occupy movement that uses both direct street action and electoral politics is one that can move thecenter of gravity in American politics Leftward, the way progressive activistsin the U.S. did in the 1910’s, 1930’s and 1960’s — and Right-wing activistsmoved it Rightward in the 1980’s and the last three years of the Tea Party.

Whatever the police or thecity authorities say, Ray Lutz was arrested on November 29 because he wanted tohelp the “wrong” people vote. A once-popular slogan of the anti-electoral U.S.Left said, “If voting could change things, they would make it illegal.” Betweenthe attempts of Republican governors and legislators to shrink the electorateand make it more difficult for younger, poorer and darker people to vote, andarrests like Ray Lutz’s, maybe that’s just what the 1 percent that runs thiscountry is trying to do!

Occupy Activist Recalls Being Maced by Police

2012-01-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

Michelle “Jersey” Deutsch Tells Story at S.A.M.E.Fundraiser

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

The San DiegoAlliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) held its second annual fundraiserFriday, December 9 at the Bamboo Lounge sushi bar in Hillcrest, with a fullprogram of entertainers and a short speech by Michelle “Jersey” Deutsch ofCanvass for a Cause and Occupy San Diego. Deutsch was arrested and sprayed withchemical Mace in Civic Center Plaza by San Diego police on October 14, a weekafter Occupy San Diego started occupying the plaza, and S.A.M.E. decided togive half the fundraiser’s proceeds to Deutsch to pay for her medical billsfrom the attack.

The other halfwent to the defense fund for the Equality 9, nine S.A.M.E. members andsupporters who were arrested at the San Diego County Clerk’s office August 19,2010 to protest the county’s continued refusal to give same-sex couplesmarriage licenses despite a federal judge’s ruling that Proposition 8, whichbanned legal recognition of same-sex marriages in California, isunconstitutional.

“LGBT [Queer]grassroots groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. should not beovershadowed by $40 million corporate-sponsored campaigns, but we are,” Deutschtold the people who attended the fundraiser. “In 38 states Transgender peoplecan still be fired from their jobs for being Trans, and in 29 states Gay peoplecan be fired from their jobs for being Gay. … We don’t have marriage rights inCalifornia. In several states across the country, we don’t have adoption rightsand hospital visitation rights. … As individuals, we’re denied housing,employment benefits, employment in general. This is a summary of the reasonswhy groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. need to be involved in theOccupation.”

Deutsch faultednot only anti-Queer groups but less radical Queer organizations who arethemselves funded by major corporations. “We don’t have $10,000 coming fromTarget,” she said. “In fact, we’re trying to sue them. So we do want to protest down there [at Civic Center Plazaand wherever else Occupy stages demonstrations]. We are protesting down there. We cannot depend on a lot ofthe groups that fought with us [against] Prop. 8, because a lot of those groupsare corporate-sponsored.”

According toDeutsch, the incident that led the police to attack her began when she and herfriends at Occupy, including S.A.M.E. president Cecile Veillard (one of theEquality 9), witnessed police attacking other Occupiers in an attempt to clearout the tents members of Occupy had set up in the plaza. “We were peacefullyprotesting,” she said. “I could look to my left and right and see people’s armsbeing twisted … [The police] were kicking people in the groins and grabbingpeople by the backs of their hands, and pulling people to the ground so theycould choke them.”

Deutsch saidthat there were news cameras from two local TV stations, the NBC and Foxaffiliates, and therefore a lot of the police assaults on Occupiers took placelow to the ground so the cameras couldn’t photograph them. So she startedyelling “Brutality!” at the camera operators, trying to get their attention sothey would photograph what she was seeing. “I saw my friends getting the crapbeat out of them next to me,” Deutsch said. “And there’s nothing you can do.You can’t fight back against the police. None of us did that. None of us putour arms up against them.”

According toDeutsch, the police Maced her to shut her up and keep her from directing thecamera operators toward the assaults on her friends. “I was Maced really closeto my face, like within three inches of my face, for a good five seconds atleast,” she recalled. “It was so close to my face that you really can’t catchit on camera, because the officer was bigger than me.” After the attack, shesaid, “I was literally blinded for about two hours. I was laying on the ground,everybody else was still protesting, and I couldn’t see anything.”

Deutsch said shereturned home a few hours later, only she still felt symptoms from being Maced— complicated by her chronic asthma, since the Mace had triggered an asthmaattack. “I woke up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose,” she said.Her partner Lauren and Megan, a nurse who lives next door, convinced Deutsch togo to the emergency room at Scripps Hospital — where her ordeal continued.

The doctors andnurses at Scripps, Deutsch said, “were being really nice and treating me reallywell until they said, ‘What do you mean, you got Maced?’ The second they heardI had been Maced by the police, they were not very helpful. It really turnedaround how the doctors and nurses were treating me, to the point where wecalled our neighbor, nurse Megan, and we said, ‘What should we do? They’re nottreating me right. What should they actually be doing?’ And she helped us tellthem what I needed.”

Localsinger-songwriter Joshua Napier performed one of his intense, powerful sets,including the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and several of hispolitically themed originals. The program also featured the debut performanceby the San Diego People’s Revolutionary Choir, which included three members ofthe Equality 9 — Cecile Veillard, Sean Bohac and Chuck Stemke — singing classicworking people’s songs, including one called “We’re Bound for San Diego” thatcomes from the 1912 Free Speech Fight. This was a year-long action staged bythe Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the radical anarchist unionnicknamed the “Wobblies,” who set up soapboxes in San Diego’s traditional freespeech zone at Fifth and E Streets downtown and were met with police-sanctionedviolence and a city ordinance prohibiting free speech in the area.

Set to themelody of “The Wearing of the Green” — itself an old song of the Irishrevolutionary struggle against British colonialism — “We’re Bound for SanDiego” was published by the IWW and used as a recruiting tool to bring membersand supporters to San Diego. Those who attempted to answer the call were met byvigilante groups on the outskirts of town, where they were beaten and sometimeskilled. In the context of the S.A.M.E. event, the last line of the song — “We’llwhip old San Diego if it takes 100 years” (“if it takes us 20 years” in the originalpublished lyric) — seemed almost unbearably ironic given the way the police hadtreated Deutsch and other Occupy protesters.

Privatized Police

2012-01-02T21:15:00.000-08:00

Representatives from Valley ViewCasino & Hotel presented San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne andhis team with a giant replica of a San Diego Police badge made from 44 poundsof pure chocolate.

The chocolate badge, sculpted by Valley View Casino & Hotel ExecutivePastry Chef Daniel Sampson and his talented team, was originally created forand displayed at the San Diego Police Foundation’s 11th Annual Friends of theBadge Luncheon September 21, 2011 at the Valley View Casino Center. Chef Danieland his team spent a total of five days creating the solid 26 inch by 17 inchchocolate masterpiece. Chef Daniel used over 44 pounds of white couverturechocolate to create the badge and its accompanying stand. Then, Valley ViewCasino Chef Sammy Chatluang spent two days hand-carving the badge’s exquisitedetails. The chocolate was then airbrushed with aureolin yellow cocoa butterand dusted with real gold.

by STEVEN REED

I’ve been listening to alot of the various Occupation protests that have been going on across thecountry. I’ve been listening to the complaints of the protesters andrecognizing the obvious threat they are to the establishment and to their manycorporate overlords. So I’m not shocked by the brutal response by the police inmany cities across the country. As we have seen in New York, it’s not hard tobuy a mayor and a police force. Before he was the Mayor of New York, MichaelBloomberg was an entrepreneur that sold the Bloomberg terminal to Wall Street.That’s how he made and continues to make billions from Wall Street. So it’s nothard to guess were his priorities are going to lie.

And as for the New YorkPolice Department (NYPD), they have a private and independent foundation whosemain goal is to gather private and public donations and funds for the NYPD. Whoare the foundation’s main contributors? JP Morgan donated $4.6 million. Othercompanies that donated over $100,000 were Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Jeffries andCo. (bank), Carl Icahn, the Renco group, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.So in essence, their police force is now privatized.

Brutal police crackdownsagainst Occupy protests, have been occurring all over the country, but I didn’thave to look farther then my own town of San Diego. The SDPD have performedmultiple raids and arrests even though courts have ruled that occupations andtents are forms of free speech. Are youstarting to see a pattern here? I decided to see if San Diego has its ownfoundation for raising private funds for the police — and lo and behold, itdoes.

“Formed in 1998, the SanDiego Police Foundation helps insure that programs critical to ‘publicinterest’ receive funding that is not available through the City’s budget,”explains the Foundation on its own Web site,http://www.sdpolicefoundation.org/. “Whether it’s an evidence managementsystem, advanced video streaming and recording, or other ‘life-saving’equipment and training, the SDPF ensures that donations to the policedepartment impact all of San Diego.” I think their words had more meaning than they intended.

It’s also not surprisingthat Mayor Jerry Sanders, a former cop who rose through the ranks to become SanDiego’s chief of police, is currently the board chair of the SDPD foundation.So who bought San Diego’s finest, you might ask? Well, the Irving group (run byformer board chair Craig Irving) donated $20,000. The Irving group deals withcommercial real estate and investments. Also on the list was Ted Fogliani, theCEO and founder of Outsource Manufacturing Inc. Among the corporate donors areWalmart, Verizon, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, Bell Management (real estate investor),AT&T and Qualcomm who donated $1 million.

Other major contributorsare Dan Shea, an investment banker who used to be a managing director for Fortune 500 companies; and Ron Fowler, an investment bankerand agency owner at Farmers Insurance Group dealing mainly with foreclosureclaims. For those of you who don’t know, Farmers Insurance Group is asubsidiary of ZURN, Great Britain’s second biggest commercial property insurerand a very shoddy company indeed. Another SDPD Foundation contributor is ArtBarter, president and CEO of Datron World communications (a division of TitanCorporation). Datron produces military communications equipment which isparticularly used to suppress and control demonstrations in third worldcountries like Zimbabwe. That company is now equipping the SDPD with the sameequipment.

Upon doing more research Idiscovered that the CEO of the foundation is Wilensky Napoli, also part of ahuge marketing firm based out of California whose extensive list of clients spanthe private and public sector with ease.

How could it be thatfoundations like these aren’t regulated at all? Who oversees these practices?

The only even remotelyeffective check on the power of the San Diego Police Department is the CitizensReview Board (CRB). This board is responsible for reviewing serious citizencomplaints against San Diego police officers, officer-involved shootings, andin-custody deaths. The CRB also oversees the administration of discipline insituations where the officer has been found to have disobeyed proper policy andprocedure. Also, the CRB makes policy and procedure recommendations to theChief of Police. It’s the only group that I can see that could have anyoversight into the foundation’s activities.

Apparently, anyone can geton this board. The only problem is recommendations for membership are then sentto the Mayor for appointment. Members have too undergo training and will beappointed to the CRB when there’s an opening. Board members may serve for up toeight, one-year terms and serve at the pleasure of the Mayor. Don McEvoy andBarbara Schutze were once members of this board but back in 1988, but sincethey were critical of the SDPD, they were replaced. Apparently every term theyrotate and are forced to drop five people. Seems like a convenient way to getrid of dissenters to me.

Well, I think it’s easy tosee a conflict of interest here. I urge everyone to do similar research inthere own town where police brutality and raids are occurring. It’s not hardand with only a little digging the occasional breaks for uncontrolled vomiting,the overwhelming evidence will appear. Local Occupations are correct in theirassumption of the corruption within the establishment. But they need to focuson their own town first. There’s more then enough corruption in our fine cityto keep the Occupation busy for years to come.

Nine Days with Mother

2012-01-02T21:03:00.001-08:00

A Christmas Story, Subtitled “How to Say I’m Gay”

by LEO E. LAURENCE

Originallypublished in the December 1968 issue of the pioneering San Francisco Gaymagazine Vector.

“MOM’S COMING TOVISIT … OH, MY GOD, NO!”

Frantic feelingsof horror often hit Gay kids about to be visited by their mothers. Loverssuddenly become just roommates. Physique magazines are hidden. Lesbian “dates”are lined up to add to the heterosexual illusion.

The whole affairbecomes a phantasy “to keep Mom happy.” Tell her the truth? God, no, I couldn’tdo that. Telling Mom I’m a homosexual would be “just too much.” From the day wefirst come out, Gay kids (male and female) manufacture dozens of reasons whytheir homosexuality “must” be kept a secret. But can there be real love in sucha phantasy?

“If my Mothercannot accept me as Gay, then she couldn’t really love me,” a tall, blond,blue-eyed go-go boy in San Francisco told me recently.

Gay malestypically have a very close relationship with their mothers. As youngsters, Momseemed to always care, always worried about us, and provided comfort whenthings got rough. But as we matured, the scene changed. We started grooving onguys rather than girls. Secretly, we were “coming out.”

The“double-life” living pattern gradually developed. We started to live ourprivate Gay life, while simultaneously maintaining straight appearances on thejob and in our family home.

We fooledeveryone but our own consciences. The guilt began to bug us with disturbedsleep, nightmares, and some even started the slow process of drowning in boozeor drugs.

Christmastimeonly intensified the troubles. ’Tis the season to be jolly, yet for many Gaykids, it’s the bluest time of the year. We see love all over … except insideour own hearts. Those living the double life may sing, laugh, and be merry(Mary?), yet the tinsel and bright lights silently intensify the loneliness.

“There’s threeways of handling a disturbing situation such as this,” says the Rev. A. CecilWilliams, minister of Glide United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco.“You can (1) run away from it, (2) leave it as is and live with the pain, or(3) you can change the situation.”

We’ve all triedrunning away. Most of the quarter-million Gay people in the greater SanFrancisco Bay Area come from other states. Some have run just by moving acrosstown. But it’s all the same; we soon learn that the problems go with us …unsolved.

The secondmethod of coping with our homosexuality is by avoiding any direct discussionwith our families. Teenagers “coming out” can dream up the wildest storiesexplaining to Mom or Dad why they spend so much time with their male “buddies.”And it becomes a full-time job to somehow dodge all those probing questions athome from suspicious parents asking about girls, girls, girls.

Facing the issuehead on and changing distorted parental ideas on homosexuality is a provensuccessful method of dealing with parents, but it’s also the most difficult.“It’s tough, baby, to look at ourselves honestly,” Rev. Williams said. “Ittakes guts, and you can expect some resistance, especially at first.”

The toughestpart is making the initial decision to tell Mom like-it-is. Most parents knowvery little about their own heterosexuality, less or nothing about homosexuality,and never heard of bisexuality, says Ted McIlvenna, director of the NationalSex and Drug forum at Glide United Methodist Church in San Francisco.

That’s why Ihonestly expected my “Nine Days with Mom” during her vacation to be pure hellfor me.

About ten yearsago, my homosexual activities were “discovered” by my university. I wassuddenly exposed. My parents were shocked. Obviously, I couldn’t run away fromit then, ignoring it was impossible, so I was forced to face my family head-on.Still, I tried copping out.

Regularpsychiatric counseling satisfied another college, and my parents. But I adoptedthe double life, since I stayed Gay. Life soon became shallow. I wasrestricting any open expression of the most important emotion in life … love. Iwanted to give my love to another male, but it had to be kept secret from myfamily.

Remember howhard it was when you were a kid to keep a secret from your mother? It’s thesame when you become a teenager, or reach 35. Mothers have a way of knowing, ofsensing the truth … or lack of it.

This year, Idecided things would be different. I wasn’t ashamed to be Gay, so during Mom’svisit, she was going to see her son as-is. I expected the worst.

During her firstvacation days, she graciously met my Gay boyfriends, and seemingly went alongapprovingly as we toured the San Francisco Gay scene … shows, restaurants, anddances. She even saw me smoke and get high.

After two daysof this, she became saturated and could take no more. She blew her stack andthoroughly “read me out.” She bitched about everything.

I just let herblow off the steam, then I had my say.

“If you came tospy on me,” I told her calmly, but with determination, “then your visit was amistake. If, however, you came out to have a good time with your son, then tryto understand my life, don’t try to change it.”

That statementwas like a bombshell. Distorting its meaning and intent, she cried, sobbingthat I didn’t want her here, that I didn’t love her, and she started packing.

Reminding herthat I loved her very much, I simply repeated my original statement. She triedeverything … crying, pouting, and packing. Difficult as it was, I ignored hercarrying on, and said I’d drive her to the airport when she was ready. I meantbusiness. I also meant my original statement.

An incomingphone call broke the suspense. I managed to stretch out that phone call to gaintime, time for both of us to “cool” off … time for emotions to return tonormal. It worked.

We were bothhungry, so we headed for Señor Pico’s for dinner. Hardly a word about theconfrontation was spoken. Mom soon became fascinated by the Mexican-Americandinner, and the Gay waiter’s detailed explanation of it. Sitting at aneighboring table, I recognized a Gay bartender and his lover, both lookingdapper in business suits. It all had quite an effect on Mom.

“I’m nowconvinced that all men have some homosexual in them” she said, as if justuncovering a deep mystery, instead of a basic, fundamental fact of life.

“I’m beginningto realize that there’s a whole lot I don’t understand about this [Gay life],”she said. Progress was finally being made. It was progress through truth, byfacing reality head-on … difficult, but beautiful.

Three days ofher vacation had passed, and our fun was just beginning. Saturday night, I“dated” a handsome young man named Kim. We went to the theatre, then the S.I.R.[Society for Individual Rights] dance.

Several hundredpeople were there dancing. Mom was surprised to see so many Gay “types.” I feltvery strange at first dancing with Kim right in front of my mother.

The shock came alittle later during an intermission. “It’s good to see you having such a goodtime,” Mom whispered in my ear. That comment I didn’t expect, but it felt sogood I almost cried with joy.

Hallowe’en wasthe following week. Explaining that it was “the” night for dragscoast-to-coast, I took her on a tour. Her eyes popped. “I can hardly believeit. They’re positively fascinating,” she said, watching the “girls” parade intothe Fantasy in San Francisco.

I suddenlyrealized something profound had happened in our relationship. I was beginningto be proud to be alive … totally … for the first time in my life. Shecommented on this.

“I think aMother and son should get together after the kid grows into manhood. You haveto educate your Mother, just as the Mother once educated the son as a child.

“I’ve seen kidsin Hippieland that would never try talking this way to their mothers. If thekid was scared as a child, he (or she) will be scared as an adult. Some kidsrun away even though they live in the same house.

“Kids should tryto think of their Mothers as human beings, not as dictators … regardless ofwhat happened in childhood. It’s not easy, though.

“I don’t thinkyou Gay kids respect your Mothers’ intelligence. You can’t talk to your Motheras a grown-up. You think of Mom only as before, as a growing kid. Gay kidsnever allow their Mothers to grow up WITH them,” Mom continued talking.

“Mothers shouldbe sent material about homosexuality: books, folders, the story as seen fromthe Gay life, not a psychiatrist’s couch. If she’s really loving, she’ll readthem.

“I can rememberwhen homosexuality was never mentioned in the newspapers, but times arechanging. I can even remember when a pregnant woman was ashamed to appear onthe streets.

“You Gay kidsshould give your parents a chance to be friendly. It may not work with allfamilies, but if there’s love in the family, they will gradually understand …and accept.

“There’s onlytwo lines in some dictionaries about homosexuality, and that’s all some parentsknow about it. An understanding of Gay life cannot be accomplished by readingthe dictionary,” my Mother said. “It’s too diversified, too different, there’stoo much to it.”

Inside my closetnow sits a Christmas package. Mom carried it all the way from the East Coast topersonally present it to me. Somehow, I already knew what’s wrapped up inside …a gift of love.

Copyright Hypocrisy and the Assault on the Internet

2012-01-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

On November 27, LosAngeles Times business columnist MichaelHiltzik reported a story that exposed the hypocrisy behind the claim from majormedia corporations that their hard line on copyrights is designed to “protectthe artists.” In 2001, Laura Dick Coelho and her half-sister Isa Dick Hackett,heirs and executors of the estate of their father, legendary science-fictionauthor Philip K. Dick, sold writer-director George Nolfi an option on the filmrights to a Philip K. Dick story called “Adjustment Team” for $25,000. Afterspending years trying to place the project, Nolfi assigned the rights to acompany called Media Rights Capital, which financed the movie and paid the Dicksisters $1.4 million to exercise the option. The deal also called for MediaRights Capital to pay the Dick sisters an additional $500,000 once the filmmade back its cost.

The film,retitled The Adjustment Bureau, wasfilmed for a total estimated budget of $50 million and featured a major star,Matt Damon. Released early in 2011, it was a major hit both in theatres (whereit grossed $128 million) and on DVD. But instead of paying the $500,000 theystill owed the Dick sisters, Media Rights Capital not only stiffed them butsued them to recover the original $1.4 million rights payment. The grounds?Though Dick had written “Adjustment Team” in 1953, he hadn’t released it for publicationuntil 1973, when he copyrighted it and sold it to a publisher for an anthology.But the attorneys for Media Rights Capital found that “Adjustment Team” hadactually been published in 1954, in a short-lived pulp magazine called OrbitScience Fiction — and since OrbitScience Fiction’s copyright had expired in1982, “Adjustment Team” was in the public domain and therefore anybody couldmake a film of it without any rights payment at all.

Dick’s daughterscounter-argued that Dick had neither authorized the Orbit publication nor been paid for it. According toHiltzik, they also pointed out “that Nolfi and the producers had plenty of timeto verify the copyright before making the picture, and that in signing theoriginal deal they effectively acknowledged that the rights were authentic.”Certainly it’s preposterous to imagine that a media company would have spent$50 million on a film based on an obscure story by a “name” author without aguarantee that some other studio couldn’t beat them to the marketplace with aquick, cheap adaptation of the same work. More likely Media Rights Capitalsimply had their lawyers go looking for a loophole to save themselves somemajor rights payments — and found one, stiffing the heirs of the story’soriginal creator in the process.

So don’t swallowthe propaganda line from the big media industry that a hard line on copyrightprotection does anything to protect “the artists” who create your favoritemovies, stories, novels and songs. By aggressively extending the length of copyrights,shrinking the allowable “fair use” of excerpts from copyrighted material, andthrough other legal changes the media industry is buying from their paid-forpoliticians through the system of legalized bribery known as campaign finance(in which it’s perfectly legal to buy “access” to politicians by donating totheir campaigns, and it only becomes illegal when there’s a direct quid proquo — “I’ll give you $50,000 if you voteyes on bill X and no on bill Y”), media companies are protecting theirown rights while simultaneously treatingthe actual creators of copyrighted material the same way they always have. Theyexploit the desperation of chronically poor artists and the lure of fame andbig bucks to sign them to one-sided contracts that give the companies, not thecreators, all or most of the income from the creations.

The story of howMedia Rights Capital is trying to screw the daughters of Philip K. Dick out oftheir rightful share of the proceeds from a hit movie based on one of theirdad’s stories happened to break while Congress is considering two bills thatwould vastly extend the policing power of media companies (and pharmaceuticalcompanies too) over the Internet. The version in the House of Representativesis called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (its bill number, in case youwant to write or call your Congressmember about it, is H.R. 3261), while theSenate version has the mouth-busting title “Preventing Real Online Threats toEconomic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,” or “PROTECT IPAct” for short. (It’s the same naming strategy that gave us the “USA PATRIOTAct.”) The bills are supposedly designed to keep American movies, recordings,books and other creative properties from being pirated by overseas Web sites —but their agenda is much more far-reaching than that.

Under SOPA, themore extreme of the two bills, media companies would be able to go after notonly the Web sites that used their copyrighted content without authorization,but everyone else on the Internet food chain who wittingly or unwittinglyhelped them. The companies could go after the Internet service providers(ISP’s) through whom you access the Web, and also online advertisers and thepayment services (like Visa, MasterCard or PayPal) through which you pay foranything you buy online. Indeed, if a media company noticed their content beingposted online by a Web site without authorization, they could demand that ISP’s cut off all U.S. access to that site,advertisers stop buying ads on it, and payment services refuse to channel moneyto it. They could do that without having to go to court first, just on the say-so of the media company’s lawyersthat the site is “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property” — and the targetswould have to respond within five days, a blink of an eye in terms of how litigation usually proceeds.

What’s more, themedia company could target not only the Web site that posted their contentwithout authorization, but every other site on the Web that links to it, or every site that links to a site that links to it,and so forth until just about every site in the world would be touched by thetainted links. Media companies already have the right to send so-called “ceaseand desist” letters to sites like Facebook and YouTube, stating that theircopyrighted material is on a user’s Facebook or YouTube post and demanding thatit be removed. Under SOPA, the companies could sue Facebook or YouTube — andcould also sue the users who put the material on their site, or users whomerely linked to another sitethat had unauthorized copyrighted material on it. And, as the American Centerfor Law and Justice (a Right-wing alternative to the American Civil LibertiesUnion) points out in their excellent fact sheet on SOPA, “SOPA’s private causesof action would allow anyone asserting a copyright or trademark right toeffectively attack and silence both foreign and domestic speakers andviewpoints they may find objectionable.”

In that regard,SOPA would require ISP’s and paymentservices to do what they’ve already done voluntarily to put WikiLeaks out ofbusiness. The governments of the U.S., Great Britain and Sweden all looked forways to stop WikiLeaks, from arresting the alleged source of much of itsinformation (U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning) and holding him underunspeakably barbaric conditions, to pushing rape and sexual harassment chargesagainst site founder Julian Assange, and couldn’t get the site offline. Then,as part of their “patriotic duty,” Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced thatthey wouldn’t send any more money to WikiLeaks from users who wanted tocontribute to it — and Assange eventually ran out of money to maintain the siteand announced he would have to shut it down. The WikiLeaks story should be awarning that the supposed “freedom” of the Internet is a myth: the Internet isreally run by private mega-corporations who can effectively censor its contenteven if governments can’t.

The reason isthat, unlike telephone companies, Internet service providers were never legallydeclared “common carriers.” What that means is that if I phone the San DiegoCity Hall and tell the person who answers that I have planted a bomb in thebuilding, I have committed a crime. Even if I haven’t actually planted a bomb,I have still committed a crime. But the phone company is not legallyresponsible in any way for my crime, even though I could not have committed itwithout their equipment and network infrastructure. It also means that I cancall a friend of mine with similar politics, and the phone company can’t censorour conversation even though the people who own and run it may not like what wehave to say to each other about the need to get rid of capitalism.

An ISP isdifferent. By not being common carriers,ISP’s have every right to censor messages with which they disagree — a rightthe former CEO of Comcast asserted publicly when he stated that he didn’t seeany reason why “my pipes” should be used to communicate political views hedidn’t approve of. They also have legal liability if their services are usedfor allegedly criminal activity. So far, ISP’s have treaded gently on the pathsof political or legal censorship because of an informal principle called “Netneutrality,” which has meant that every piece of data on the Net gets treatedthe same as every other piece of data. “Net neutrality” has given Internetusers an illusion of freedombecause it’s prevented huge media outlets like Fox News from cutting sweetheartdeals with ISP’s to move theircontent through the Internet faster than that from smaller, less wealthy andless politically influential site owners.

But the U.S.Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already compromised the “Netneutrality” principle in a set of regulations that basically said it applied todesktop and laptop computers but not tosmartphones, tablets and the other wireless portable devices through which moreand more people are using the Internet. And even those weak “Net neutrality”regulations were nearly overturned by a big money-dominated U.S. Congress thatwants to turn the Internet into yet another wholly owned subsidiary of thecorporate media giants. This will mean that, as with all other corporate mediaoutlets, the Internet will systematically push Right-wing points of view andcensor Left-wing ones. In a worst-case scenario, the loss of “Net neutrality”and the passage of bills like SOPA could make the organization of Occupy-stylemovements impossible by giving ISP’s the power to censor all anti-corporate messages and keep them off the Web.

In addition tobroadening the censorship of the Web — both by ISP’s themselves and by mediacompanies sending out five-day notices willy-nilly and making ISP’s and siteslike Facebook and YouTube into content police — SOPA is also a direct attack bythe U.S. pharmaceutical industry to make sure that Americans keep paying thehighest prices for prescription drugs of any country in the world. Rememberwhen you used to get e-mails advertising lower-priced drugs from Canada? Youdon’t get them anymore because, responding to lobbying from Big Pharma,Congress made such sales illegal — and SOPA would strengthen those prohibitionsby giving drug companies the same tools as media companies to punish any Website that dared to offer cheaper drugs.

The most bizarrething about SOPA is it’s an attempt to pump up a system of copyrights,trademarks and patents that no longer serves artistic or scientific advancement— if anything, it retards it — and, atleast in the case of copyright, is no longer technologically sustainable.Historically, copyright worked by giving the copyright holder the right toprohibit the manufacture of physical copies of a copyrighted work. Such copiesdid get made — I remember my shock when a street peddler offered me a bootlegcopy of the third Matrix movie, TheMatrix Revolutions, in front of HortonPlaza while the film was still playing in the movie theatres inside — but theyrequired an elaborate physical infrastructure that was relatively easy to findand shut down. With the digital revolution, a book, a record or a movie is nolonger necessarily a physical object: it’s a series of zeroes and ones that canbe moved anywhere around the world literally at the speed of light. (The same thing has happenedto money, which is how hedge-fund operators and “flash” investors can make — orlose — millions of dollars in seconds.)

If I could writea copyright law for the digital age, the first thing it would say is that nocopyright would last for longer than 50 years. Period. Ever. That common-sensepolicy — which was the law in Europe until recently, when the European Unionparliament was lobbied by the big media companies to extend it to 70 years —seems to me to strike the right balance between the purpose of copyrights andpatents (which is not to benefit mediaand pharmaceutical corporations in perpetuity, but is, according to the U.S.Constitution, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securingfor limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to theirrespective Writings and Discoveries”) and the principle that ultimatelyhumanity’s artistic and scientific legacy should belong equally to all.

Second, I wouldbase the new copyright law on a principle known as compulsory licensing. That would mean that copyright holders would nolonger have the power to prevent the physical or digital reproduction andredistribution of their works. What they would have is the right to demand that end users pay them.Instead of trying to put Web sites out of business by sending cease-and-desistletters as they do now — or threatening them and their users with criminal prosecution and damages, as SOPA wouldlet them do — they would simply send them bills. Some forms of artisticendeavor already use compulsory licensing: anyone can perform a copyrightedsong in person or play a record of one on terrestrial radio, andlong-established laws allow them to know in advance how much that will costthem. Compulsory licensing would solve the problem of so-called “derivativeworks” — like hip-hop songs that “sample” bits of previous records, or ShepardFairey’s Obama poster — by allowing reuse as long as royalties were paid. Iwould set up special “copyright courts” to resolve disputes over how muchcopyrighted content was used and how much royalty should be charged for it,modeled on the arbitration panels the Writers Guild uses to apportion writingcredits for movies.

Compulsorylicensing and royalty requirements would also be more effective in putting outof business the so-called “rogue Web sites” SOPA is ostensibly aimed at thanSOPA would be. The lawsuits against Napster and other peer-to-peer musicsharing sites didn’t end this type of copyright violation. What did was the advent of iTunes and its competitors, whichallowed people to purchase online music downloads of consistent quality for areasonable price. Once people get used to the idea that media companies cancharge them for copyrighted content regardless of where they got it from, they’ll be more likely to buy itfrom the companies themselves — so long as the companies don’t get greedy andtry to gouge them with unsustainably high prices.

In copyright,and in intellectual property law in general, the old order is dying and the newone is not yet ready to be born. Media companies are spending huge amounts ofmoney to lobby Congress for punitive bills like SOPA in order to maintain acopyright regime that has been rendered obsolete and unenforceable bytechnological advances. Internet companies like Google are saying that they tooare against “piracy,” buying into the central assumption underlying SOPA evenas they try to defeat the bill because it would cost them money. Once again we have corporate elephantsfighting each other over business models that need to change — and the stakefor the rest of us is whether the Internet will be allowed to be the totallyfree channel of communication we were promised, or it will become just anotherorgan of a dying corporate oligopoly.

SEAN WHERLEY:

2012-01-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

From Activist to Comedian, “Laughing Out Proud”

interview by MARKGABRISH CONLAN

When thepeople who started the Martinis Above Fourth restaurant and bar at 3940 FourthAvenue, #200, between University and Washington in Hillcrest, gave it thatname, they weren’t kidding. The front door is the entrance to an elevator —there’s no other way, at least none visible from the street, to get in — andwhen the elevator lets you out on the second floor you’re right in a narrowlittle lobby that leads to the main dining area. And if you go there the secondThursday of every month and stay from 8 to about 9:30 p.m., prepare to laughyour head off.

That’sbecause that’s when Martinis Above Fourth’s management turns over the space tolocal Queer comedian Sean Wherley for his monthly “Laugh Out Proud” shows. Theystarted in January 2011 and have snowballed to the point where it’sstanding-room only — if you haven’t made a reservationfor dinner before the show, which you can do by calling (619) 400-4500 orvisiting www.martinisabovefourth.comon the Web, good luck finding a place to sit until the room clears out a bit —and they’ve attracted a mix of male and female, Queer and straight, SanDiego-based and out-of-town performers who are genuinely funny.

Wherley spoke to Zenger’s about his unusual background — for a comedian, anyway —and how he’s built up the show. Originally it was largely about giving himselfand his producing partner, Lesbian comedienne Sarah Burford, guaranteed stagetime to perform each month. It’s grown to become a show featuring major, or atleast semi-major, talents in the stand-up world — on December 8 the headlinerwas Shann Carr, a Lesbian who performed for 10 years before Gay male audienceson the Atlantis holiday cruises and who ruefully told about how the breakup ofa 15-year relationship seven years ago plunged her into the nightmare world ofInternet dating.

Laugh Out Proud is a comfortable, amusing way to spend aThursday evening. The comedians occasionally hurl F-bombs but mostly they talkquietly and reasonably about the absurdities of their lives and avoid thetasteless raunch that afflicts all too many straight comedy shows today.Wherley, a tall, thin, rather gangly but attractive man, focused his ownperformance December 8 on how Gay men tend to be shorter than straight men andhow hard it’s been for him to find partners he won’t literally be looking downon (my joke, not his, so don’t blame him if you didn’t laugh).

Zenger’s: Sean, just tell me a little about yourself andyour background, and how you got into comedy.

Sean Wherley: I grew up in Wisconsin. I was the sixth of eightkids, Catholic family, went to public schools, always wanted attention. Therewas never enough. It’s almost to be expected with that many kids, I think.Eventually I made my way to Minnesota to go to college, majored in politicalscience, and spent my last year of college studying overseas in East Africa, inTanzania. That was an opportunity to understand another culture, anothercountry, and avoid the work world for at least a year.

When I cameback, I made my way to Washington, D.C. because I’d always wanted to work onCapitol Hill. I was there for three years. I worked for two of those withmembers of Congress, a U.S. Representative from Michigan and a U.S. Senatorfrom Iowa. But I got kind of tired of D.C., came back to the Midwest —Minneapolis, where I’d gone to college — and lived there for about five years.I was very involved in politics, running political campaigns. I worked for anenvironmental organization.

But then Istarted thinking about the opportunity to come to a warmer place. I came to SanDiego on Martin Luther King weekend in 2006 with a friend who had once livedhere. Seventy degrees, I’m wearing a T-shirt, and the vibe of the city remindedme a lot of Minneapolis: very laid-back, very easy to get around. On the flightback I decided I would quit my job. I gave my two-weeks’ notice the next dayand moved out here a month later.

I’ve continuedto do public-policy work since I’ve been here. It’s been five years. But thecomedy piece was something I’d always thought about. People said, “Oh, you’reso funny. Have you thought about comedy?” I would always say, “No,” when infact I had thought about it in 1997. Iwas living in Minneapolis and started going to comedy clubs just to watch, justto observe. But then I moved to D.C. and lost track of it, never thought toconsider it again.

It wasn’t untilthree years ago that, working with my therapist, I discovered that comedy is something I want to do, but I’d always been tooafraid to pursue it. I started slowly by watching DVD’s of various comedians.Then I went to watch live shows here in San Diego, and I eventually enrolled inan improv class at the National Comedy Theatre. In that class I met a guy namedChris, who was also interested in doing stand-up. Chris and I started writingtogether, and eventually we went up for the first time in April 2009.

Zenger’s: Who would say are the comedians who have mostinfluenced you?

Wherley: The one that I always enjoyed most as a kid wasSteven Wright, a very deadpan one-liner. If you remember him, very plain in appearance,frizzy hair, would never break from that kind of sober appearance, which isreally clever, really thoughtful. He always stood out. As I’ve gotten older,I’ve really come to like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, BillMaher. What I like about them is they’re smart and they’re clever, they’rebringing up different premises, and even if the premise itself might be onewe’ve heard before, their “take” is unusual. They just really seem to be havinga good time when they’re up there. Eddie Izzard, too, I forgot. I really enjoyhim.

Zenger’s: How did the Laugh Out Proud series come about?

Wherley: I co-produce the show with a Lesbian comedienne.Her name is Sarah Burford, and the two of us started about the same time andgot to know each other in the spring of 2010. We discovered that we were bothstruggling to get stage time. It wasn’t really clear why, but we thought ratherthan just lament our situation, why don’t we create an opportunity forourselves?

We wanted to dosomething that was different from all the other shows that were going on in thecity, whether it be at bars or restaurants or clubs. We thought let’s do it ina space that’s welcoming to the LGBT community, one that they’re familiar with,one that they would come to. I had struggled to get a lot of my Gay friends tocome to my shows, and I was never sure whether that was because they weren’tfamiliar with some of these bars or restaurants, or they didn’t feelcomfortable coming into these neighborhoods, whether it be Ocean Beach orClairemont Mesa.

So I thought,well, let’s give them an opportunity to come to a place that’s for them. Westarted working with the owners of Martinis Above Fourth in January of thisyear. There hadn’t really been anything that had been done like it on a regularbasis. There would be the random show out of various bars or restaurants, butwe wanted to do it on a monthly basis and we wanted to have LGBT comedians, asmany as possible, in each show. We also wanted to bring headliners down fromL.A., people that most San Diegans would not have seen.

Zenger’s: What’s been the experience like finding thetalent? Has it been difficult to get the kind of people you wanted and do theshows you envisioned?

Wherley: Well, locally there are only so many LGBT comedians.I think we have one, two, three, four others besides Sarah and me. That’spretty much it as far as I’m aware. So then we’ve had to look to L.A., andthat’s been good. It’s a long drive for them, but there are eager to find a newspace, a new city. I think they’re discovering that we’ve got a good thinggoing. The turnout has been excellent. Martinis seats roughly 130, and we’veaveraged over 100 over the first six shows.

We’ll alsooccasionally have a straight allied comedian, usually from San Diego but we’vehad some from L.A. too. And that’s nice. It’s good to mix it up, and I thinksome of them have been really surprised, too, with the experience. The audienceis welcoming and eager to support them, to see them do well.

Zenger’s: So you’re not trying for the kind of atmosphereof some comedy shows, where everybody’s out there thinking, “Oh, my God, I’vegot to get my big break tonight, and if anybody else does well that’s justgoing to get in my way.” That’s kind of the stereotype of a comedy show. You’vegot all these different people, and especially if it’s a place like L.A. wherethere are industry people in the audience, they’re thinking, “Oh, my God, I’vegot to get my big break, and if anybody else looks good, that’s going to killme.”

Wherley: The big break is probably not going to happen atour show! There typically aren’t industry people there. It’s too far away. ButI think for that L.A.-based comedian, it’s a different vibe. First of all,there are only so many LGBT shows in southern California. There are a couple inLong Beach, one or two in L.A. What we’re really marketing is something uniqueto San Diego and only a handful in southern California: LGBT bar, LGBTaudience, mostly LGBT comedians.

It’s an intimatesetting. It’s a classy setting. It’s not a club, but a restaurant. And with thenew owners kind of making investments in the property — they’ve built a stage,they’re putting in a better sound system, better lighting — I think the peoplewho come down from L.A. will be really impressed.

Zenger’s: Maybe it’s a relief for them to have an audiencewhere there aren’ta lot of industry people, and there isn’t this “my career is hanging in thebalance” thing, and they can just relax and be funny.

Wherley: Yes, and I think the competition up there is muchfiercer than here. Just the sheer number of people who gravitate there to docomedy. But a lot of people who do comedy up there use it as a launching pointfor acting, whereas if you’re doing it here in San Diego that’s probably notyour motivation. You really do just want to hone your craft.

We’ve beenreally happy with the comedians who have wanted to come down. I mean, that’sasking a lot. That’s four hours, probably at least, on the road. We pay ourheadliners up front, so at least there is some guarantee, but for everyone elsethey’re working off the tips we collect.

Zenger’s: What do you think distinguishes Gay comedy fromanything else? Is it just your typical stand-up act with Gays — “Take myboyfriend, please!” — or is there a Gay sensibility that you see in your ownwork and in some of the performers you’ve hosted?

Wherley: There is an experience that is unique to LGBTpeople, and historically we haven’t been onstage. One of the first “out”comedians to perform — I think he appeared on the Tonight showwith Johnny Carson, I can’t remember his name now — it was maybe in the 1980’s.We’ve been hidden, like Hollywood in general. For me it’s an opportunity tobring a perspective to the stage that I’m not necessarily hearing at other showsin San Diego. And I don’t think the audience is, either. Just like otherminority groups: people of color, women. For them to get up there, they standout immediately, visually.

For us, we maynot stand out visually, but if we choose to come out in our set, our material,our jokes, it’s something new for the audience to hear, to respond to. And Ithink it makes for a richer experience for the audience. I’ve been to showswhere it’s one 25-year-old white straight guy after another, all kind of thesame appearance and almost the same perspective, and at the end of the nightyou’re kind of numb because you can’t remember who’s who. The stories and the“take” are so similar.

I think whatwe’re doing with our show is an opportunity to connect with our audience. Whilethere are obviously some well-known LGBT comedians out there, they’re nottypically the ones getting their own shows or specials on Comedy Central. Andso this is a chance to hear their stories, in effect, affirmed through the LGBTcomedians on stage. And it’s safe. The audience doesn’t feel that they’re beinglaughed at, like maybe how we felt inthe past. It’s an opportunity to look at ourselves and poke fun at the realityof what it may mean to be LGBT.

Zenger’s: You’ve used that ghastly set of initials,“LGBT,” throughout this interview. Have you had any Bisexual or Transgenderperformers?

Wherley: Bisexual, yes. Not Transgender. We are aware ofsome in L.A. that we are interested in having. I’ve said to Sarah I’d love tohave someone Trans: one, to mix up our show; but also I’d really like to bringTransgender people into the audience, because I don’t really think we’ve hadmany, if any, Transgender people at our shows. I think that would beexhilarating, because again, that’s a perspective I’m not even hearing. Somepeople might call Eddie Izzard Transgender, but that’s not really how heidentifies. So it would be something altogether different.

Zenger’s: What would you say is different about a Gaycomedian? What separates you from the indistinguishable 20-something straightguys you talked about at this putative show you attended? How would you sayQueer people look at the world differently, in terms of what inspires them tojoke about it and what they would find funny?

Wherley: I think we’re used to being a minority. We’re usedto being isolated. And as a result, our stories aren’t always shared. Ourperspective isn’t necessarily understood. So when I get up there, I think I amtalking about things that people may be aware of, but haven’t heard on stage.And so I’m basically giving them the invite to laugh. I definitely poke fun atmyself and other Queer people in front of what are majority straight audiences.And I enjoy it! And I’ll tell the same jokes when I go to a Queer audience.(I’m mixing up the lexicon for your sake.)

What’s differentis that by being a minority, you are used to seeing things differently. It’sreally powerful to use that identity, and yet connect with the majority, forinstance a straight audience. Sometimes I’ve held back and not told any jokesthat indicate I’m Gay, but I’ve come to realize that that’s what makes me standout when I’m up there. And I’ll mix it up. It’s not all stuff that’sGay-related. I’ll talk politics and current events and observational humor. I’lltalk about my family, about having grown up in the Midwest, and how life isdifferent in California. And those things are understood by people regardlessof their orientation.

Zenger’s: I remember in the 1960’s when African-Americancomedians started performing and getting major club dates, first there was DickGregory, who was politically radical and made being Black and the civil-rightsstruggle the center of his act; and then that paved the way for Bill Cosby, whobecame famous as the first Black comedian whose jokes were not dependent on hisbeing Black. Do you think Gay comedy is going to evolve in the same way? You’llhave someone who is out there and is Gay, is generally known as Gay, but is nottelling Gay jokes?

Wherley: I think it’s already happening. There’s onecomedian I know who’s Gay — not local — and I watched one of his DVD’s. It wasa one-hour special, and he never referenced being Gay. Now, is that progress oris that him just choosing not to come out? I’m not sure. I mean, I think there’sdefinitely a desire on the part of Queer comedians to broaden theirbase, and so some may feel compelled to talk less about being Queer. But Ithink we can’t help it. Whoever’s booking shows knows who we are. And that mayhelp us or hurt us, and so you might as well accept it and incorporate it intoyour act.

Zenger’s: One of the most brilliant things I ever saw wasnot from a Gay comedian, although it twisted the knife in somewhat the sameway. It was a panel about marriage equality. It was at the Malcolm X Library.Most of the speakers were Black, and there was this one African-Americanminister of a storefront church in San Diego — actually part of a nationalmovement to create a Queer-friendly Black church. One of the other Black peopleon the panel used the line, “Well, being Gay is not like being Black. Everyonesees me and knows that I’m Black. They don’t necessarily know that you’re Gay.”And this Black Gay minister, in the queeniest voice you could imagine, said,“Well, actually the moment anybody sees me they know I’m Gay, too.”

Wherley: Nice. There was a guy who performed at BourbonStreet. He did not reference that he was Gay. In fact, some of his jokes talkedabout girlfriends. And then I later discovered that he is Gay. SoI guess we do have that luxury, if we quote-unquote “pass.”

Zenger’s: That baffles me. Why would he want to staycloseted in a Gay establishment?

Wherley: I don’t know if he was aware what that place was.He was from L.A. It was peculiar. That’s why, when I later discovered it, Ithought, “This is really odd.” Why wouldn’t he have tried toconnect with his audience and switched the joke? Maybe he does usually say “girlfriend.” He could have said“boyfriend” and it would have worked just as well. But he didn’t tweak any of it, so I was led to think he was straight.

Zenger’s: Was he afraid of one of his L.A. friendscatching him in San Diego, Tweeting back and saying, “This guy’s a Queer”?Word gets back to the industry andhis career chances are finished?

Wherley: He’s out on line. Justin Martindale is his name.We’re looking to try to get him to one of our shows. So he isGay, identifies as such [on his Web site], but he chose not to, and it wasunusual.

Zenger’s: Of course, maybe he’s Bi and he has girlfriends and boyfriends.

Wherley: It’s possible, but I found the word “Gay” attachedto him. Now maybe that’s for those who don’t know what “Bi” means.

Zenger’s: In fact, I could imagine a Bisexual comedianhaving a greattime with this. I remember in the 1970’s a woman named Lindsay Maracotta, whowrote for Playboy, publisheda book about the singles scene, and there was this marvelous line in it, whereshe quotes one of her girlfriends as telling her, “I’m dating a guy who’sBisexual. And I don’t mind him being Bisexual. It’s just twice as many peopleto be jealous of.”

Wherley: A friend of mine who does comedy — she startedhere, now she’s in L.A. — she’s the one on our show who identifies as Bi, andshe did a show in L.A. and actually came out on stage to her mother and auntand cousins, who were in the audience. That’s something straight comedianscan’t do. I told her, “I think there are better ways to come out!” I came outby letter. It may be considered old-fashioned, but a little more discreet, Iguess.

Zenger’s: How did your family react?

Wherley: I wasn’t there, but not well. I think they wouldhave preferred it be shared in private. Understandable. I did have the pleasureof performing in Madison, Wisconsin in September. It was the first time I hadperformed in front of my parents and two of my siblings. That was a lot of fun,because I do tell a couple of jokes about my mom, so it was nice to have herthere, and then I could kind of tweak them a little and acknowledge that shewas in the audience, and have some high-school classmates. It was really fun.It was the second-largest audience I’ve had, and that was 250. Cold, rainynight, late September, and everyone came out. It was just a lot of fun toperform in front of them. It’s really a rare opportunity to perform out of thearea, and that was really special. It reminded me why I enjoy doing comedy. Itwas thrilling.

Zenger’s: What have you got coming up for January 12?

Wherley: The headliner is a straight woman. Her name isVicki Barbolak. She’s kind of in the mold of almost Roseanne Barr. She presentsherself as someone trashy. I think it may be more of a personathan reality, but really just kind of sassy in an overweight 1980’s kind ofway. It’s this whole schtick, but itworks, and I think Gay men in particular will really like her.

Who else is onthat show? Sarah and myself, we perform at every show. Another straightcomedian, Kyle Ray, who has a Gay brother and does a lot of Gay-relatedmaterial, really clever stuff. I’m really looking forward to having him on theshow.

Zenger’s: Where do you think Laugh Out Proud is going inthe future?

Wherley: We just had our first show with the new owners ofMartinis, Jim Simpson, and they are invested in their operation. They justbuilt a new stage. There was no stage before, so that was a big improvement. Ithelps the audience see the comedians, and whatever other entertainment they mayhave, much better. The sound system, as they have described, is going to be ahuge improvement, allowing people farther away to hear it better. The lightingsystem that they’ve described is going to be a huge enhancement, too.

We really areeager to continue putting on a good show, and that means a mix of men andwomen, people of color and Queer and straight and San Diego and L.A.; that wefill the place — that it seats up to 130, getting close to that — and havingpeople come back because they really had a good time: enjoyed the comedians,felt comfortable.

It’s a freeshow, and there aren’t a lot of free comedy shows of that caliber in San Diego.And I think it’s really special. The headliner we had last month, Steve Hasleyfrom L.A., really enjoyed it. And he’s already told people up there, becausethey’ve contacted us, asking if they can get on. So our hope is that we cankeep bringing people from L.A. who are interested, Queer or straight.

Two Hard Cases, Two Bad Laws

2011-11-27T20:37:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN, Editor

There’s an oldsaying in the legal profession that “hard cases make bad law.” In mid-Novembertwo court decisions threatened to prove that once and for all. On November 14,the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a constitutional challenge tothe Affordable Care Act, the official name of what’s almost universallyreferred to by the pejorative “Obamacare.” Among the questions the justiceswill be ruling on are whether the law can require every American either topurchase private health insurance or pay a “penalty,” “fine” or “tax” (andwhich of those words apply is itself a key issue the justices will have todecide!) to the government; and whether, if the so-called “individual mandate”is unconstitutional, can the rest of the law be sustained or will the wholething be thrown out?

Three dayslater, on November 17, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled thatProtectMarriage.com, the official sponsors of Proposition 8 — the initiative bywhich California voters decided in November 2008 that same-sex couples would nolonger be able to marry in this state — have so-called “standing,” the legalright to appeal federal judge Vaughn Walker’s decision that the initiative wasunconstitutional. The state court got involved when the three-judge panelhearing the case for the federal Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit askedthem for a ruling under state law whether the proponents of an initiative wouldhave the legal right to represent it in court if the people who are ordinarilysupposed to do that — the elected governor and attorney general — won’t.

These are hardcases not only for the legal system in general but for me personally. Thedecision by the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the challenge to theconstitutionality of Obamacare and the likelihood that the Proposition 8 casewill also make it to the U.S. Supreme Court are both potential politicaldisasters for the progressive community. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently inthe grip of five Right-wing ideologues who have already signaled theirwillingness to run roughshod over century-old precedents in order to fulfilltheir role in a political movement aimed not only at winning immediateelectoral and policy victories for the Right but making it impossible thatthose victories could ever be reversed.

Already they’veset aside virtually all restrictions on the ability of corporations toinfluence the political process. They’ve extended the obnoxious doctrine of“corporate personhood” in ways that actually give corporations more rights than mere mortal humans. They’ve usedtechnical nit-picking to deny victims of Wal-Mart’s persistent discriminationagainst women any realistic chance of relief in court. They’ve directlydetermined the outcome of at least one Presidential election, and they’ve foundfor the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment grants anindividual right “to keep and bear arms” that has nothing to do with “awell-regulated militia.”

Given the recordof the current justices — especially the five (John Roberts, Samuel Alito,Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy) who constitute thisRight-wing activist wing which aims, like the modern American Right generally,to return this country to a late-19^th century concept of politicsand economics — believing that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold Obamacare orthrow out Proposition 8 makes about as much sense as believing in Santa Claus.In a November 15 Los Angeles Timescolumn, law professor Erwin Chermerinsky laid out an argument that the Court’sprevious decisions interpreting the constitutional clause giving Congress thepower “to regulate … commerce between the states” virtually require it todeclare Obamacare constitutional.

Chermerinskycited the Court’s 2005 decision in Gonzalezv. Raich, in which “the court held that Congress constitutionally couldcriminally prohibit and punish cultivation and possession of a small amount ofmarijuana for personal medicinal use.” He added, “If Congress’ commerce clausepowers allow it to prevent Angela [sic] Raich from growing a small amount ofmarijuana to offset the ill effects of chemotherapy,then surely it has the authority to regulate a $2-trillion [health care]industry.” The Raich case hit home for me personally because I met AngelMcClary Raich (her real name) when she gave a press conference in San Diegobefore the Court ruled on her case, and I will never forget this frail womanwith failing eyesight for whom only marijuana stood between her and blindness.

Louis Brandeis, the legendary attorney who argued socialjustice cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and then was appointed a Justicehimself, pioneered the idea that appeals courts, including the Supreme Court,shouldn’t just look at the cases before them as a matter of law. They shouldconsider the effects of their rulings on real people. When he was called uponto defend the constitutionality of a statute outlawing child labor, Brandeisfiled a brief devoting one page to the legal issues — and over 200 pages tosociological research showing what child labor did to the children involved,their families and society as a whole. Eventually the liberal justices appointedto the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhoweradopted the Brandeis approach — and then in the 1970’s the Court swung to theRight again and eventually returned to its historic role of relying on crabbed,nit-picking legalisms to affirm the rights of corporations and the rich andslam the doors of justice in the faces of everyone else.

So the current Right-wing majority on the U.S. SupremeCourt will have no trouble declaring Obamacare unconstitutional. Years ofprecedents establishing a broad meaning of the interstate commerce clause?Irrelevant, just as the years of precedents on the legitimacy of regulating gunownership and corporate influence in politics were irrelevant because they gotin the way of the Right-wing majority’s ideological agenda. A contradictionbetween saying a sick woman can’t have marijuana to keep from going blind andsaying the government can’t require people to carry health insurance? Noproblem; the current Court majority simply decides that Congress’s power toregulate interstate commerce applies when Congress does something the justiceslike, and doesn’t when Congress does something they don’t like. What’s more,since virtually all the federal government’s power to regulate the economystems from the interstate commerce clause, if the current Right-wing court cancut back on its reach, they can declare everything from the Clean Water Act tothe minimum wage unconstitutional, and thereby bring us closer to thedog-eat-dog Ayn Rand libertarian world they, like the rest of the AmericanRight, want this country to become.

As for the Proposition 8 case, the idea that a courtdominated by such a hard-line Right majority could actually do something soradical as extending civil-rights protection to same-sex couples seekingmarriage equality was always a pipe dream. The principal pipe dreamer was TedOlson, who before he filed the Perry v.Schwarzenegger case challengingProposition 8 was a charter member of the Right-wing attack machine. Olsonjoined forces with David Boies, the Democratic attorney who had opposed him on Bushv. Gore in 2000, with the idea that a properly framed casechallenging marriage inequality as a denial of equal protection under the 14^thAmendment would win the presumed “swing vote” of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, JusticeKennedy had written the two greatest decisions the Queer community ever gotfrom the U.S. Supreme Court: Romer v. Evans (1996), which threw out an anti-Queer initiative inColorado on the ground that it unfairly handicapped the Queer community inbuilding majority support for Queer rights; and Lawrence v. Texas (2003),which abolished anti-sodomy laws nationwide. But that was then and this is now.The current Justice Kennedy signaledhis change of heart on Queer issues when he joined the majority opinionallowing the Boy Scouts of America to discriminate against Queers and atheistson the ground that they were a “religious organization” and therefore had aFirst Amendment right to restrict their membership. He cemented it when hepersonally made the decision not to allow the trial of Proposition 8 in JudgeWalker’s court to be televised live — and in his opinion he said that whereonce Queers had been the oppressed minority, now it was Christians and othersupporters of “traditional marriage” who were being harassed and deprived oftheir political rights by the Queer community.

The likely outcome of the Obamacare suit is a 5-4 decisiondeclaring the individual mandate unconstitutional as a gross overstepping ofCongress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. It’s less clear whether thejustices will take the more radical step of throwing out the whole law asunconstitutional; it’s possible that Clarence Thomas and/or Antonin Scalia willtake that position in a concurring opinion, but the other three Right-wingjustices will draw back — at least partly because, like the rest of theAmerican Right, they may be so convinced the 2012 elections will putRepublicans in complete control of the federal government and then “Obamacare”will be toast anyway.

As for the Proposition 8 case, the only real question iswhether the vote will be 5-4 or whether some of the so-called “liberal”justices in the minority will find it too radical for the court to declare, asa matter of constitutional law, that the understanding and definition of“marriage” that has prevailed throughout U.S. history — one man and one woman —is a civil-rights violation. And while most of the Right-wing justices willprobably preserve the right of individual states to allow same-sex marriage,Clarence Thomas will file a concurring opinion stating that according to his reading of the Constitution, all laws that allow marriage between anyone other than one manand one woman are presumptively unconstitutional.

What’s more, even if a miracle happens and Ted Olsonsomehow finds five votes on the current U.S. Supreme Court willing to goagainst a half-millennium of American tradition and find marriage equality notonly desirable but constitutionally mandated, that’s not going to be the end ofthe story. The radical Right will immediately mobilize for passage of a FederalMarriage Amendment to nullify the decision. The barriers to a constitutionalamendment are pretty formidable — approval by two-thirds of each house ofCongress and ratification by 38 of the 50 states — but not impossible. Enoughsocially conservative or just plain scared Democrats could well join theascendant Republicans in the next Congress to pass the amendment, and at least35 states have already passed their own versions of Proposition 8.

Both theObamacare and Proposition 8 cases pose uncomfortable moral dilemmas forprogressives. We find ourselves defending fundamentally unjust but politicallyconvenient positions. The “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance isan outrageous concept on its face. Never before in the history of the U.S. hasevery resident of this nation been requiredto buy a product of a private industry as a condition of being allowed to livehere. Indeed, President Obama rightly opposed an individual mandate when he ranfor the Democratic nomination in 2008 — the fact that Hillary Clinton was forit and Obama was against it was one reason I voted for him over her in theCalifornia primary — only to embrace it once in office.

The idea that wehave to buy a particular capitalistproduct as a condition of being allowed to live in the U.S. is obnoxious enoughon its face. The common analogies to requirements that drivers carry autoinsurance and doctors carry malpractice insurance are false. Driving andpracticing medicine are legal privileges, things that the government giveth and the government can taketh away.You don’t want to buy auto insurance? Don’t drive. You don’t want to buymedical malpractice insurance? Don’t be a doctor. You don’t want to buy privatehealth insurance from an industry that adds absolutely no value whatsoever tothe health care system — it just sits there like a vampire, sucking money fromthe system and making its profits by denying rather than facilitating health care — and, ifObamacare is upheld, you’re S.O.L.

As forProposition 8, my heart sank when I heard how the California Supreme Courtruled because I knew having the case thrown out on standing was the onerealistic way we could ever hope for the return of marriage equality inCalifornia. I feel this issue on a personal level because my husband Charlesand I were both politically savvy enough that we got married within the 4½-month “window” between the time the California Supreme Court’s decision formarriage equality took effect and the time the voters reversed it withProposition 8. As I’ve said at more than one marriage equality event, I’m tiredof my husband and I having “special rights” to be married while other Gay andLesbian people in long-term committed relationships who want to marry can’t.

But at the sametime, throwing the Proposition 8 case out on standing would have beenfundamentally unjust to the people who voted for it and the people who workedhard for its passage. As the court declared in its opinion, if the governor andattorney general of the state were permitted effectively to repeal aninitiative simply by refusing to defend it against a court challenge, the wholeidea of the initiative — the people coming together to make laws directly whentheir elected representatives refuse to do so — would crumble into dust.

Though theenormous cost of qualifying an initiative for the ballot and mounting acampaign for it in a state as large as California has turned the initiativefrom a weapon against the specialinterests to one most often used byspecial interests — corporations, wealthy individuals or, in the case ofProposition 8, the enormously well-funded Roman Catholic and Mormon churches —to impose their will on a scared and easily manipulated electorate, it’s stillconceivable that a liberal initiative (like the one consumer advocate HarveyRosenfield just announced to give the state power to regulate health insurancepremiums) could pass and a Republican governor and attorney general coulddecide they would effectively veto it by refusing to defend it against theinevitable lawsuits against it by the corporations it would regulate.

Indeed,something quite similar has actually happened in Wisconsin over the issue ofmarriage equality. The state legislature had passed a domestic partnershipbill, which the radical Right sued in state court to have thrown out on theground that it violated Wisconsin’s version of Proposition 8. Wisconsin’sprevious Democratic governor had defended the suit in court, but when he wasreplaced by Republican Scott Walker, Walker announced that he was dropping thedefense and conceding in court that a domestic partnership bill did constitute legal recognition of marriage equality inviolation of the state constitution. It’s an object lesson in how positionstaken in one context because they seem to offer a way to victory for our sidecan come back to bite us in a different context when the roles are reversed.

Greg Palast Presents Vultures’ Picnic in San Diego

2011-11-27T20:27:00.001-08:00

Investigative Reporter Ties Oil Scandals Into the OccupyMovement

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

On August 28,1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. famously used the phrase, “I have a dream,” as headdressed an estimated 250,000 people on the mall at Washington, D.C. at theclimax of the March on Washington for equal rights for African-Americans.Forty-eight years later, introducing his new book Vultures’ Picnic: InPursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores before a much smaller audience at San Diego’sLesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center, investigative journalistGreg Palast used his own recurring phrase, “This is why we occupy,” to tie hisbook, and its obsessively documented tales of corporate irresponsibility, intoa movement that hadn’t yet gone public when his manuscript arrived at Dutton, abranch of Penguin — the world’s largest publisher — and was readied forrelease.

Written inmock-James Bond style, replete with characters with names like
Goldfinger and Ms. Badpenny, Vultures’ Picnic kicks off with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and travels allover the world, from the coast of Alaska to New Orleans to Liberia toAzerbaijan (which Palast calls “The Islamic Republic of BP”) to Fukushima,Japan and wherever else he can document the abusive amorality of corporationsand how it’s literally killing people. Though his book was available in printform at the event, Palast worked at least as hard promoting the interactiveversion for e-readers and tablet computers — and early on in his speech hemocked Republican rhetoric by saying he’d received a request from Mitt Romneyto take the word “vultures” out of his book’s title and rename it JobCreators’ Picnic.

“We occupy forStanlee Ann Mattingly, an Osage Indian who made $30 a week watching the oiltrucks,” Palast said in the first of several stories from his book which wove aweb depicting corporate power, influence and sheer greed. “She saw them takeout 100 barrels of oil on the Osage reservation and mark down 70 barrels.They’d take 40 barrels and mark down 30. I followed the trucks to the centralloading dock, and the man said, ‘I want more overage.’ In the old days wecalled that ‘thievery.’ Today we call it ‘job creation.’ The guy standing onthe deck was named Charles Koch” — one of the notorious Koch brothers who areamong the principal corporate villains cited by the Occupy movement — “and whenhe was asked why, since he’s already a billionaire and he’s taking $3 fromStanlee Ann Mattingly — Koch said, ‘I want what’s coming to me, and that’s allof it.’”

Palast, who madehis living as an oil company consultant before he got fired and became ajournalist (in Vultures’ Picnic he saidhis last work for the oil industry was a four-volume study of the ExxonValdez tanker spill in 1989 that pointedout that, though Exxon took the public blame, “the real culprit in destroyingthe coastline of Alaska is British Petroleum”), said he received a cable from aconfidential source which said that BP had had a similar spill to the DeepwaterHorizon blowout in September 2008. Youdidn’t hear about it, he explained, because it occurred in the Caspian Sea offthe coast of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan — whose government was so pro-oilindustry and anti-investigative reporting that the Azerbaijani police actuallyarrested Palast and his crew when they tried to film the site of the disasterin 2011.

The spill offBaku occurred, Palast claimed, for the exact same reason the DeepwaterHorizon rig blew two years later: “cheapcement made by Halliburton” that couldn’t withstand the pressure of the oilunder the ocean floor. “They covered it up with bribes, beatings and babes,”Palast said. “Lord Brown [BP CEO] flew in a 727 with two bags and brought theAzerbaijani officials to lap dances in London. One bag was $30 million and theother bag was Margaret Thatcher. Leslie, a double agent for MI-6 [the Britishequivalent of the CIA and the agency the fictitious James Bond worked for], wasa BP executive. He was holding the bag with the $30 million. Lord Brown wantedto hand it directly to the president of Azerbaijan. The president turned themoney over to the Azerbaijani state oil company — and BP provided some weaponryto a guy named Baba, who used it to overthrow the Azerbaijani president in a coup. Three months later, BP got an exclusive contract todrill in the Caspian Sea.”

Palast, who doeshis reporting for British outlets — the Guardian newspaper and the BBC — because no American mainstream media,including PBS (which because it gets so much corporate sponsorship from Chevronand other oil companies, he calls the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”), willtouch his stuff, explained that under British law he’s required to report whathe’s about to publish to the company he’s targeting to ask them whether or notit’s true. When he was about to report that a BP executive had lied to the U.S.Congress in 2009 when he said the company had never had a deepwater drillingaccident, just a year after they hadin the Caspian, BP neither affirmed nor denied it. Instead, Palast explained,“BP sent back a note that said, ‘We followed all the rules and regulations.’ Nodenial. It was a very smart phrase at the time because under British law it wasnot against the law to pay bribes.” According to Palast, BP’s lies cost thelives of Jason Alexander and the other 10 Deepwater Horizon crew members who were killed when the rig blew up inthe Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

As for Palast’scondemnation of PBS as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System,” as part of hisevidence he cited the documentary its acclaimed series Frontline did on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “Nothing about Baku,” he said, “but they didsay that BP had ignored several safety warnings. They didn’t say that PBS had also ignored BP’s safety record.Then they said that BP had no ‘culture of safety’ — unlike Chevron.” Accordingto Palast, not only did the PBS filmmakers uphold PBS’s number one sponsor inthe oil industry as the company whose “culture of safety” BP should haveemulated, the network redesigned its Web site around the same time to deletethe Chevron logo and the acknowledgment of it as the network’s number onecorporate sponsor.

In order tochallenge Chevron’s claim to be the “good” oil company as opposed to BP’s “bad”oil company, Palast ended up in Ecuador, where he was ferried across a lake in“a carved dugout log with a paddle and an indigenous guy paddling it” toinvestigate a spill at a Chevron site. Chevron had been sued by several nativeEcuadorians who said the company had spilled oil into their lakes and hadn’twarned the natives that swimming in the oil-covered waters could be toxic.“Chevron had said this was the biggest fraud in history,” Palast recalled, “andso I asked, ‘Who’s the biggest con man?’ I asked the chief, ‘Didn’t you justhook up with some rich gringos with deeppockets?’”

As Palastrecounted it, the chief was “very formal” as he told him that both his sons hadbathed in the oil-tainted waters, started vomiting blood and eventually died ofleukemia. “The Chevron lawyers said, ‘So these are the only kids that ever gotcancer?’ Then they said, ‘You can’t prove that it’s our oil.’ But I got hold of this document, signed by B.J. Shields, the president of Texaco [before its merger with Chevron], that’s anorder to take all documents relating to oil spilled in the jungle and make them‘ser destrucados.’ I asked thelawyers for Chevron/Texaco to translate, and then I asked if they knew themeaning of the words ‘obstruction of justice.’ They said, ‘There’s always anexplanation,’ so I asked them to send it to me. It’s been two years.”

Palast’swide-ranging presentation included a discussion of the mysterious death of GulfPower executive Jake Horton in Pensacola, Florida in 1989. Palast called him “areal scumbag, until the end,” and said he had been about to turn state’sevidence in a federal investigation of Gulf Power and its corporate parent, theSouthern Company, when he was killed in a plane crash. “In the old days,corporations could not make donations to political candidates,” Palastexplained. “But [Horton] did, and when he got caught and the company let himhang out to dry, Jake said he had a lot of dirt and he went to meet with theattorney general of Alabama. Thirty minutes after his plane took off, it wentboom and both he and his papers were gone.”

According to acontemporary report in the May 22, 1989 Time magazine, three hours after the plane exploded, the local sheriff’soffice received an anonymous phone call. The caller said, “You can stopinvestigating Gulf Power now. We took care of that for them this afternoon.”The article also mentioned at least three other mysterious deaths involvingGulf Power, including Pensacola graphic artist Ray Howell, who disappeared inDecember 1988 as he was about to testify before a grand jury about his work forGulf Power; and Gulf Power director Robert McRae and his wife, who were foundshot to death at their Graceville, Florida home in January 1989. Fredric Levin,Horton’s attorney, told Time thatafter Horton’s death three yellow birds were dumped outside his home andoffice. Levin, Time reported,believed these were “Mafia-style warnings not to divulge the substance of hislast conversation with Horton.”

Horton, Palastsaid, had not only paid illegal bribes to Florida utility regulators on behalfof Gulf Power and Southern Company, he also had evidence that the company wasbilling utility customers for coal it was supposedly mining from its own mines— but the supposed “coal” shipments were actually rocks. After Horton’s death,Palast got access to Southern’s internal records and found they were billingcustomers for $100 million for “spare parts” for their nuclear reactors andpower lines — “spare parts” that did not in fact exist. Palast flew to Englandto try to stop Southern’s bit for a British utility company — and was entrappedin a phony sex scandal which was widely reported in tabloid articles, includingone written by Piers Morgan, now host of CNN’s flagship evening talk show.

Meanwhile,Southern neatly got out of any legal jeopardy by using its politicalconnections to have the laws rewritten so what they had done is no longerillegal. What’s more, Southern and Reliant Energy, a company Palast describesas equally corrupt, have won contracts to build two of the five new nuclearpower plants under $8 billion in loan guarantees enacted under President Obama.According to Palast, some of these plants will be operated by yet anothercompany — Tokyo Electric, the people who ran the nuclear plant at Fukushima,Japan destroyed in the March 2011 tsunami.These companies got the contract, Palast said, by bidding to build each reactorfor $5 billion even though their own internal documents said each plant wouldcost over $7 billion, which, Palast noted, “used to be called fraud and is nowcalled ‘job creation.’”

Palast’spresentation also included a section about “pigs” — electronic devices that aresupposed to monitor oil pipelines for leaks. Once the pig detects a leak, thecompany running the pipeline is legally required to shut it down until the leakis fixed — but, Palast explained, because it’s expensive to have a pipeline outof commission that long, oil companies routinely change the computer softwaregoverning the pigs so leaks go undetected. Palast said he got this story fromsources who refused to be identified or photographed — even with their facesblurred out and their voices distorted — including one who identified himselfas “Pig Man” and said a recent incident in which six people had been killed byan exploding pipeline was “not an accident, it’s a homicide.”

Also on hisdocket were the Keystone XL pipeline, being pushed by a Canadian company todeliver oil from tar sands across the United States — cutting across, andpotentially soiling, several important aquifers, including the one thatsupplies water to the entire state of Nebraska — and a recent ad campaign byCoca-Cola that involves marketing special white cans of Coca-Cola andannouncing that “they’re raising money for endangered polar bears.” This,Palast said, led him to a virtually unreported story that the polar bears onthe Alaskan island of Kaktonic are being moved so the area — part of the AlaskaNational Wildlife Refuge — can be drilled for oil. According to Palast,President Obama approved the permit for Shell Oil to drill off the coast ofKaktonic on August 8, 2011.

Palast’sdossiers can make dispiriting reading — which is probably why he cast the bookas a James Bond-like adventure and gave his villains names like “Goldfinger.”The man’s real name is Michael Francis Sheehan, an American investor who runshis company out of the British Virgin Islands. Sheehan, Palast said, “had paid$3 million to the president of Zambia to agree to have his nation pay off foreign debts with money we gave themfor AIDS medicines.” He also, Palast claimed, got rid of the prime minister ofBosnia and installed a new one who would go along with what he wanted. Palastsaid the Bush administration actually contacted him for his information onSheehan, but the FBI never followed up.

“The Zambiansarrested their own president, and the Bosnians are investigating their primeminister, but the Americans are doing nothing” about Sheehan’s allegedcorruption, Palast said. As for Sheehan himself, the day before Palast spoke inSan Diego Sheehan called the BBC “and said, ‘We have a file on Greg Palast.’I’d like to see it.” Palast said he’s also investigating Charles and DavidKoch, who have become the Left’s current poster children for the evils ofcapitalism, and closed out his presentation with a plea for activists to“occupy the airwaves” and a boast that “we have to tell the vultures the feastis over. Charles Koch, you may be too big to fail, but you’re not too big tojail!”

The Way She Sees It: Jamala Rogers in San Diego

2011-11-20T19:10:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

If there’s onething Jamala Rogers “gets,” it’s that the various progressive struggles — ofAfrican-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native people forcivil rights, of women for equality and Queers for equality and protectionunder the law — are linked. It came through in the way she got the job aspolitical columnist for the St. Louis American, an African-American weekly, in 1994: she confronted the paper’spublisher, Donald “Doc” Suggs, and demanded to know why he had only one womancolumnist, and all she wrote about was religion. Suggs saw her point that hispaper needed a woman writing about politics, and gave her the column she writesto this day.

Rogers’ sensethat all struggles for equality and freedom are linked comes across in her newbook, The Best of “The Way I See It” and Other Political Writings,1989-2010. (“The Way I See It” is the nameof her St. Louis American column;since 2006 she’s also contributed to the BlackCommunicator.com Web site. Thevery first The Way I See It columnreprinted in her book is one from June 1998 called “Human Rights Are GayRights,” which directly took on the religious and secular leaders in theAfrican-American community who oppose Queer rights. “The African-Americancommunity has definitely absorbed anti-Gay messages from the mainstream thatfeeds into the very similar forms of discrimination we experience daily,” shewrote with her usual bluntness. “That should sensitize us not to victimizeothers. This isn’t always so.”

The outspokencolumnist and activist (she’s the chair of the Organization for Black Struggleand the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, and co-chair of theFreedom Road Socialist Organization) came to San Diego November 15 to speak atthe World Beat Center in Balboa Park. Co-sponsored by the World Beat Center andActivist San Diego, Rogers’ speech took place against a nationwide campaign ofpolice repression against the Occupy movement, in which campers protesting theincreasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. were roustedby police using suspiciously similar tactics in various cities.

Rogers’ originstory of how she became an activist reminded her audience that the repression againstOccupy was nothing new. “I was in 1968 in Kansas City, after the assassinationof Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” she recalled. “There were rebellions all overthe country” — itself a revealing choice of words, since the mainstream mediathen and now called them “riots.” “In my community, six people were killed andthe drugstore at which I worked was leveled,” Rogers said. “The National Guardwas called in. My mother said, ‘Don’t go down there. Stay at home.’ So I wentdown there.”

When she did,Rogers recalled, “the first thing that hit me was the smell of tear gas. Butthe most important sight was a U.S. tank coming down the street. It was a clearmessage that you could be killed if you got out of line.”

Rogers said the1968 riot in Kansas City was one of the two most important events that haveshaped her life. The other, she said, was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and theblatantly racist ways authorities handled both the evacuation of New Orleansand the cleanup and rebuilding afterwards. “I had a sort of post-traumaticstress disorder just watching it on TV,” she said. “I went to the Gulf foursummers in a row and saw no changes in the [poor, mostly Black] Lower NinthWard and a lot of things in the[upscale, mostly white] French Quarter. So I wrote a column calling the Bushadministration’s attitude towards Katrina genocide.”

She didn’t justmean that as a metaphor. According to Rogers, “people were shot in the back bythe police as they tried to get away from Katrina, and one person was burned ina car.” She said that, like the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991 andthe 1992 acquittals of the four police officers who beat him, which sparked the1992 L.A. riots, the activities of the police in New Orleans and its suburbsshowed how differently white and Black people see the police.

“White peoplesee the police as really serving and protecting,” she said, “but in lower-classcommunities and communities of color, the role of the police is occupation andrepression.” Indeed, one peculiar sort of hope she holds out regarding theOccupy movement is that its white participants, too, are getting to see thepolice behaving badly. The rousts, the arrests, the meaningless and arbitraryrules, the destruction of property and physical attacks by police on Occupyprotesters are the same things “we get on a daily basis in our communities,”Rogers said.

One story Rogerscovered was about an African-American professor who did a study of how the St.Louis police functioned in communities of color. “”The study was socontroversial, no American journal would publish it. It had to be published inGreat Britain. We felt he should do a presentation to Black mothers who thoughttheir children were doing something wrong because they were getting in troublewith the police. The police in St. Louis had a model of stopping people thathad nothing to do with ‘probable cause’[the Constitutional standard]. They would stop students going to school withbackpacks. The police would rip open the backpacks, saying they were looking fordrugs. If this happens twice a week, sooner or later the kid is gong tobad-mouth the police, or they’re going to be late for class and have a badattitude in school. White mothers don’t have to deal with this. Black sons areprogrammed from the fourth grade to be part of the criminal-industrialcomplex.”

Rogers alsoexposed scandals relating to racism in the St. Louis Fire Department, which sheencountered soon after she settled there in 1972 and which is still going on.“When I first came to St. Louis I was told by a Black firefighter who said thefirehouses were so segregated, the white firefighters didn’t want theirsilverware washed with the Black firefighters’ silverware. That was in 1972,and in 2007 a Black person was beaten for going into a firehouse to use thephone.”

One of thecolumns from her book she read at the November 15 event (“Where’s the Fire?,”page 101) was about Sherman George, the first African-American fire chief inSt. Louis’s history, and how he was denied the control over promotions hiswhite predecessors had had. Eventually the white mayor, Francis Slay — a formercorporate lawyer who was re-elected by wide margins in 2005 and 2009 — firedChief George for “insubordination.” Slay has been in the news more recently fortaking a tough line against the Occupy movement in his city.

Rogers says herwriting and activism are about “the ways people live in a community, and theprivileges and racism that keeps people from not only being equal but realizingour full potential as human beings. Our schools are now under the control ofthe state, and there’s little to offer the kids. I can remember shedding tearswhen Barack Obama was elected president and I worked in his campaign, but thoseof us on the Left know that there are limits to what any elected official can do. We have to raise up ourvoices and talk, and that’s one of the things Occupy Wall Street is doing.” Oneof the things we have to talk about, Rogers said, is how “there’s almost aparallel government, and definitely a parallel military force,” that protectsAmerica’s rich and powerful.

Asked how toreach white people and give them an understanding of the African-Americanstruggle, Rogers said, “You have to really inform people with statistics andnumbers from sources they think are legitimate. In the 1970’s and 1980’s we allheard about the ‘welfare queens’ and not about the welfare corporations get. …Some of it is fighting people with information. The rest is taking people intothe community. People who have relationships with people of color learn aboutit.” She noted that Washington University in St. Louis actually warns theirstudents, “Don’t go north of Del Mar” — i.e., don’t go into St. Louis’s Blackcommunity — “and the kids don’t, except for a few who want to see the wholecity.”

Rogers closedher prepared remarks with a short bit of advice on how to build a better,healthier and more effective movement for progressive social change. “First, dono harm to the movement and the organization,” she said. “Second, do what yousay you’re going to do. We have to deal with homophobia, genderphobia andracism.”

America's Unequal Heritage

2011-11-15T17:35:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN, Editor

The Tea Partymovement has perpetuated a lot of dangerous and silly myths about Americanhistory in its leaders’ and members’ attempts to advance themselves as the onlytrue defenders of America’s Constitution. Some of the earliest Tea Partyleaders even said that the original United States Constitution of 1789 was“divinely inspired” — an idea which would have dumbfounded most of the peoplewho wrote it, who were Deists (believers in God but not in an interventionist God that takes an ongoing rolein human affairs) — and, by implication, that the amendments that have beenmade to it since are not only objectionable but attacks on the divine plan. TheTea Party has largely adopted the position of its coalition partners in theradical Christian Right that the opening words of the First Amendment — “Congressshall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting thefree exercise thereof” — were nota guarantee of religious freedom for non-Christians but simply a statement thatno one branch of Christianity could ever be the “official religion” of theUnited States the way Roman Catholicism is in Italy or Anglicanism is in GreatBritain.

Though claiminga reverence for the Constitution as a whole, the Tea Party has been fiercelycritical of a good deal of it — particularly the birthright citizenshipprovision of the Fourteenth Amendment (“All persons born ornaturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, arecitizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”) and theSixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, which respectively allowed the federalgovernment to collect income taxes and moved the election of U.S. Senators fromthe state legislatures to the people at the polls. Indeed, it’s hard to saywhether the “divine inspiration” the Tea Partiers claim for the Constitution of1789 extends to the Bill of Rights, approved two years later, since aside fromthe Second (the right to bear arms) and the Tenth (federalism and state’srights) Amendments, they don’t appear that enthralled by the Bill of Rights —particularly the ones guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure intheir persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches andseizures,” due process for those accused of crimes and a ban on “cruel andunusual punishments.”

But there’s oneaspect of the U.S. Constitution that the Tea Party is right about, at least inregards to the framers’ original intentions. The Constitution really does make this country a republic, not a democracy, andthe form of government it sets up is intended, among other things, to protectthe rights and properties of the elites — who today are being called “the 1percent” — from attempts by the majority to distribute wealth and income moreequally. You don’t have to take the word of the Tea Partiers for that; it’sclearly articulated in Federalist#10, probably the most oft-cited of the Federalist Papers written in 1787 as part of the campaign to getenough states to ratify the Constitution so it could take effect. Though threepeople wrote the Federalist Papers— Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay — #10 was written by Madison,who quite literally knew more about the Constitution and the “original intent”of its framers than anyone else.

Not only didMadison actually write most of the Constitution himself, but during theConstitutional Convention he also took the notes that are our only primarysource for what went on inside it and how the various disputes over what theConstitution should say were resolved. Sometimes Madison’s notes have been usedfor progressive purposes — as when they were cited as the Supreme Court’sauthority for striking down states’ attempts to impose term limits onCongressmembers. But there’s little comfort for progressives in what Madisonhad to say in Federalist #10. Madisonmade clear that the Founders had no intention of making the U.S. a democracy —even though “democracy” is the word generally (and incorrectly) used todescribe our form of government. Instead, this country was to be arepresentative republic which would, in Madison’s words, “refine and enlargethe public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body ofcitizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, andwhose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it totemporary or partial considerations.”

What that meantin practice was a system in which the electorate would not get a chance to votedirectly for any office higher than their own member of the House ofRepresentatives. Senators would be chosen indirectly, by state legislators, andthe President would be picked by an Electoral College whose members could beselected any way the state legislature chose. What’s more, the pool ofpotential voters would be considerably smaller than what we’re used to now. Atthe time the Constitution was enacted, the states restricted the franchise toowners of “property” — which in 18^th Century-speak meant land. Ittook centuries of struggle before that limited franchise was actually extended.The populist movements of the 1820’s that gave rise to the presidency of AndrewJackson and the modern Democratic Party struck down the “property” requirementand essentially won the vote for all white males.

People of colordidn’t theoretically get the vote until 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment waspassed — and over the next 30 years a campaign of terror and intimidation wagedlargely by white-supremacist Southern Democratic politicians and theirparamilitary arm, the Ku Klux Klan, effectively abolished the African-Americanvote until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And, of course, overhalf the American population remained disenfranchised until 1920, when afterdecades of struggle women won the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. (In afew states some people of color couldvote before 1870, and women before 1920.)

This history isimportant in understanding and dealing with the Tea Party because it highlightshow profoundly reactionary a movement it really is — and how elitist it is,despite its periodic claims to be populist and anti-corporate. The Tea Party isthe latest in a series of Right-wing movements aimed at nothing less thanreversing virtually all the gains progressives have struggled for over the lasttwo and one-half centuries of American history and returning to the originalunderstanding of the Constitution: a limited franchise comprised exclusively ofaffluent people who in any case were not given direct authority to vote on thehighest offices in the land.

During the1980’s and early 1990’s it was a common complaint on the Left that the Right ofthe day wanted to return us to the values and mores of the 1950’s, when Blackswere still on the back of the bus, women were still in the kitchen and Queerswere still in the closet. Then it began to occur to people on the Right thatthere were some aspects of the 1950’s that didn’t fit their world view — like the upper bracket of the income tax, whichwas 91 percent (although almost nobody actually paid that much), and thepercentage of workers in labor unions: one-third, higher than at any timebefore or since. So starting with the Republican takeover of Congress in the1994 elections — after which talk-show host Roger Hedgecock said the newCongress would “undo the mistakes of the last 60 years” (i.e., go back to apre-New Deal economy and society) — they proclaimed an intent to go evenfurther back: to the 1880’s, before Social Security, unemployment insurance,laws protecting workers’ health and safety, to a time idealized in Ayn Rand’swritings as one in which “job creators” (Republican-speak for corporations andthe super-rich) got to amass huge profits and build giant industries while theworkers who actually created their wealth got just barely enough to live on,and sometimes not even that.

Now the TeaParty wants to take us back even farther than the 1880’s — to the early yearsof the United States, when the country was dominated by owners of hugeplantations whose workforces they either owned outright as slaves or paid suchpittances they might as well have, and in which only a handful of propertyowners had political rights at all. At least part of this stems from aRight-wing understanding that a republic can survive only as long as it doesnot allow the dispossessed majority — “the 99 percent,” as the Occupy movementcalls them — to redistribute wealth and income by voting high taxes on the 1percent. Once again, James Madison’s words in Federalist #10 support the Tea Party’s agenda: “A rage forpaper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, orfor any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the wholebody of the Union than any particular member of it.” Madison, who on someissues — notably the freedoms of the Bill of Rights — was among the mostprogressive of the Founding Fathers, would, if he were alive today, quitelikely denounce the Occupy movement as an “improper or wicked project.”

The Tea Party’sdrive to return to the Founders’ desire for a limited republic that wouldensure the dominance of propertied interests — the great landowners who werethe 1 percent of their day — is taking many forms on the ground. It includesnot only such unlikely dreams as a call to repeal the 17th Amendmentand return the election of Senators to state legislatures but a series ofrestrictions on voting rights Republican governors and state legislators arerushing through to keep younger, poorer and darker people from being able tovote at all. Under the guise of preventing “voter fraud,” states governed byRepublicans are cutting back or eliminating same-day voter registration, earlyvoting and mail ballots — used largely by working-class and student voters —and in Florida a Republican legislature and governor passed such draconianrestrictions against private organizations’ voter registration drives that theLeague of Women Voters announced they would stop doing them because, as thegroup’s Florida president Deirdre Macnab said, “We could not put our volunteersat risk of these fines and penalties.”

When they’recovered at all — which, aside from an excellent front-page article in theOctober 30 Los Angeles Times, theygenerally haven’t been by the mainstream media — these restrictions on votingrights have been portrayed as Republican efforts to defeat President Obama andthe Democrats in 2012 by shrinking the pool of potential Democratic voters.That’s just a short-term goal; the long-term intent is farther-reaching thanthat. It was expressed by Florida State Senator Michael Bennett (R-Bradenton)when he called voting “a hard-fought privilege” — not a right, but a privilege, which in legal-speak means a gift (like driving orpracticing medicine) the government giveth and the government can taketh away.“This is something people died for,” Senator Bennett said. “Why should we makeit easier?”

At a time when a lot of the rhetoric on theLeft is openly contemptuous of electoral politics, and many Leftists wronglybelieve that both major political parties are so totally dominated by corporatelobbyists and the 1 percent’s campaign donations that it doesn’t matter whowins elections (it doesn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as it should, but itstill matters), the American Right is pursuing a long-term strategy tore-establish a piece of the Founding Fathers’ “original intent” this countryshould have outgrown a long time ago. The idea that under the guise of a“republic” we should actually be governed by a self-perpetuating elite runscounter to over two centuries’ worth of struggle to build a truly democraticAmerica out of the limited republic the original Constitution bequeathed us. Weignore this struggle at our peril. To paraphrase Senator Bennett, people diedso that wage workers, people of color, and women could vote in this country.Why should we make it easier for the Tea Partiers and the rich people who fundthem to take our votes away from us?

S.A.M.E. to Host Holiday Fundraiser December 9

2011-11-15T17:29:00.001-08:00

The San DiegoAlliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) will host its annual holidayfundraiser Friday, December 9, 7 to 9:30 p.m., at the Bamboo Lounge, 1475University Avenue in Hillcrest. Half the proceeds will go to the defense fundfor the Equality 9, nine S.A.M.E. members and supporters who are going to trialin March 2012 for their civil disobedience action at the County AdministrativeCenter in August 2010 to protest the county’s failure to issue marriagelicenses to same-sex couples after a federal district judge found suchdiscrimination to be unconstitutional. The other half will go to pay medicalexpenses for Occupy San Diego and Canvass for a Cause activist Michelle“Jersey” Deutsch, who needed treatment after she was beaten by San Diego policeduring one of their raids on the Occupy encampment in Civic Center Plazadowntown.

Entertainerswill include singers Joshua Napier (who also performed at S.A.M.E.’s 2010holiday fundraiser) and Drew Searing. There will also be a retrospective videopresentation of S.A.M.E.’s activities during 2011 and other performers to beannounced later. For more information visit the S.A.M.E. Web site,www.samealliance.org

Chaos in the Medical Marijuana Community

2011-11-15T17:22:00.001-08:00

news analysis by LEOE. LAURENCE, J.D.

Faced withpowerful pressures from federal prosecutors and an aggressive city attorney, medical-marijuanadispensaries are also struggling with disunity in their own ranks.

There are twomajor community organizations involved: the Americans for Safe Access (ASA), abroad-based organizations with several “chapters” spread throughout San Diego county;and a financially stronger group representing dispensaries, the Patients CareAssociation’ (PCA).

Although theirinterests are nearly identical, they aren’t talking to each other.

And the PCA issplit between local leaders who successfully scored a victory by forcing thecity council to repeal its ordinance that was a de facto ban on dispensaries, and a man who is trying topersonally take all the credit for that victory, Randy Welty.

Disaster Expected

Welty is pushingtwo ballot initiatives, one locally andone statewide. To pay the hugecost of these initiatives, Welty is pushing the PCA to put on a huge gala with$500 tickets. No way in hell that will work, especially with no professionalsproducing the gala event and an impossible, one-month promotional time. Thisisn’t La Jolla, and even there a sizeable lead time is required to promote andadvertise a major event.

Welty, however,is polished in selling, and he’s trying to do it again with the twoinitiatives, though copies of neither initiative are available.

The PCA meetingsare nominally run by 28-year-old dispensary owner Alex Scherer. But, accordingto PCA members, Scherer has difficulty chairing the meetings because Welty“takes over” with long speeches that make him into a “Rambo” character of themedical marijuana community. There is a lot of resentment locally because Weltyseems to be trying to take credit for the hard work of locals.

“It’s eitherWelty’s way or the highway,” said one PCA member critically. When a recent PCAmeeting voted to give control of a major project to a local board, rather thana statewide group run by Welty, Welty got upset and walked out of themeeting. The tension in the PCAmeeting was so thick you could cut it.

After hereturned from his “smoke break,” the conflict continued.

“I’m not goingto work with the local group,” Welty said bluntly. “You have to put me incharge to get my support.

“We need $5,000by tomorrow, but only have $2,000,” he added.

Everything hediscussed during his speeches was in general terms with no specifics.

Even theso-called “budget” for the gala he was promoting didn’t have detailed figures,though the event was just weeks away. A six-page promotional document hedistributed listed “expenses” at $85,000, but didn’t give specifics of thoseexpenses.

The major incomefrom the “gala” event was the tickets at $500 each, and he anticipated selling600 . . . to whom?

With talk of twoinitiatives, one local and another statewide, Welty didn’t answer a question asto which would control local dispensaries.

There wasconsiderable talk about lawsuits that have been filed against local and federalprosecutors, but nobody at the PCA event had details of any of them.

Photo caption: AlexScherer, 28, of Ocean Beach runs meetings of the Patients’ Care Association,when Randy Welty isn’t giving a speech and taking over. Photo by Leo E. Laurence.

A Few Minutes with the Real Andy Rooney

2011-11-15T17:17:00.001-08:00

He Personally Apologized forInfamous 1990 Gay Slur

reminiscence by LEOE. LAURENCE, J.D.

Andy Rooney, whoproduced weekly CBS commentaries on 60 Minutes about the absurdities of everyday life, was practically deified when hedied at 92 on Nov. 4th, just weeks after his farewell broadcast. CBS News saidhe died of complications after minor surgery.

He had writtenand aired 1,097 original essays on final broadcast on October 2, and had workedfor CBS News for 62 years.

The network hadhired me in 1996 to work on its coverage of the Republican National Conventionin San Diego.

One day whilewalking in a secure section behind the convention center, I found myselfwalking behind a hump-backed old man wearing a suit that looked like he hadslept in it.

I particularlynoticed that his shoes were so worn out that the old man was literally walkingon the sides of the heels. I thought he looked homeless … but I figured ahomeless person couldn’t be inside the security zone limited to only CBS Newspersonnel.

However,everything about this man looked poor, even his unkempt hair.

Out ofcuriosity, I followed him right into the huge tent used by CBS News to feed itsentire crew. I still hadn’t seen his face.

Not until we gotto the long, food line did I realize that I had been following theworld-renowned Andy Rooney. Oddly, everyone was ignoring him.

After we got ourfood, he sat alone at a table and I asked if I could join him.

“Of course,” hesaid, amicably.

His clothes werea mess. He sat bent over his food, looking even older than the 79 he was.

Though I was 65at the time, he treated me like a grandson over lunch.

Usually whenmeeting a famous person, I’m the one asking questions as a journalist. ButRooney was filled with questions for me. Heasked about my family and my life, seemingmore interested in me than I was about him.

Whenever I askedhim a question, he managed to twist the answer around to talk about my life,not his.

Somehow, he mademe feel special, as if the worldrevolved around me, rather than him being the superstar.

Yet I wasstunned by his homeless look.

During ourcasual, lunchtime conversation, I was especially surprised when he interruptedthe flow of our chat with an admission: “While you don’t look Gay, I guess youare and I want to apologize for a commentary I made in 1990.

“I’m nothomophobic, and I made a big mistake by comparing homosexual marriages with smokingand drinking that can lead to premature death.”

That surprisedme. He was able to read me so correctly, and he was still uncomfortable with a broadcast that he had made so manyyears ago.

He had beengiven a three-month suspension by CBS News for that commentary.

I still rememberthat he looked homeless to me.

NICO D’AMICO-BARBOUR:

2011-11-15T17:06:00.001-08:00

“Born-Again” Activist with Canvass for a Cause

interview by MARKGABRISH CONLAN

For the last two years, people — mostly young — havebeen accosting passers-by on the streets of San Diego wearing professionallyprinted T-shirts with a distinctive logo reading, “Legalize Gay.” They’re partof an organization called Canvass for a Cause, founded in the wake of thedefeat for marriage equality in California when Proposition 8, which bannedlegal recognition of same-sex marriages, was passed by voters in November 2008and a similar initiative, Question 1, was passed in Maine a few months later.Canvass for a Cause was started to get the marriage equality message out toresidents not only in San Diego’s so-called “Gayborhoods” of Hillcrest, NorthPark and University Heights, but throughout the city. It was also designed tofinance itself and raise money so its members could not only spread the messageof marriage equality but get paid for doing so.

Zenger’sinterviewed Nico D’Amico-Barbour, regional director of Canvass for a CauseOctober 13, which by coincidence was also the date the San Diego police didtheir first of several attacks on the ongoing Occupy San Diego camp-out in theCivic Center Plaza downtown. The police originally ordered everyone out of theplaza, then relented and allowed them to stay but only as long as they didn’thave tents. My interview with Nico coincided not only with the police attack onOccupy San Diego but also the controversy surrounding the decision by the boardof Equality California not topress for repeal of Proposition 8 in the 2012 election, and the suddendeparture of its executive director, Roland Palencia, after just five months inthe job. In his comments on the Occupy movement and Equality California,Canvass, Nico stressed that he was speaking for himself and not for Canvass fora Cause.

Nico so strongly supports Occupy San Diego that he’sbeen spending time at the occupation site and originally wanted us to do theinterview there, though his duties with Canvass for a Cause made him reschedulefor the Canvass headquarters at — ironically — an old Mormon church just southof 10^th and Robinson in Hillcrest. While we were doing theinterview, we were interrupted by a young man coming to apply for a job withCanvass for a Cause, a long-time staff member who needed Nico’s attention, anda phone call with a person Nico was letting go. They’re certainly a busy group,not only with marriage equality and other Queer issues but also a subsidiaryorganization called Gay Groups Give Back, which raises money for non-Queercauses like earthquake relief for Haiti. Canvass’s Web site describes the groupas “strictly progressive, occasionally Queer.”

What’s interesting about Nico in particular and themembers of Canvass for a Cause in general is how much they show a level ofdedication and commitment more often associated these days with the Right thanthe Left. The infectious excitement with which he described Canvass’s growthdoesn’t sound all that different from a capitalist entrepreneur waxing eloquentabout a particularly successful start-up, and his personal dedication toactivism reminded me so much of what I’ve heard from born-again Christians thatI decided to headline this article “‘Born-Again’ Activist.” The remarks Nicomade as we were finishing the interview — “When you are so exhausted and tired from doing the work that you feel youneed to do to help others that you feel that you just can’t physically do itanymore, that’s when it’s time to take a break … Most people cannot honestlysay that they’ve been activists” — show a quasi-religious dedication to thecauses he cares about that goes far beyond what most of us either would orcould maintain.

To join or contact Canvass for a Cause, visit theirheadquarters at 3705 10^th Avenue in Hillcrest, phone (619) 630-7750,e-mail them at info@canvassforacause.org,contact the Canvass for a Cause page on Facebook, or visit their Web site at www.canvassforacause.org. An audio versionof this interview was previously posted for streaming at http://zengersmag.posterous.com/nico-damico-barbour-regional-director-canvass#, or for download at https://rapidshare.com/files/1024242343/01_Nico_D_AmicoBarbour__10_13_11__radio_edit_.mp3

Zenger’s: Let’s start by you telling me a little aboutyourself, and how you got into activism.

NicoD’Amico-Barbour: My first experience withanything LGBT [Queer] was when I first came back from Italy. My parents were inthe Navy, so I spent the second half of my first decade there. I came back tothe United States when I was 10, and my parents took me to theUnitarian-Universalist Church of San Diego. It’s probably one of the mostliberal churches in the world. In the early 1980’s the Unitarian-UniversalistAssociation put out a mandate saying that all ministers had to marry Gaycouples — and that was in the early 1980’s!

So from a veryyoung age, I was playing with little boys and little girls who had two moms ortwo dads. It wasn’t strange to me. It wasn’t weird. It was just how I grew up.But at the same time, I didn’t really have a great grasp on the difficultiesthe Gay community faced. That didn’t come about until high school, when Ibecame a little less sheltered and I got to see a bunch of kids from a lot ofdifferent lifestyles, and what those different lifestyles and cultures thoughtabout the Gay community. I went to a fairly progressive school, but thatdoesn’t mean that I wasn’t exposed to some homophobia.

I got involvedin the GSA, Gay-Straight Alliance, as a result, and while there I met a verygood friend of mine at the time. Her name was Noelle, and she became like asister to me. She was very closeted. She had a terrible time coming out. It gotto the point where I and a few of her friends would basically force her to goto Hillcrest and hang out with us. And we would just be like — “Oh, there’s agirl over there. Why don’t you tell us three things that you notice about her.”We would say, “Come on. Be honest with yourself, really.” Later she became very open, and because of that I went to a lot of eventswith her.

I joined theGSA. I did school-wide awareness events such as Day of Silence. People tookbets on whether I could do it, whether I could keep my mouth shut all day. ThenI got into the Decline to Sign campaign, which was a volunteer effort towardsmaking sure that Proposition 8 wouldn’t even get on the ballot. That was myfirst experience with actual politics.

However, afterhigh school I drifted away from activism. I didn’t have as much time to do stufflike that. I had to worry about getting a job and paying the bills. I wasmanaging a small coffee shop and I went to a church event. I met a girl thereand we were talking, and I was saying, “I’m sort of between jobs right now. Ihate my job. It sucks. I’m in a small coffee shop. What do you do?” And shesaid, “I fight for Gay rights.” I said, “So you volunteer a lot?” She said,“No, no, I get paid to fight for Gay rights.” And I’m like, “Hold the phone.Say what? You can get paid for that?”

I was working atCanvass for a Cause less than a week later. The very first thing I said was,“Sign me up.” As I came to work here, I went out, I did voter outreach, Isigned up members and recruited volunteers. More and more, I just needed more.I literally would go up to people here at the office and say, “I need more. Ineed to do more stuff.” They started giving me more stuff, and within a coupleof months I got a promotion. A couple of months after that I got anotherpromotion, and I’m pretty dedicated to working here now. I spent some time inLos Angeles opening up our second office, the L.A. office. I spent three monthsup there making sure that office was off the ground, in the black, ready to go.Then I came back to San Diego, and now I’m moving into a regional position. I’moverseeing the San Diego and Los Angeles offices.

Zenger’s: Can you tell me a little about Canvass for aCause: how it started and how it works?

D’Amico-Barbour: That’s a very long story! Canvass for a Causestarted as a group of six pissed-off activists in the aftermath of Proposition8. Nobody in the community was actually doing anything. They wereall just “strategizing.” A lot of people, the six pissed-off activistsincluded, said, “Listen. We would literallyhave more of an effect on the Gay rights movement if we just went up to doorsand just talked to people. We could literally just go up and say, ‘Knock-knock,Gay,’ and that would have more of an effect than doing nothing, because atleast people would be talking about it.”

They had thisidea about going out and fundraising, and using those dollars to run volunteerevents where they would get their volunteers and activists to go intonon-supportive neighborhoods and persuade voters to come back to the side ofequality. It was an amazing idea, but it wasn’t something they had any way togerminate and do an actual campaign. It looked like they weren’t sure if it wasgoing anywhere or not, until they had what they like to call the Bat-symbol inthe sky moment, the moment where they said, “We need to go help. That’s whatwe’re talking about.”

What that wasfor us was something called Question 1. Question 1 was the same exact thing asProposition 8, except that it happened in Maine. In 2009 Maine passed a Gaymarriage bill through their House and Senate, and it was signed by theGovernor. It was set to become effective on January 1, 2010. However, theNational Organization for Marriage showed up and qualified a special electionfor October 2009. So, because Question 1 was a constitutional amendment thatwould ban Gay marriage pre-emptively, the No on Question 1 campaign put out anational call for help through all these different activists across thecountry.

The ones here inSan Diego, our founding members, went. They didn’t get paid for it. Theyliterally were volunteers for three weeks. The only thing the campaign providedfor them was support or housing. They went and, thanks to their volunteerexperience and the organizing experience they had, they helped run volunteerevents and recruit volunteers for the entire state of Maine. And on their wayback, they were thinking, “God, we can’t believe this! We’re going back tonothing. We just spent this amazing, amazing time in Maine doing thisorganizing work, and we have this strong feeling about what should happen in California. We should do this. We shouldkeep doing this.”

Literally on the plane flight back from Maine to San Diego,they went on the IRS Web site and registered Canvass for a Cause as anonprofit. So that’s where Canvass for a Cause was born, 5,000 miles aboveKansas City, Missouri. But When they got back to San Diego they hit the groundrunning. As our executive director, Tres Watson, likes to say, we started with$20 and a Discover card, two volunteers and donated moldy space.

The way weoperated at first is we would fundraise, go out and recruit volunteers, andthen we would put those fundraising dollars and volunteers towards projectswith coalition partners, where we would go out into non-supportive areas andpersuade voters. We kept growing as an organization and eventually moved out ofthe donated moldy space. We moved into a nice little executive suite downtown.It was kind of cool, except that it was a tiny, tiny little space, and we keptgrowing as an organization.

Eventually wegot to the point where we really needed another make-or-break moment, and whatthat was for us was the disaster in Haiti. When you saw these images ofthousands dead, thousands more displaced, there was this incredible feeling of,“Man, we need to do something.” What that was for us was a project called GayGroups Give Back. We became coalition partners with other groups in thecommunity, and in the name of the Gay community we fundraised money to send toHaiti to get survival packs in the hands of families, so they could survive formonths while they waited for more permanent help.

We were able tohelp 12 families that day, and what’s more, we did it in the name of the Gaycommunity, which was something that was really needed. The Gay community at thetime was seen as somewhat secular. We want people to help us with our issuesbut we don’t necessarily want to help everyone else with theirs. So that wassomething that we were endeavoring to do, and it was an awesome feeling. We dida lot of work, and what it showed us was that we didn’t need to throw ourvolunteers at these other organizations. We could run our own volunteer events,because we organized that entire event ourselves.

That’s reallywhen the field program was started here at Canvass for a Cause. That’s when westarted hiring field directors. That’s when we started doing field work. Andfrom that point on, the rest is history. We just kept growing and growing andgrowing, adding more to our field programs, taking on more and more events, andnow we’re at the point where we not only work on our own campaigns but peoplewill literally come to our field committee meetings and say, “We’ve got thisgreat idea. Can you help?”

One example iswe did a prisoners’ rights rally a few weeks ago. It was literally brought tous by a woman whose husband was in prison and on a hunger strike. She literallysaid, “I’ve never done this before. I’ve never organized a rally before, and Ifeel I would be lucky to get 200 signatures at this rally.” We helped her out,and we got something like 370. Now she’s personally thanked us for teaching herall of these methods she needed to organize that rally in order to organizearound her specific issue.

Zenger’s: How is Canvass for a Cause funded?

D’Amico-Barbour: Canvass for a Cause is a completely grass-rootsorganization. We’re funded by thousands and thousands of donors every singleyear who believe in what we do. The largest donation that we’ve ever had out inthe field is $508. And yet, despite that, we manage to operate with 50activists in two cities here in California, operating on no more than $508contributions at a time. And the reason we are able to do that is when we goout there, people are constantly funding us.

Because weoperate at the grass roots, it helps keep us honest. We’re not working for oneor two donors who can dictate what we do or don’t do. We’re working forourselves. We know what we want to do, and if people disagree with us and don’tagree with the work we’re doing, they won’t give us donations anymore. That’sone of the things that’s so special about working in the grass-roots field:it’s completely self-sustainable. But also it keeps movements honest. Itensures that movements are going to live up to their promises, or else theirfunding is just going to fall out from underneath them.

Zenger’s: Any comment about the decision by EqualityCalifornia not toseek the repeal of Proposition 8 on the ballot in 2012? Personally, do youthink the community should be doing a campaign right now or not?

D’Amico-Barbour: On a personal level, I would say absolutely. One ofthe sad things about the campaign is that during the original Proposition 8campaign we had something like 400 volunteers statewide, and yet a few weeksafter Proposition 8 passed we had hundreds of thousands of people up and downthe state marching in the streets in protest. They had the time to take awayfrom their daily lives to come protest, but they didn’t have the time tovolunteer in the first place. That’s what Canvass for a Cause is. We’re outthere activating voters. We like to say that Canvass for a Cause is theantidote to apathy. If someone feels strongly about this issue, they shouldn’tjust sit on the sidelines. They should go out and figure out what it is thatthey can do to improve the movement.

Of course Ibelieve that we should be fighting to repeal Proposition 8 next year. But ifevery single person in the state isn’t behind that — if every singleperson sitting at home reading this article isn’t going forward, moving forwardon this issue and doing everything they can — then we might not be able to get equal rights. We need everyone on board. This isn’t something that five people canwin. This is something that takes an army of advocates and activists, allworking on human rights issues.

Zenger’s: That’s how the people on the other side gotProposition 8 in the first place. They had thededication, they were able to mobilize their forces to get it on the ballot,push it through, and change a 15-point deficit in the early polls to afive-percent victory on Election Day.

D’Amico-Barbour: Exactly.

Zenger’s: So what you’re saying is we need to be at leastas organized as they are.

D’Amico-Barbour: At least, if not more. Canvass for a Cause has tonsof volunteer events all the time. We have tons of opportunities to getinvolved, but more so than just Canvass for a Cause, the progressive movementhas so much more potential than people give it credit for. People assume thatthings are going to happen because they vote a certain way. But the fact of thematter is that when you’re an organizer, you’re not just producing your ownvote. You’re producing thousands of votes as you go out and talkto people.

So what I wouldwant your readers to do is ask yourselves, “Do I want to be one vote to theelection, or do I want to contribute 1,000?” Because you can contribute 1,000easily. Even if it’s not with Canvass for a Cause, you can find ways toorganize. You can go out and, even if you just go door-to-door in yourneighborhood, knock on random strangers’ doors and say, “Hey, do you supportGay marriage? Really? Why not?,” at least you’re doing something about it.

Zenger’s: You said that people, especially on theprogressive side, think they can achieve social change by electing the right people.One source of frustration to me has been that the Right seems to understand thelimits ofelectoral activism a lot better than the Left does. The Right seems tounderstand that your electoral activism and your direct action out in thestreet need to work together, and the Left doesn’t seem to have a clue aboutthat. Leftists seem to think that’s an either/or choice.

D’Amico-Barbour: One of the things that makes me sad is that everyday I would go out in the field, I would hear at least one person say, “Oh,don’t worry, don’t worry, it’ll happen.” That sentence is the reason why we don’thave Gay rights in the United States. “Don’t worry, it’ll happen.” NO! It will not “happen.” If you’re saying that “it’ll happen,” that means that you’renot doing what you need to be doing to ensure that it will. If someone caresabout his issue, they should get out and do something about it. And the samewith every other issue as well. Being an active member of a democracy is morethan just about voting. It’s about organizing and speaking your beliefs.

Zenger’s: We’re speaking while the Occupy Wall Streetprotests are just about a month old, the Occupy San Diego protest is about aweek old, and one of my fears about that is that instead of realizing thatthere has to be an electoral component as well as doing those kinds of actions, we’re going to notbe able to translate a lot of that good energy into positive change.

D’Amico-Barbour: I would disagree with that, and the reason I woulddisagree is because when someone becomes activated on any issue, they start tolook at the world in a completely different way. When I first came to Canvassfor a Cause, I had done a little bit of work on Decline to Sign, but that was nothingcompared to the work I’m doing today. When I first came to Canvass for a Cause,sure, I had political beliefs, and I even talked to people when the moment wasright about those political beliefs.

But what doingactivism work teaches you is that it isn’t about believing in politics and thendoing what you need to get a certain vote through, or to get a certain electionto happen, or to pass a certain bill, or to get a certain person in office.It’s about seeing the world in terms of not how it is or how it should be, buthow you can improve it and how you can make it better. Sometimes that’s acompromise, and sometimes that’s a complete and total victory.

But as long asyou’re looking at the world in that light, and as long as you’re thinking abouteverything in terms of how it can change, you can make positive growth. I thinkwhat Occupy San Diego does is, even if it doesn’t bring that electoralcomponent into it, it is awakening so many people. There are people downtownwho are walking through that area and seeing everything that’s going on downthere, and asking and figuring out what’s going on. When that person has thelightbulb moment, when the lightbulb finally goes off in their head — even ifthey’re not doing that electoral work right there, they’re finally activated.

Now you’re goingto be seeing that sort of thing everywhere, in everything from the food you eatto the clothes you wear. We should alwaysbe thinking about the social impacts we’re having. A great example is I refuseto buy new clothes because I know most of them are made by sweatshops inforeign countries. That, in its own way, is a form of activism. And looking atyour entire life that way is how you can truly contribute to society.

Zenger’s: One possible outcome I can see from the Occupymovements is that, by stressing how much both major parties are in thrall tothe corporate agenda, they might actually make it easier for the Republicans tosweep the 2012 elections. The kinds of people who three years ago werevolunteering for Obama are turning up at these things and saying, “Well, he wasn’t the Messiah. Therefore, we shouldn’tbother to vote,” and everyone from our side who doesn’t bother to vote is avote for the Republicans and the Tea Party to take complete control of thecountry and move it in the direction they want, which is quite different from what wewant.

D’Amico-Barbour: I think that right now, the progressive movement isgoing through a sort of cocoon phase and a rebirth. Up until now, so much of ithas been about some sort of centralized movement. Right now people are finallywaking up. People are realizing that it’s not about becoming part of something;it’s about doing things for yourself. And yes, that includes voting, and itincludes voting for the right person. But it’s not about being swept intosomething. It’s about being able to find our own way.

Zenger’s: Why can’t the Left be more like the Tea Party?

D’Amico-Barbour: I don’t think that’s the answer. Becoming like theTea Party means being swept up in a movement. People in the Tea Party don’tnecessarily even understand what they’re fighting for. They’re fighting becausethey’re angry and they’re involved in this movement. However, they’re notthinking for themselves. I don’t think that the answer for the progressivemovement is to become more like the Tea Party. It’s to become the complete oppositeof the Tea Party. It’s to individualize and educate every single person, and toactivate every single person to become their own organizer.

Zenger’s: That’s an interesting statement, because a lotof the criticism of the Occupy movement in the mainstream media has been thatat least when you go to a Tea Party rally, you know what their group standsfor. When you go to one of the Occupy events, so the argument goes, you’restepping into a group of people that don’t have a unified set of demands.

D’Amico-Barbour: The Occupy movement isn’t about a specific set ofdemands. It’s about educating the public and bringing people outside of theirdaily lives. If you go down there, there’s no power, there’s no electricity,there’s no showers. We’re lucky there’s a restroom. That means that everyaspect of modern society that distracts us from the issues that affect humanrights and human suffering here in the United States is removed. You’re notbogged down by everything that usually bogs us down in daily life. All that’sleft is a pure sense of community, understanding a progressive forward visionand the need for activism and positive movement.

So many timesI’ve met people out in the field who don’t want to talk to me until I say, “No,you’re going to have to talk to metoday.” And by the end of that conversation they want to volunteer with us 10days a week! The reason why that happens is because long before I managed tohave a conversation with them, they were thinking about their daughter’s soccergame and their son’s recital, and about the groceries and what they need to dofor work, and what the boss said last time, and their mother-in-law is comingfor dinner that night, and all these things about their daily life. Until someonehas a conversation with them that pulls them away from all that and says,“Stop! Forget all that for a second. These other things are happening.”

Zenger’s: I guess what’s going through my head is the fearthat the 2012 election is going to be a major change for this country, and it’snot going to be the change we want. It’s going to be the total takeover of theRepublicans and the Tea Party, and they will move this country as far to theRight as Germany was moved by the Nazis in 1933.

D’Amico-Barbour: We don’t know that to be true, and Iwould actually argue that right now the Occupy movement is making a lot ofpeople wake up. A lot of people in the United States are waking up in a waythat they never have before, and if they aren’t now, they will soon, becausethe Right is going crazy right now. and They’re gathering support, but they’regathering support from people who are scared. They’re gathering support usingfear. They’re not gathering support using education and understanding, and inthe end education and understanding is always going to win. It just sometimestakes time.

I personallythink the election is not going to be as bad as you think it is. I think thepeople are going to surprise you. But even if it is, it will always get better.I take pride in that, and it will always get better because there will alwaysbe people like me and groups like Canvass for a Cause that will not stop, andwill continue to fight no matter whatthe odds are against them. The beginning of Canvass for a Cause was by no meansimpressive, but we continued to grow and we continued to fight. We continued tostrive until we became what we are today.

And if everysingle person took as much drive and as much initiative as Canvass for a Causeas an organization has, then we would have every human right and every humandignity that people have been calling for in the United States. It’s just thatpeople sit by and do nothing, and that’s why we don’t have what we have now.

Zenger’s: I know. I put out a newspaper and cover a lot ofevents, do alternative media, do publicity, get things on the Web, and I askmyself sometimes, “Mark, are you really doing enough? Are you really doing everything you could be?”

D’Amico-Barbour: I think the answer to that question is when you areso exhausted and tired from doing the work that you feel you need to do to helpothers that you feel that you just can’t physically do it anymore, that’s whenit’s time to take a break. That’s when it may be time to spend some time onyourself, and I can understand people that were in activism and spent a lot oftime in activism and leave it to do their own things, because there comes atime in your life when you need to take some time for personal care.

Most people cannot honestly say that they’vebeen activists. They can honestly say that they’ve been contributing members ofsociety, and that in itself is respectable. But every single person has it inthem to be an advocate and an activist, both for themselves and for thesuppressed minority groups that do not have the means to speak for themselves.When every single person can honestly say, “I have been an activist and I havedone good work,” that will be the day when the United States will finally bewhere it should be. And even then there will be more work to do.

Learn to Be Latina: Diversionary’s Comic Romp

2011-11-15T17:04:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Learn to BeLatina, Diversionary Theatre’s currentproduction, is a comic romp that’s funny and entertaining start-to-finish.Enrique Urueta’s script is a satire on so many sacred cows that whenDiversionary’s production finally opened for previews on November 13 — two dayslate, mostly because it took longer than expected to work out the show’selaborate choreography — John Alexander, the theatre’s executive director,announced at the beginning, “If you’re not offended, it means we haven’t doneour job.” Directed by Iris Saratial Misdary at a whirlwind pace that forces usto accept Urueta’s stylized plotting and character setting without giving ustime to pick it apart for dramatic inconsistencies, Learn to BeLatina is a delightful skewering of ourcommon notions of fame, ethnicity and sexual identity that leaves a lot ofsacred cows butchered in its wake.

It begins in theoffices of Funky Artists’ Development (the initials F.A.D. are prominentlydisplayed on the back wall of Matt Scott’s effectively stylized set), a recordcompany where three identically dressed executives, Bill (Dangerfield G.Moore), Will (Steve Smith) and Jill (Amanda Cooley Davis), are looking for theNext Big Thing. A potential Next Big Thing arrives in the person of HananMashalani (Tamara Dhia), a Boston native and recent graduate of William andMary College in Virginia, from which she emerged with a theatre arts degree, aheavy-duty student-loan debt, and a demo CD produced for her by a boyfriend whobecame an ex-boyfriend when she caught him in his dorm room taking it up theass from a guy who, just to mix up the signals a bit further, Hanan thought hada cute ass of his own.

Hanan is alsoburdened with a problematic ethnicity. Though she’s U.S.-born, her parents wereimmigrants from Beirut, and in the post-9/11 era Lebanese = Arab = terrorist.One of the show’s funniest scenes, in fact, is a bizarre parody of post-9/11stereotyping in which Bill, Will and Jill immediately switch their perceptionof Hanan from potential dance diva to potential suicide bomber, hiding undertheir desk in cowering fear when she tries to fetch her bag and doing anhilarious re-enactment of the attack on the World Trade Center. So they call inthe company’s fearsome “ethnic consultant,” Mary O’Malley, MBA, Ph.D. (FaerenAdams), who’s so scary that in Keven Anthenill’s sound design her entrance isheralded by the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. What happens next will be obvious to anyone who’sbothered to notice what the play is called, but Urueta teases us with it forseveral minutes until O’Malley finally blurts it out. Hanan, it seems, is “thewrong shade of brown,” but that can be dealt with if only she can — you guessedit — “learn to be Latina!”

The ethnicremodeling includes a name change — the brain trust at F.A.D. decide that ifthey just drop Hanan’s last name and put an accent over the second vowel in herfirst, “Hanán,” she’ll sound suitably Latina — plus Spanish lessons fromO’Malley’s omnipresent hand puppet Calcetina (who speaks in an accent Adamsseems to have got from watching Lupe Vélez’s old “Mexican Spitfire” movies) anda multiple-choice test designed to measure her “Latina I.Q.” The testquestions, projected for us in PowerPoint, have some of the same ridiculousethnic stereotyping that’s made Gustavo Arellano’s syndicated column “¡Ask aMexican!” a delight. The one person in the F.A.D. operation they don’t turn to for how-to-be-a-Latina advice is the onegenuine Latina present, “office bitch” Blanca (Olivia Espinosa), who not onlyhas the real ethnicity Hanán is trying to adopt but also has a raging crush onher (well, it’s a Diversionary production so there had to be Queer charactersin it somewhere!) and wins herheart — or at least her body — through their shared interest in an obscure1980’s TV show called Gem.

Learn to BeLatina is performed in two acts, andneedless to say, during the intermission Hanán skyrockets from unknown toinstant superstar. Her first single, a remake of an obscure dance tune called“Latin Heat” by 1980’s mini-phenom La Juana (who didn’t even last long enoughto be a one-day wonder: she went from fame in the morning to obscurity bynoon), soars to the top of the charts. So does her first album, which Uruetaalmost inevitably saddles with the ironic title For Real. She’s still unhappy, though, not only because thestar-making machinery is carrying her farther and farther away from who shewanted to be and what sort of music she wanted to make but also because she hasto live in mortal fear of being “outed” as a Lebanese, a Lesbian or both. Itall comes to a head the night she’s scheduled to appear on the Grammy Awards,and …

Along with thelaughs, Learn to Be Latina offersscathing social commentary on the transitory nature of fame and the extent towhich we accept blatantly false and transparently silly tales aboutcelebrities. Sometimes we take these corporation-created figures to our hearts,sometimes we want to burn them at the stake (“You Americans!” Rudolph Valentinocomplained in 1923, “You build up stars just for the fun of tearing themdown”), and sometimes we follow them with the same sick fascination with whichwe watch auto accidents (what else were we doing with Michael Jackson for thelast decade of his life?). We’re willing to accept what the corporate machinetells us they are, then we react with ferocity and rage when we find outthey’re not like that at all.

The charactersin Learn to Be Latina change ethnicities— or at least ethnic signifiers — at the drop of a thin dime. Their sexualorientations are equally malleable, as they are in real life and aren’t in the “born that way” mythology of the Queermainstream (ironically the exit music is Lady Gaga’s recent hit of that title!).From the moment they’re introduced we’re told that Bill is married(heterosexually) and Will is Gay, but throughout the play there’s a running gagof them sneaking out of the office together — when one has to go to thebathroom, the other always accompanieshim — for reasons we figure outin a microsecond even though the other characters remain oblivious to the end.The ethnic masquerades continue when Hanán gets booked for an interview on Elena — she’s called “the Latina Oprah” and that’s howFaeran Adams, who doubles the role, plays her — and gets confronted with aphoto of herself and Blanca making out. “I’m not Lebanese! And I’m not aLesbian, either!” Hanán blurts out, thanks to a playwright delighting in thesimilar sound of the words for both her forbidden identities.

Learn to BeLatina is really a tour de force for the women in the cast. Though she isn’t given anopportunity to perform as a singer or dance diva — and therefore we’re never sure whether Hanán is agenuinely talented musician being forced into a rancid commercial mold or ano-talent being built up into manufactured stardom (i.e., whether she’sChristina Aguilera or Britney Spears) — Tamara Dhia is fully the mistress ofher role. She superbly manages the transition from scared wanna-be tofrustrated superstar, babbling her lines at rapid-fire pace as the former andmanaging the spaced-out look and demeanor of the latter. She’s matched superblyby Adams, who as O’Malley is a really formidable and relentless villain; and byEspinosa, who as the one truly likable character in the whole piece suppliesthe earth-mother grounding Urueta clearly intended. Espinosa is also creditedas “dance captain,” whatever that means, while Anna Sarao gets a choreographycredit; they both deserve accolades for getting non-dancers to move as to themanner born.

Matt Scott’s setdesign is simple and effective, though it works better in the first act thanthe second. Michelle Caron’s lighting is functional and appropriate, thoughshe’s not as challenged as she would have been if the script had included anactual Hanán performance. Raquel Barreto’s costume designs includeappropriately sleazy outfits for Dhia to wear as the public Hanán, a forbiddingblack pantsuit for O’Malley, and entertainingly unisex business drag for Bill,Will and Jill. Luke Olson’s “projection design” offers engaging PowerPointshows that satirize business presentations. Sound designer Kevin Anthenillseems to have a collection of virtually every mediocre dance record made in the1980’s and 1990’s, and he even makes the overused Carmina Burana music work. Learn to Be Latina is a start-to-finish delight whose satire steals inon you while you’re busy laughing at its more outrageous gags, and Diversionaryhas done it full justice in this engaging production.

Learn toBe Latina runs through Sunday,December 18 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights.Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays (except November 24) through Saturdays and 2and 7 p.m. Sundays (no evening performance November 20). Tickets $31 Thursdays& Sundays, $33 Fridays and Saturdays. For tickets and other information,call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org

S.A.M.E. Presents Dec. 13 Showing of Bayard Rustin Biopic

2011-11-15T17:02:00.001-08:00

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

The San DiegoAlliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) and the Peace Resource Center arepresenting a special screening of Brother Outsider: The Life of BayardRustin, a 2003 documentary about thepioneering Black Queer activist who issued the original call for the 1963 Marchon Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the famous “I Have aDream” speech. The showing will take place Tuesday, December 13, 6:30 p.m. atthe Peace Resource Center, 3850 Westgate Place in City Heights.

Rustin — whosename, incidentally, was pronounced “BYE-ard,” not “BAY-ard” — was a pacifist in the 1940’s who went to prison ratherthan serve in the U.S. military during World War II. He was also a Blackcivil-rights activist and a Gay man who lived long enough to come out as suchand even make a statement shortly before the end of his life in 1987 thatwhereas in the 1960’s Blacks had been the cutting edge of the civil rightsmovement, by the 1980’s it was Queers who had taken that role. Rustin was acounselor to Dr. Martin Luther King, though the two men broke not only overRustin’s sexual orientation and King’s fear that it would taint the movementbut also because they took opposite positions on the war in Viet Nam.

Though a womanwho knew Rustin attended a screening of the film at the San Diego PublicLibrary in 2003 and said she had marched with him in 1961 in New York City onthe first-ever protest in the U.S. against the Viet Nam war, the man who hadgone to prison rather than fight in World War II refused to oppose the Viet Namwar in the late 1960’s. The film explains Rustin’s tacit support of the war aspartly due to his friendship with President Lyndon Johnson and partly becausehe believed that a stand on the war would only detract from the civil rightsissue — quite the opposite of Martin Luther King’s position, which was thatopposing the war was just as much a part of his moral witness as opposing thesegregation and oppression of his own people, and was therefore an issue onwhich he could not compromise.

Thanks largelydue to his otherwise inexplicable refusal to come out against the war in VietNam, in the late 1960’s Rustin became the living symbol of Blackaccommodationism and the man the militant “Black Power” activists most loved tohate. The film included clips from two filmed debates Rustin had with BlackPower leaders, one with Malcolm X in 1962 and one with Stokely Carmichael in1967. In the latter, Rustin criticized the Black Power movement for calling onBlacks to carry guns, arguing that it was insane for people to arm themselveswith rifles and knives and think that wasgoing to defend them against a government armed with bazookas and tanks.Carmichael in turn attacked Rustin for being willing to work within theDemocratic Party, arguing that America’s two major parties were both “evil” andBlacks needed to stop making “lesser of two evils” choices at the ballot box.It’s a debate as old as two-party politics in America; it goes at least as farback as the formation of the Free Soil Party in the 1840’s by abolitionists whoweren’t willing, as people like Abraham Lincoln were, to align with the WhigParty as the lesser of two evils on slavery.

A peculiaraspect of Rustin’s career was his arrest in 1953 in Pasadena for having sexwith two other men in a parked car — which was used against him for the rest ofhis life (the film includes a 1963 clip of racist Senator Strom Thurmond usingit to denounce Rustin as a “pervert”) and which no doubt contributed to hisdisinclination to stand in the limelight and his withdrawals from the Kingcircle and other positions where he thought the presence of a convicted sexcriminal would detract from the civil rights issue. The film also covers hiscareer as a singer (he sang backup vocals on Josh White’s 1940 album ChainGang) and his late-in-life relationshipwith a white man one-third his age.

For moreinformation on the screening, please call the Peace Resource Center at (619)263-9301 or visit the S.A.M.E. Web site at www.samealliance.com

Queer Democrats Endorse Occupy San Diego

2011-10-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

Also Support Death Penalty Repeal, Congressmember Filnerfor Mayor

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Bob Filner

Hud Collins

Marty Block

Dr. Shirley Weber

Sid Voorakkara

Thepredominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality — holding their firstmeeting since changing their name from the San Diego Democratic Club —overwhelmingly endorsed Occupy San Diego and the Occupy movement generally onOctober 27. They passed a strongly worded resolution, which the San DiegoCounty Democratic Central Committee had also approved, not only defendingOccupy San Diego’s right to protest in the Civic Center Plaza but alsoapproving the group’s goals. The club also endorsed the recently introducedSAFE California initiative, sponsored by California Taxpayers for Justice, thatwould abolish the state’s death penalty and replace it with life imprisonmentwithout the possibility of parole. And they endorsed the one major Democraticcandidate for Mayor of San Diego in 2012, Congressmember Bob Filner.

“Theoverwhelming influence of corporate interests over public policy andinstitutions — exacerbated by greed, mismanagement, and corruption — has causedcatastrophic levels of economic inequality, financial distress, environmentalharm, climate crisis denial and other injustices felt by the majority ofAmericans,” read the pro-Occupy resolution passed by both the county party andSan Diego Democrats for Equality. “Under the current conditions ofcorporate-owned media and corporate financing of political campaigns, politicalleaders and the media have failed to address and remedy these systemicproblems. … The Occupy movement on Wall Street, in San Diego, and around theworld is peaceably and authentically giving a voice to millions in the 99% ofthe population who have not been heard.”

The resolutionstates that the county party and the club both stand “in solidarity with the‘Occupy’ protesters and their call for economic and social justice; … encouragethe movement’s evolution toward increased political engagement and policyreforms; support the protesters’ constitutional rights to free speech andpeaceful assembly; and call on the City of San Diego and other public agenciesto protect their rights fully and grant them the opportunity to occupy publicspaces without intimidation or duress.” Ironically, the club passed theresolution just a few hours before the San Diego Police Department raidedOccupy San Diego’s encampments at the Civic Center Plaza and Children’s Parkdowntown in a failed effort to end the occupation.

While the countyDemocratic party’s endorsement of Occupy was unanimous, the club’s vote had onedissenter, Bob Leyh. “I can’t support this,” he said. “I know we’re a liberalclub, but are we really so far out there that we would endorse this movement? Ijust can’t figure out what they’re all about, and I don’t even know what toendorse.” Leyh challenged the resolution’s description of Occupy as“peaceable,” saying there had been riots at Occupy events in Oakland and Rome.“They don’t speak for me,” he said. “If they want to be politically engaged,[they should] come and join clubs, get involved that way.” He also accused theOccupy demonstrators of forcing the food carts in Civic Center Plaza to close —a news report other members said was not true — and disrupting the City Councilmeeting on October 25, two days before the club’s meeting.

“Bob, I didn’tknow you were in the top 1 percent,” joked longtime club activist Cindy Green.“They speak for me. I am in the lowest of the 99 percent. I’m a retired nurse.I live on Social Security and the little bitty pension that I get. I was one ofthem in the 1960’s. I’m proud of them, and I want this resolution to pass.”

“I’m actuallyoffended that there’s even a question as to whether we’re going to endorsethis,” said Tres Watson, executive director of Canvass for a Cause, themarriage equality organization that has provided volunteers and logisticalsupport to Occupy San Diego. (Many people at the occupation site can be seen wearingCanvass for a Cause’s trademark “Legalize Gay” T-shirts.) “I’d respectfullysuggest you actually speak to one of the protesters before you take the drivelthat comes through the filter of the media,” Watson told Leyh. “It’s been somisrepresented, you can’t even believe the reports. We’re very active in givingthe Occupy movement some political muscle, and training them to go door-to-doorto talk to voters about the very issues we represent.”

Candidates Clash — OrNot

The San DiegoDemocrats for Equality also heard from five candidates for office at theOctober 27 meeting. One, Assemblymember Marty Block, sailed to an easy andunanimous endorsement for the State Senate seat Christine Kehoe, longtime clubfavorite and the first openly Queer elected official in San Diego County, isbeing forced out of due to term limits. The other speakers included twocandidates for Mayor of San Diego, Congressmember Bob Filner and attorney HudCollins; and two candidates for the 79^th Assembly District, SanDiego State University professor and former San Diego Unified School Districtboard member Dr. Shirley Weber, and Sid Voorakkara, on leave as San Diegoprogram officer for the California Endowment non-profit health foundation.

The club’s rulessay they can only endorse a candidate if he or she fills out a questionnaire onvarious issues, mostly but not exclusively centered around Queer rights.Filner, Block, Weber and Voorakkara all scored 100 percent. Collins scored 83percent, due to his opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples, hisrejection of living-wage ordinances to workers on government contracts(“minimum wage yes, free market,” he wrote), his statement that he had oncesupported affirmative action programs but “no longer,” his refusal to support age-appropriateeducation in public schools about the contributions of Queer people andawareness of sexual orientation or gender identity, his opposition to allowingwomen in the military to serve in combat, his refusal to support universalhealth care and his saying he’d allow equal treatment for Queer people inadoption, parenting and child custody only “in some instances; best interestsof the child.” A third Democratic candidate for Mayor, Steven Greenwald, filledout a questionnaire but didn’t show up at the meeting.

“We need apolitician who is not a politician,” said Collins, who got to give the firstopening statement. “We do not need a politician to be the Mayor. I have beendown at the City Council every meeting for five years and I have not seen Filner or [Republican candidates] BonnieDumanis or Nathan Fletcher there. Unfortunately, I see Carl DeMaio every week.Not one of the ‘top four’ has an idea on how to get the city out of itsfinancial mess. Not one of them has an idea on how to solve the pension crisis.Filner doesn’t have a plan on the pension issue, and the other three all favor[DeMaio’s initiative for] the 401(k) for new hires. As soon as it gets on theballot, I will be in court to knock it off.”

“I’ve been amember of this club since it was founded,” said Filner. “I attended the firstFreedom Banquet as a member of the board of the San Diego Unified SchoolDistrict. I was the only electedofficial to attend.” Filner recalled that at that event he had to run a gantletof anti-Queer protesters — and now two of the four top-tier candidates forMayor of San Diego, DeMaio and Dumanis, are Queer Republicans (though thepredominantly Queer Log Cabin Republican Club rejected both of them andendorsed straight Republican Fletcher instead).

Filner, who’sbeen criticized for allegedly not having a plan to deal with the city’s $2.1billion in unfunded pension liabilities, said his plan is “to restructure thedebt at a low rate of interest,” giving the city longer to pay it and thuscreating less need for immediate cuts in city services. But he was stronger onattacking DeMaio’s pension solution that advancing his own. “We have to solvethe pension crisis in a way that does notthrow city workers under the bus,” he said, calling DeMaio’s initiative to endpensions for newly hired city workers and substitute 401(k) accounts “part ofhis effort to be the Scott Walker [Wisconsin’s anti-labor, anti-Queer governor]of the West.” According to Filner, the top priority of the next Mayor should beto generate new jobs for San Diegans, not bash city workers over theirpensions.

“One of you[Filner] is too far to the Left to get elected in San Diego,” said Bob Leyh.“People want to hear real facts. Talk about what you’re going to do to fix thepensions.”

Filner challengedthe idea that he’s too far Left to get elected, pointing out that he’s won 14elections in San Diego County — two for the school board, two for City Counciland 10 for Congress. He said his pension plan including putting a cap on thepensions for managerial positions in city government “because they’re the ones the horror stories are about,” and sayingthat renegotiating the city’s pension obligations at today’s low interest rateswould be the equivalent of refinancing your home. “I want to free up hundredsof millions of dollars, with no new taxes,” Filner said. “I want to show thatif you can solve the pension problem, maybe this will show people thatgovernment can work.”

“You have nopension idea,” Collins fired back. “You haven’t a clue.” Then Collins arguedfor a pension plan even more radical than the DeMaio initiative: “close thedefined-benefit plan and go to a 401(k) for all employees, with hiring bonuses if you need them for police officersand firefighters.”

Asked why hethought women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in combat roles, Collins said, “Ihave been in two and one-half wars, and every time I’ve served with women inOCS and support units. I’m all for it. I’m old-fashioned and I do not want tosee a woman in combat who might be captured and raped. I’d feel like I’d haveto watch and protect her.”

“I don’t see anyreason women should not be in combat,” Filner replied. “There’s only onereason: can they do the job? We went through this in 1948 withAfrican-Americans” (when President Harry Truman integrated the military byexecutive order).

Former clubpresident Gloria Johnson asked Filner about his vote for the Defense ofMarriage Act (DoMA), which defines marriage for federal benefit purposes as theunion of one man and one woman and is being used by the military to denyspouses of Queer servicemembers access to on-base housing, health care,visitation and notification in case their partners are killed or wounded inbattle. “I made a mistake,” Filner said. “I’ve never voted that way again. Asmuch as I’d been involved with this club, I did not understand the depth offeeling [about marriage equality] until this vote came up.”

“I’ve been acivil rights attorney for a long time,” said Collins. “Thanks to a case Iworked on, every person in this state who’s handicapped gets equal access. Ibelieve in full equality, and I don’t care whether you’re Black, white, pink orblue. I’m old-fashioned, and it would be very hard for me to understand what itwould be like to be in a same-sex marriage. If that were the rule of law, Iwould defend it.”

Filner had notrouble getting the endorsement, with 50 votes to one for no endorsement. Atthe end of the meeting, Bob Leyh assured the members that he had not been the one vote against endorsing Filner. “I’mstill a liberal on some things,” he said.

Assembly Race: ClubCan’t Decide

The club memberspresent couldn’t decide between Sid Voorakkara and Dr. Shirley Weber for the 79^thAssembly District seat, perhaps because they both scored 100 percent on the issuesquestionnaire and their answers to the questions from club members were alsovirtually identical. Their only difference was about a bill the legislaturepassed, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed, which would have banned sponsors ofballot initiatives from paying people to circulate them on a per-signaturebasis.

“I probablywouldn’t [support that bill] because this is how people get jobs,” Dr. Webersaid. “I do have a problem with peoplegiving out wrong information. There should be a law holding initiative sponsorsaccountable and having them train the individuals.”

“I think a lotof the paid signature gatherers are flown in from out of state, and rich peoplecan bring them in,” said Voorakkara. “We should end the process of havingendless ballot initiatives and have a convention on what to do with the state.”

Aside from that,there were very few issue differences between the two candidates. The debate onthe endorsement was largely over style rather than substance. Voorakkara wonsupport for being a member of the board of the San Diego Lesbian, Gay,Bisexual, Transgender Community Center, but Dr. Weber was admired for standingfirm for Queer rights despite the opposition of ministers and other leaders inthe African-American community.

The club votedthree times on the race. On the first ballot, Voorakkara got 23 votes to 10 forDr. Weber and 20 for no endorsement. On the second — conducted by public handvotes rather than by paper ballots, and leaving out a substantial number ofmembers who had come early, cast ballots and then left for another progressiveevent the same night — Voorakkara got 21 votes to 21 for no endorsement. Amotion to rate both candidates acceptable — an option in the club rules whenthere is more than one candidate strongly supportive of Queer issues — got 24votes in favor to 17 votes against but fell one vote short of the 60 percentsupermajority the club requires for candidate endorsements and ratings.

Labor Rallies in Support of Occupy San Diego

2011-10-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Despite Pre-Dawn Police Raid, the Occupation Continues

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Defying the police on signmaking

Faith Leaders for Peace

"I've been to Iraq … "

Manny

More signmaking

Musician

"Occupy!"

"Police, stop abusing power"

"We are the 99 percent"

"When injustice becomes law … "

“We had planneda solidarity sleepover for tonight, and we made the mistake of announcing onTwitter and Facebook that we were planning a solidarity sleepover for tonight,”said San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council CEO and secretary-treasurerLorena Gonzalez at the Occupy San Diego (OSD) site in the Civic Center Plazathe night of Friday, October 28. “But the police chief, whom we’ve worked withsuccessfully in the past, and the mayor, with whom we haven’t worked assuccessfully in the past, decided to try to drive us out of the park. Now, I believein coincidence” — slyly suggesting that the police had raided OSD when they didto try to stop the labor support rally from happening without actually sayingso — “but we are here anyway.”

October 28 was akey day in the three-week history of Occupy San Diego. At 2:45 a.m. — just 15minutes before the 3 a.m. time psychologist Ivan Pavlov recommended to theSoviet secret police in the 1920’s as the most disorienting time for the victimof a political arrest — San Diego police officers raided both the main Occupycampground at the Civic Center plaza and the satellite encampment at Children’sPark across from the Convention Center the OSD people had planned to use as abackup. Over 40 people were arrested, and some were still in custody during theevening rally. An empty water-cooler bottle was passed around for people todonate to the bail fund.

The police alsogathered up all the tents, canopies andother structures the occupiers had set up, and all the occupiers’ personalpossessions, and simply threw them away instead of returning or formallyconfiscating them. As one occupier noted in a sign she carried to the eveningrally, the police treated the occupiers the way they routinely treat homelesspeople when they break up theirencampments. Though the police pretty much left the Civic Center occupiersalone that evening, they were there in force and they made sure OSD couldn’tleave the plaza to march through the Gaslamp Quarter after the rally, as theyhad planned.

Police exercisedtheir authority in other seemingly arbitrary ways as well. At one point, whenoccupiers had laid cardboard on the surface on the plaza and were writing signson it, an officer told an OSD activist that they would be allowed to make signsbut only if they held the cardboard in their hands rather than laying it on theground. Shortly after that, an officer confiscated a blanket whose owner hadleft it on the ground, and a woman with OSD quickly grabbed up other blanketsthat were lying there, distributed them to occupiers who planned to spend thenight, and warned them to keep the blankets on their person instead of droppingthem.

After the laborrally, which lasted about half an hour, OSD opened the mike and gave some ofthe people who’d been arrested that morning a chance to describe theirexperiences. “My face was bounced off the pavement by a law enforcementofficer,” said Kevin. “You can arrest me, you can take my belongings, but youcan’t arrest an idea. This is my country. We will not back down.”

“They kicked mewhen I was down,” Manny said. “They must have been Mexican cops from Tijuana,”he added facetiously. “I can’t imagine this happening in San Diego. We’ve hadgreat revolutionary leaders: Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, CesarChavez. I never trusted the cops in Mexico and now I don’t trust the cops inSan Diego, either.”

“It’s veryimportant that we respect the police, who are just following orders from themayor on down, and have a political protest,” Gonzalez said at the start of herrally. “The media want to talk about confrontations, tents and sanitaryconditions. We want to talk about the 99 percent and the economic crisis. Theywant you to believe the economic crisis was caused by the trash truck driverwho’ll retire on $23,000 a year, and by your third-grade teachers and cityworkers. They don’t want to talk about the big banks who sold bad mortgages andare now throwing working people out of their homes.”

Along withGonzalez, who MC’d, the speakers included local union leaders and ministers invarious denominations. “People say there’s no clarity [to the Occupy movement],but everyone here has moral clarity,” said Rabbi Laurie Coskey, executivedirector of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. “We have come to offerwords of support and remind you that we are all created, not 90 percent, not 99percent, but 100 percent in the image of God.” She then brought on five otherfaith leaders, ranging from Unitarian-Universalists to Muslims, to offerprayers for the occupiers.

“I’m so gladother people feel my outrage here tonight,” said Bridget Browning of the hotelworkers’ union. Like Gonzalez, Browning said she was particularly outraged atthe Democrats on the San Diego City Council like Todd Gloria and David Alvarez,who, though elected with labor’s support, have routinely joined in unanimousvotes to support projects like the latest bid to expand the Convention Centerthat will enrich San Diego’s already wealthy people and offer only minimum-wagejobs, if they hire anybody at all. “Do you think expanding the ConventionCenter is going to make your lives better?” Browning said. “I’m sick of walkingprecincts to get these people elected, and then, when they get in office, theyvote with everyone who’s against our values.”

“I’m 15 yearsold and I am the 99 percent,” said Tierra Gonzalez, Lorena Gonzalez’s daughter.“Don’t blame my teacher, my counselor or my bus driver for the economic crisis.Blame Wall Street and the bankers that caused it.”

“I’m a city ofSan Diego garbage truck driver and proud of it,” said union leader JoanRaymond. “I am the 99 percent. I know police chief [William] Lansdowne and I’veworked with him, but I’m disappointed. Workers in our union repair the policecars, and if it weren’t for them, the police wouldn’t be able to get to thescene of this protest” — which prompted some of the occupiers to yell, “Strike!Strike!”

Raymond saidthat, contrary to the corporate media propaganda that has blamed San Diego’sfinancial woes on the supposedly “generous” pensions given to city workers, shewill retire on only $23,000 per year — and as a city worker she won’t get Social Security. (In the 1970’s city workersvoted to take themselves off Social Security in exchange for a promise ofguaranteed health care for life — which, needless to say, the city has renegedon since.) “So don’t lay the blame for the greatest recession since the 1930’son your garbage truck drivers, nurses, mechanics and other workers trying tomake a living. You don’t have to go to Wall Street to find your villains; justgo to the 10^th and 11^th floors of City Hall” (where themayor and city councilmembers have their offices).

“I just want tosay it was a great honor working in your medical tent — until the police toreit down,” said Lisa Rusk of the California Nurses’ Association. “As nurses,we’ve seen too many people without health insurance delaying needed care untilthey just get sicker and sicker. Health care should be a right, not aprivilege. Tax Wall Street and get us health care!”

After Ruskfinished her brief remarks, a legal observer began reading the names ofoccupiers arrested in the morning who were still in custody — though she waswrong about one of them: no sooner had she read his name than he identifiedhimself and announced he had been bailed out. Her reading was interrupted by aloud shout from the crowd as members of Critical Mass, a group of bicycleriders who stage actions challenging the dominance of cars on public streets,rode their bikes into the plaza and joined the rally.

After that a manwho identified himself as “Chaplain Ron” called up any veterans in the audienceto the impromptu stage on the Civic Center Plaza steps and asked them to leadthe crowd in a singalong. They sang patriotic songs like “The Star-SpangledBanner” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” — surprising choices for a progressiverally but ones that put out the message that they weren’t going to let theRight monopolize the symbols of American patriotism — as well as a verse ofWoody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

“I’m a20-year-old mother, college student and Girl Scout troop leader,” said Melissa.“I worked full-time until 2009, when I was laid off. I work in construction,and when I was laid off I lost my health care for myself and my daughter, Ilost my savings and I lost my 401(k). Everyone should have reasonable access tohealth care.” Melissa was starting to talk about her daughter’s best friend,who was recently diagnosed with diabetic ketoacidosis — a disease “associatedwith lower family income, health coverage and parental education” — whenshe was interrupted by another occupier making an announcement that the policehad arrived with tear gas.

There was acontroversy over whether to announce that to the crowd at all. Some occupiersdidn’t want to interrupt Melissa’s speech for a report that might panic thecrowd. Eventually things calmed down and former Congressional candidate RayLutz, OSD’s media liaison, told occupiers to come to the San Diego City Councilon Tuesday, November 1, 10 a.m., to demand that the Council pass a resolutionendorsing the occupation and instructing the police and other city departmentsto leave the occupiers alone. The Los Angeles City Council has passed a similarresolution and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering one, butso far no San Diego City Councilmember has come forward and asked that it beput on the agenda.

After it becameclear that the police were not going to allow the occupiers to march throughthe Gaslamp Quarter as originally planned, the occupiers changed plans andinstead convened a General Assembly (GA) in the plaza to discuss futurestrategies, including how to deal with the police if they try to shut down theoccupation again.

FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this post attributed an obscene word to Tierra Gonzalez. She did not in fact use such a word. Zenger’s apologizes for the error.

Democracy Now! Co-Host Gonzalez Speaks in San Diego

2011-10-26T21:04:00.001-07:00

Presents News for All the People, His Epic History of U.S. Media of Color

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Stopping in San DiegoOctober 24 in the middle of a whirlwind tour — 14 cities in eight days,including two events in the L.A. area before he got to San Diego — JuanGonzalez, co-host (with Amy Goodman) of the progressive radio/TV show DemocracyNow!, spoke at the Church of the Brethrenin City Heights to present his new book, News for All the People: TheEpic Story of Race and the American Media.Co-authored by Joseph Torres, who also appeared at the event, the book arguesthat there have actually been three sectors of the American media: themainstream corporate media, the white alternative/rebel media, and media ownedand controlled by people of color.

“I have been aprofessional journalist for over 35 years, and for 10 years before that I’dbeen a social activist in the anti-war, Puerto Rican liberation and labormovements,” Gonzalez said. “For 35 years I worked in the corporate orcommercial media [he still does, as a columnist for the New York Daily News], which remains the primary way people are informed,but they are not the only way.Amy Goodman and I work with the rebel, alternative, community press that datesback to the founding of our country and is a totally separate strain. I havealso had the opportunity to work in the third strain. In the 1980’s I edited VocalCommunidad in Philadelphia, about theLatino community. It still exists today, among six to seven Spanish-languagepapers in Philadelphia. I was also involved in the 1980’s with the founding ofthe National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and defended the right ofAfrican-Americans, Hispanics and Native people to own their own media.”

The storyGonzalez and Torres tell in their book is alternately exhilarating anddepressing, celebrating the heroism of the pioneers of media ownership in thecommunities of color — and describing how their publications and radio outletswere suppressed, not only with economic power but often through physicalviolence. According to Gonzalez, the first newspaper in the U.S. owned byAfrican-Americans, Freedom’s Journal, wasfounded in 1827 — and the words of its first editorial could stand as a missionstatement for virtually all U.S. media outlets coming from the communities ofcolor: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. …From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectlyrepresented.”

“There were 30Black papers before the Civil War,” Gonzalez said. “In 1808 the firstSpanish-language newspaper in the U.S. was founded in New York. The firstChinese-language paper was founded in 1854. The Native American press is to methe most astounding because until the 1820’s no Native American tribe in the U.S. had a written language. In the1820’s the Cherokees developed a written version of their language and launcheda literacy campaign, and in 1828 the Cherokees started the first Native paper.There were others in Shawnee in the Indian Territory” (modern-day Oklahoma).

According toGonzalez, the media of color were attacked not only by the mainstream mediaoutlets of their time but also by the white-owned “alternative” or “rebel”press, particularly papers owned or associated with organized labor andso-called “workingmen’s” movements. It’s not surprising when you realize howmany unions and white workers’ movements historically blamed immigrants fortheir low pay and poor working conditions. The first labor party in U.S.history, the Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco in 1867, had at the top of itslist of demands the exclusion of all Chinese from the U.S. Not until 2000 did theU.S. labor movement formally reverse itself, abandoning its historicanti-immigrant position when the AFL-CIO executive council passed a resolutioncalling, according to labor writer David Bacon, “for the repeal of employersanctions, for a new amnesty for the undocumented, and for a broad new programto educate immigrant workers about their rights.”

Both themainstream and the white alternative press “not only spread raciststereotypes,” Gonzalez said, “their editors and publishers often instigated,organized and fomented racial violence. We have decades of examples.” The mostnotorious one, Gonzalez said, was in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, wheredespite the takeover of the state government by white supremacists, enoughAfrican-Americans still voted that the City Council had a Black majority. ThenJosephus Daniels, editor/publisher of the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, called on whitesupremacists from all over the state to invade Wilmington and forcibly drivethe Blacks from office.

“Day and nightwe worked, for I rarely went home until two or three o’clock in the morning,getting the news and writing the editorials and conferring with the Democratic[Party] leaders,” Daniels later wrote in his autobiography. Their first targetin Wilmington was the city’s only Black-owned paper, the Record, and its publisher, Alex Manley. On November 10,1898, Daniels wrote, “the white supremacy people determined to expel Manleyfrom the city, and to set fire to his building and burn it as a lasting evidencethat no vestige of the Negro who had defamed white women of the State should beleft. His building was gutted and burned but Manley escaped.” Then, Gonzalezsaid, the mob of nearly 2,000 white racists drove the elected Black CityCouncilmembers out of town and staged a series of gun battles in which at least60 Wilmington Blacks were killed and white supremacists took control of thecity.

After anin-depth description both of the Wilmington massacre and the prestigious careerJosephus Daniels had later — he was appointed Secretary of the Navy underWoodrow Wilson and when his assistant secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt, becamePresident he picked Daniels as his ambassador to Mexico — Gonzalez cited otherexamples of “racial pogroms” againstpeople of color begun or encouraged by white media. Among these were “the Tucson Citizen and other Arizona papers with the Camp Grantmassacre” (a slaughter of over 200 Apaches, and the kidnapping of Indianchildren, in the Arizona Territory on April 30, 1871), “the RockyMountain News and other newspapers inColorado fomenting and supporting the Sand Creek massacre” (November 29, 1864,in which a 700-man white militia attacked, killed and mutilated between 70 and163 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians), “the pogroms against Chinese-American communities and others inthe West … the Omaha Bee helpingto organize and instigate the lynching of Will Brown in a race riot in 1919. Sothe press was not merely spreading bias; it was an actor, organizer andinstigator of racial hatred in the United States.”

Gonzalez citedmore recent examples, too, including the framing of Mexican-American radioperformer and spokesperson Pedro J. Gonzalez on a rape charge to get hisprogram off the air in the 1930’s and the campaign waged by radio and TVstations in Mississippi to get whites to come out and block James Meredith fromentering the University of Mississippi as its first African-American student in1962. “This is part of the sordid history of American journalism that the mediahave yet to own up to and fully apologize for,” Gonzalez said. “We are allsuffering the damage from this long history that you do not generally readabout in the press, because the press were involved.”

TheMyth of the “Free Market” in Media

The other mainpart of Gonzalez’ message was an attack on the myth that the American mediasystem is the result of fair competition in a “free market.” According toGonzalez, the real history of media in America is a series of technologicalchanges, followed by debate at the highest levels of government about how thosechanges should be implemented. These, he explained, were a series of battlesbetween commercial and corporate interests on one side and local communities,small businesses, educational institutions, labor organizations, people ofcolor and independent individuals on the other. In every case but one, Gonzalezsaid, the battle ended with the U.S. government giving the corporationsvirtually everything they wanted, and the corporations using their control ofgovernment and the regulatory process to silence potentially competing voices.

The oneexception, he explained, occurred at the very beginning of the Americanrepublic: in 1792, when the first U.S. Congress debated whether, and under whatground rules, to set up a United States Post Office. “America was a settlernation, and the settlements were scattered across the country, so GeorgeWashington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others, decided that thegovernment had to establish a postal system so the settlers could communicatewith each other,” Gonzalez said. “Only 10 percent of what the postal systemcarried was mail; the other 90 percent was newspapers. The founders felt thegovernment had a role to contribute to the free flow of information, so they setup second-class postal rates by which newspapers could be mailed below cost sothey could be delivered easily and without censorship. For the first 60 to 70years of the U.S., the Post Office was the largest government employer, and itsmain purpose was to deliver newspapers to the people.”

The secondcommunications revolution took place in the 1840’s after Samuel Morse developedthe first practical telegraph system. “Congress apportioned money to build thefirst telegraph line,” Gonzalez explained — $30,000 for a wire betweenWashington, D.C. and Baltimore, 40 miles away — “and because it allowedinformation to be transmitted instantaneously, Morse wanted to sell his patentsto the government. The business community wanted a private market, and Congresseventually sided with the business community. The U.S. was the only country where the government didn’t run thetelegraph, so telegraph service became more expensive [than elsewhere] andcentralized. Eventually it was dominated by the Associated Press (AP), UnitedPress International (UPI) and the other wire services.” The result, Gonzalezargued, was a loss of diversity in American media, as publishers bought theirstories from wire services and offered their readers a blander, morehomogenized, pro-business perspective on the news.

The third dashedopportunity for a freer, more diverse media system in the U.S. came in theearly 20^th century with the invention of radio. According toGonzalez, early radio was the Internet of its day; equipment was readily availableand reasonably priced, start-up costs were low, “thousands of amateur radiooperators got on the air, and there was a huge diversity of voices between 1910and 1920.” Then the federal government stepped in on the side of would-be radiomonopolists like David Sarnoff of NBC and William Paley of CBS. In 1927Congress created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and put then-Secretary ofCommerce Herbert Hoover in charge of it. In 1934, the Commission’s jurisdictionwas expanded and its name changed to the Federal Communications Commission(FCC), and “in the process of regulating the airwaves, they handed the bestchannels to business interests like NBC and CBS,” Gonzalez explained.

“Suddenly,racial minorities, educational broadcasters, labor and others went off theair,” Gonzalez said. “There were all kinds of stations pushed off the air whenthe government handed it over to giant networks and newspapers.” The inventionof television and its emergence as a mass-market phenomenon in the late 1940’sdid not threaten corporate control ofthe airwaves, Gonzalez explained, because “the same corporations that dominatedradio incubated TV.”

The nextdevelopment that did threaten thecorporate media power, according to Gonzalez, was the emergence of cable TV inthe 1960’s. “The same promises that were made in the early days of radio, andwhich are now being made about the Internet, were made for cable,” Gonzalezexplained. “At the beginning there were hundreds of cable stations because inorder to use the public rights of way for their cables, companies had to getthe permission of local governments, and city councils had leverage to requirepublic access, educational channels, programming for underserved communities,and affirmative action in hiring and vendors. Hundreds of commercial cablecompanies developed in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s.”

Then, as theyhad in the case of the telegraph and radio, the federal government stepped inand took the side of giant corporations over the interests of individuals andlocal communities, Gonzalez explained. “The government relaxed ownership rulesand allowed cable companies to consolidate,” he said, “so now Time Warner andComcast between them control 50 percent of all cable.”

According toGonzalez — and his co-author, Joseph Torres, who’s active with the independentmedia lobby Free Press — government policy towards the Internet is followingthe same pro-corporate pattern as it did with the telegraph, radio and cableTV. One of the key demands of Free Press and other opponents of the corporatemedia is to retain so-called “net neutrality,” which requires Internet serviceproviders (ISP’s) to treat all data equally. But the giant corporations whichdominate the ISP market as well as the rest of the U.S. media — AT&T, TimeWarner (owner of America Online), Verizon, Comcast — are fighting for aso-called “tiered Internet,” which would give them the right to push corporateWeb sites over everyone else’s by charging less to access them and slowing downaccess to independent sites. The loss of “net neutrality” would also give ISP’sunlimited power to censor the Internet, totally or partially blocking access tosites they consider politically objectionable — which could make futureattempts to organize Occupy Wall Street-style campaigns difficult orimpossible.

According toGonzalez, the consistent U.S. pattern of allowing giant corporations to controland ultimately monopolize each new media technology has given the U.S. peoplemore media outlets than available in any other country — but also made them theleast informed citizenry in the advanced world. “The American people areliterally drowning in information,” he said. “We have 14,000 newspapers, 17,000magazines, 12,000 radio stations and 1,200 TV channels, including dozens of all-newscable channels. We have tens of thousands of Internet sites. We have all thisnews and information — yet the American people remain misinformed anddisinformed.

“When two-thirdsof Americans believed, in the run-up to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein wasinvolved in 9/11, that means the media were doing a bad job,” Gonzalezcontinued. “When Americans are the only people in the developed world not aware of the threat of human-caused climate change,that’s an example of the structural problems with the U.S. media. When it tookthe young people of Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations to turnpeople’s attention to the source of our economic problems, that’s the fault ofour media.”

The Mayoral Candidates That Didn’t Bark

2011-10-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

Labor-Backed Forum October 19 Draws Only Two of the TopFour

by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Bob Filner (center) from Labor Day rally, September 5, 2011

Nathan Fletcher (from Ballotpedia Web site)

Just as SherlockHolmes famously solved one of his mysteries by realizing that a dog hadn’t barked in the nighttime when it should have, so thebig news at the San Diego mayoral candidates’ forum at the Balboa Theatredowntown October 19 was the two of the top four candidates who didn’t show up. San Diego County District Attorney BonnieDumanis ducked the event by saying she wasn’t going to attend any debates untilafter the filing deadline for the office in March 2012, and San Diego CityCouncilmember Carl DeMaio said, in essence, that since he’s running againstorganized labor and its supposed power over city politics, he did not think heneeded to speak at a labor-sponsored event.

And make nomistake about it: the October 19 forum wasa labor-sponsored event. Though the official sponsor was a coalition called “ABetter San Diego,” of the 47 organizations listed as part of the coalition, 14were labor unions and another five were either associated with unions (like thelabor-sponsored Center on Policy Initiatives) or dealt with workers’ rights. What’smore, the moderator of the debate was Lorena Gonzalez, CEO of the SanDiego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council. The two top-tier candidates who did show up were Democratic Congressmember Bob Filnerand Republican Assemblymember Nathan Fletcher, who in the absence of fellowRepublicans Dumanis and DeMaio was sometimes forced into the awkward positionof having to defend his party’s policies.

The debatestarted with a question from retired San Diego State University professor HerbShore about the initiative DeMaio and his supporters have qualified for the2012 ballot, which would eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new cityworkers and set up 401(k) plans for them instead. Labor and other critics ofthe initiative have argued that, since city workers no longer receive SocialSecurity — they voted themselves off it in the 1980’s in exchange for a promiseof health coverage for life, which DeMaio’s initiative would renege on — itwould leave them without any retirementcoverage except for what they could get out of the stock market.

Though Fletchertried to portray himself as a maverick Republican at times during the debate,on the DeMaio initiative he was in lock-step with his party’s positionsupporting it. “This will help lower annual benefit payments,” he said. But healso promised that, “as Mayor, I will interpret the initiative in a way that isfair to workers and that will include Social Security.”

“This is thebiggest difference between me and the other three [major] candidates,” Filnersaid. “I oppose the DeMaio-Dumanis-Fletcher plan. It’s not only unfair, itthrows our city workers under the bus and makes our workers dependent on thestock market.” Filner also zeroed in on one of the main criticisms being madeof the initiative: while it might save the city money in the long run, it woulddo nothing to cover the city’s current $2.1 billion shortfall in pensionfunding because it wouldn’t apply to current retirees. According to Filner,putting city employees back on Social Security as an alternative to citypensions would “cost more money” becauseof the “transition costs” that would have to be paid under federal law.

The candidatesalso clashed over so-called “outsourcing” — turning city services over toprivate companies. A voter-passed initiative from 2006 set up a so-called“managed competition” system, in which city workers and private companies wouldsupposedly be able to bid against each other to see who could provide servicesmore cheaply. Supporters of “managed competition” have criticized the city forimplementing the initiative too slowly, and in 2010 DeMaio tried — and failed —to get another initiative on the ballot that would have sped up the process.

Filner, notsurprisingly, said he’s against outsourcing on principle. “We have to look atit very closely because the privateproposals don’t include health orpension benefits,” he said. “Trying to contract out the Miramar landfill isridiculous.” He cited DeMaio’s support of anti-labor Wisconsin Governor ScottWalker, whom he’s cited as a role model, and said the message of both Walkerand DeMaio is “let’s break up the unions and privatize, because they say publicservice is evil.”

“It is!” said aheckler from the audience who was wearing a T-shirt reading, “Bloodbath.” Hehad first spoken up when one of the panel members asking questions had citedcurrent Mayor Jerry Sanders’ support of marriage equality for same-sex couples,and kept up a barrage of comments through the rest of the debate.

Fletcher used uppart of his time to defend his support of a public investment in a new stadiumfor the San Diego Chargers. When he finally got around to talking aboutoutsourcing, he said, “I support managed competition because there are ways wecan find additional savings. The city workers have won every competition [sofar] by finding additional savings” — suggesting that he thinks public-sectorworkers need the threat of losing their jobs to the private sector to maketheir operations more cost-efficient.

On the stadiumissue, Fletcher said, “The question should not be do you support building a ‘box’ for football that’s going to beused only eight times a year. It should be whether you support building aregional asset, not a sports and entertainment district but a sports andinnovation district like the one in San Francisco. What do you do with thecurrent Qualcomm Stadium site? You can build a stunning urban park there and anindustrial training center at the current Sports Arena site.”

“I love theChargers and football,” Filner said, “but when a billionaire [Chargers ownerAlex Spanos] asks for city money, we should say, ‘What about you?’ The biggest sports teams have extorted millions ofdollars in public money, and they ain’t going to be able to do that anymore inSan Diego. Why don’t they give us a share of the profits, or a share of theteam?”

“This is whatyou get in San Diego,” Fletcher replied. “You talk about a big idea, andsomeone twists it to make it about one family.”

Another issue onwhich the candidates clashed was over project labor agreements (PLA’s), whichrequire private companies that bid on publicly funded developments to givepreference to local workers and pay prevailing wages for unionized constructionjobs. Conservatives have made ending such agreements a major priority, sayingthey make public projects cost more and don’t guarantee safe and efficientconstruction. Voters in San Diego County overwhelmingly passed a ban on PLA’sin November 2010, but a state law, SB 922, signed by governor Jerry BrownOctober 3, prevents California voters or local legislatures from banning PLA’s.

Though theperson who asked the question — sheet metal worker Enrique Martinez — carefullyavoided using the term “PLA,” it was obvious what he was asking about. Martinezhad phrased the question by defending PLA’s as a way to save local jobs, butFletcher said, “There are so many infrastructure projects we can get workersout on the street” without guaranteeing local hiring via a PLA. “San Diego has$1 billion in deferred maintenance. The city is sitting on $50 million inTransNet funding [a previously approved half-cent sales tax for transportationprojects] that isn’t being spent because of bureaucracy. I would not support mandating local hiring. There’s enough workto put everyone in San Diego andthe surrounding communities back to work.”

Filnerdisagreed. “Anything we can do to hire local workers, we should do,” he said.“And there isn’t enough work to goaround. That’s why we have 10 percent unemployment. We never replaced the jobsin the defense industry we lost in the early 1990’s. General Dynamics had60,000 employees and today our city’s biggest employer has 4,000.” Filner saidhe wants to see the Port of San Diego expanded into a “maritime center” tocreate more middle-class jobs, and he boasted that he had a 100 percentpro-labor voting record as a Congressmember while Fletcher’s rating on laborissues in his two years as an Assemblymember was 18 percent.

“Neitherpercentage is quite right,” Gonzalez said. “They’re close, but not quiteright.”

The candidatesdid agree on a few things. Despite their differences about PLA’s, both saidthey want to create more middle-class jobs in San Diego. Both also want theMayor’s office to take an active role in education but don’t want the actualcontrol of all or some of the city schools mayors in Chicago and Los Angeleshave won.

Fletcher boastedthat he had worked with Democratic Assemblymember Gil Cedillo to end policeimpoundments of cars belonging to people without drivers’ licenses — many ofwhom are undocumented immigrants.

Both candidateswere skeptical of seeking city tax increases. Voters have turned them downagain and again, and Filner and Fletcher agreed that the reason is citygovernment hasn’t proved to voters’ satisfaction that they can spend the moneythey already have efficiently and effectively, and until they do, voters won’tgive them any more.

The candidates’philosophical and historical differences came through most strongly in answerto a question about the Occupy San Diego protests and the national movement ofwhich they are a part. “There’s a lot of frustration that’s bipartisan, and Ican understand it,” Fletcher said. “[Governor] Jerry Brown and I came togetheron a bill for eliminating a tax loophole that only benefits large corporations that move jobs out ofstate, that would have brought in $1 billion, and people were shocked. We gotit out of the Assembly, but it lost by a few votes in the State Senate.”Fletcher didn’t say that all the Senate Republicans closed ranks against it onthe ground that closing tax loopholes constitutes a “tax increase,” therebyensuring it fell short of the two-thirds vote in both houses needed to pass.

“I started mycareer in jail,” Filner said. “I was active in the civil rights movement in the1950’s and 1960’s. I was one of the first Freedom Riders, and when we went tothe U.S. Supreme Court we changed history” by getting segregation on interstatebuses declared unconstitutional. Filner also said he had personally visited theOccupy movement’s encampment in Washington, D.C. “and I came away energized atthe chance that we can really change things in this nation. I look at thatmovement with great optimism.”

Both candidateswere also asked how they would use the Mayor’s “bully pulpit” and what issuethey would push more strongly, the way Mayor Sanders had done with marriageequality. This is the question that provoked the “Bloodbath” heckler tointerrupt the debate, denounce Queers as “perverts” and ask Fletcher why hevoted for SB 48, the bill that requires California’s public middle and highschools to teach the “role and contributions” of Queer people, people withdisabilities and Pacific Islander-Americans.

As Mayor, “Youare picking a direction for the city,” Fletcher answered. “The last decade hasbeen rough. You’ve seen cutbacks and a city that can’t come together. I wouldhope that at the end of my tenure, I would be seen as someone who brought thecity together. We spent a decade with business fighting labor fighting theenvironment. Imagine if we have another decade to work together for San Diegoversus the neighboring regions.”

“One of my greatheroes and mentors was Robert F. Kennedy,” Filner recalled, quoting Kennedy’sfamous lines about how others saw the world as it was and asked why, while he sawthe world as it could be and asked why not. “”Why not become a city that solvesits pension problems without throwingthe workers under the bus?” Filner said. “Why not be a city that actuallysolves homelessness? Why not have a city that celebrates its arts and culture?Why not have a city that has jobs for everyone? Why not have a city that haseffective public transportation? Why not have a city with the kind of civilityNathan just talked about — and that’s something we should all aspire to? Whynot have a city that does all that?”

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

2011-10-22T14:19:00.001-07:00

Adopted by the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street September 29, 2011. “Minor updates to some wording in the facts” on October 1, 2011.

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known:

• They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
• They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give executives enormous bonuses.
• They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
• They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
• They have profited off the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
• They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
• They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
• They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ health care and pay.
• They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
• They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
• They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
• They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
• They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products, endangering lives in the pursuit of profit.
• They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
• They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
• They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
• They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
• They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
• They purposely keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
• They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
• They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
• They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
• They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.
[These grievances are not all-inclusive.]

To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble, occupy public space, create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!

Beyond the Occupation

2011-10-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

“When Adamdelved and Eve span,

Who was thenthe gentleman?”

— Slogan of the Peasants’ Revolt, England, 1381

Until earlySeptember, when the members of what became Occupy Wall Street first hit thestreets of New York’s financial district, staging marches from a campground ona private park whose owner had given them permission to be there, it lookedlike the whole concept of economic class as a political issue was as dead inU.S. politics as free silver. Earnest commentators filled the pages of liberaland progressive publications with sober articles documenting how the richest 1percent of Americans had slowly increased their share of the nation’s wealthuntil they now control 50 percent of it all — and the nation yawned.Republicans instantly denounced any hintof a proposal to tax the rich as “class warfare,” motivated solely by envy onthe part of social “losers” who could be rich themselves if they’d only workedharder, saved more, been more “worthy.” (Actually most rich people, now as in1381, got that way by coming out of the right womb.) Democrats, anxious to appear on the side of the working people but scared shitlessover anything that might stop the rich from contributing to their campaigns,basically ignored it altogether. And the rag-tag remnants of an American Leftpretty much confined themselves to talking about it … to each other.

Then came OccupyWall Street, a movement consciously patterned after the “Arab Spring” proteststhat brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and all of a sudden thephrase, “We are the 99 percent,” became part of U.S. public consciousness. Nolonger is political debate in the U.S. trapped between a Democratic Party whichonce — because a mass Left pressured them to do it — gave us a minimum wage, Social Security,unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid and the legal recognition of laborunions, and is now killing all those advances with the death of a thousandcuts; and a Republican Party and a Tea Party which joyously and proudly want toget rid of the social safety net, the labor movement and any government taxation or regulation of corporations inone fell swoop. While it’s unclear what the future holds for the Occupymovement — whether they’ll remain as resourceful and intelligent as they’vebeen so far in coping with police repression, media ridicule and theirinability (so far) to affect the political process or whether they’ll repeatthe mistakes made by previous attempts to revive the U.S. Left — they’ve openedthe dark sky of American politics, economics and media propaganda with a simplemessage: a free society cannot remain so if its wealth, income and politicalpower are brutally concentrated at the top of the economic scale.

Occupy protestshave spread not only nationwide, but worldwide. The nations of Western Europe,which American progressives once looked to as models of social democracy, havebecome as repressive as the U.S. Their so-called “socialist” or “socialdemocratic” parties are now no more radical than the U.S. Democratic Party, andthe Right-wing regimes currently in power in all Europe’s major economic powers— Britain, Germany, France, Italy — as well as the nominal “socialists”currently running Europe’s worst economic basket case, Greece — offer nothingbut “austerity,” code for slashing the size of government, making workerspoorer and impoverishing their people for the sake of their bondholders. Thedetermination of the upper classes not only to enrich themselves and impoverishtheir people but root out any discussion of social justice has gone so far thatit’s creating a backlash. People — not enough people to make a differencepolitically, but enough to put the ideas of redistribution and the socialresponsibility of the well-to-do back on the table — are rising up, just asthey did in England in 1381, in France in 1789, throughout Europe in 1848, inRussia in 1917 and in the Arab world earlier this year.

The Occupymovement is often criticized for not offering a specific list of demands.That’s taking one of the great strengths of the movement and calling it aweakness. Occupy is not a top-down hierarchy like the various Tea Parties,which though they have genuine, committed grass-roots support (which we ignoreat our peril) have been designed largely by their wealthy funders and whoseagendas and slogans have been supplied to their activists like recipes in acookbook. Naomi Klein, a strong supporter of Occupy, got it right when she toldMS-NBC that Occupy was “not a movement, but a moment” — a moment of awarenessthat there has got to be a better way torun an economy, a nation, a world, than to base all decisions on profit, greedand exploitation. Occupy shouldn’tbe making demands yet because we’ve been told for so long that capitalism isthe end of human history — that “there is no alternative,” as former Britishprime minister Margaret Thatcher put it — that we have only the foggiest ideasof what a non-capitalist or post-capitalist economy and society should looklike.

When Occupy WallStreet expanded and new Occupy movements started springing up across thecountry, including in San Diego, I worried that they would repeat some of themistakes that have hamstrung previous attempts to revive the U.S. Left. They’reavoiding, or working their way away from, some of them — like the insaneobsession with so-called “consensus decision-making” that has made many Leftorganizations not only unworkable but actively unpleasant and soul-draining.Occupy Wall Street began as a consensus organization but quickly worked awayfrom that model and set up a so-called “super-committee” to plot direction andstrategy — risking the alienation of some ultra-Leftists for whom any resort to representative democracy is a denial oftheir principles. It also seemed to have dawned on Occupy that the reflexiveanti-Americanism of many U.S. Leftists has cut us off from the strategy used soeffectively by the Tea Parties of linking their struggle to the AmericanRevolution. At the end of September Occupy Wall Street issued a “Declaration”(published here in full above) consciously modeled on the U.S. Declarationof Independence, complete with bullet points listing the abuses uncontrolledcorporations have loosed on the American people.

The biggestissue Occupy will need to address, and hasn’t yet, is its relationship to theelectoral system. This has become a pitfall for generations of AmericanLeftists, and Occupy confronts it at a dangerous juncture in U.S. politicscomparable to the situation in Germany in the early 1930’s. The deepeningeconomic crisis, the power of the corporate media in general and the Right-wingmedia of talk radio and Fox News in particular to shape the way many Americansperceive that crisis, and the failure of the Democrats’ half-measures to get usout of the slump have created the strong possibility of a total Republicantakeover of the U.S. government — of which they already control half, the Houseof Representatives and the Supreme Court — in the November 2012 elections. Ifthey win the presidency (quite likely, though by no means assured, sincepresidents running for re-election on a piss-poor economy usually lose) andtake the Senate (virtually a mathematical certainty since the Democrats will bedefending 23 seats and the Republicans only 10), the result will be a sweepingtransformation of the U.S. into a Right-wing country — from the USA to TPA, TeaParty America — comparable to what Hitler and the Nazis wreaked on Germany in1933.

In my analysis —and I know most Occupy participants would almost certainly disagree with me —it is absolutely crucial for America’s future that we unite, vote and campaignstraight down the line for Democrats in 2012. We should do that without anyillusions that the Democrats are our friends, but with the full awareness thatthe Republicans are such dastardly enemies, not only of the 99 percent but ofthe earth itself, that in the short term at least, we need to keep what NoamChomsky calls “the reality-based wing of the ruling class” in power. Weshouldn’t hang back from criticizing especially egregiously corporate-friendlyDemocrats and challenging them in primary elections. But we should give up anynotion of not voting at all — or voting for alternative parties, which in theU.S.’s winner-take-all election system means the same thing — in the presentemergency. Given that the Republicans are committed to wiping out all controls on corporate power, ending organized labor,privatizing virtually all government functions and getting rid of the welfarestate, and their “drill, baby, drill” assault on the environment will virtuallyensure the end of the earth’s ability to support the human species, we have tobite the bullet and accept that in the current crisis, any Democratis better than any Republican.

In the mediumterm we can debate reforms we can demand from the political system, including aConstitutional amendment to end the idiotic fiction that corporations are“persons,” worldwide taxes on financialspeculation, a return to the upper-bracket income tax rates of the 1950’s and1960’s, an end to corporate subsidies and tax loopholes, restoration of theGlass-Steagall Act and other New Deal-era legislation that severed consumerbanks from investment banks, reform of the labor laws to make it easy forworkers to organize, and aggressive antitrust enforcement literally to cut the giant corporations down to size. In thelong term we can work out the models by which humanity can grow beyondcapitalism — and throughout this process we must do the work on ourselves togrow beyond our own individualistic, competitive urges and, in a saying ofGandhi’s that’s become an obnoxious cliché, “be the change that we wish to seein the world.”

Twelve years ago, in November 1999, a Leftistmovement swept through the streets of a major American city — Seattle — with asimple demand: an end to unfair “free trade agreements” that enrichedcorporations and greased the skids on which they sent American jobs overseas.It was killed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the wave ofrepression that followed. Occupy could likewise be killed by a Republican sweepof the November 2012 elections and the even more intense repression against itlikely to follow. But if it can hold on, learn from its mistakes and build forthe future, Occupy has a chance to break the corporate-capitalist strangleholdon America’s and the world’s imagination and begin the process of moving awayfrom economies and societies based on greed, individualism, monopolism,imperialism and a capitalist system that rewards humanity’s worst traits andpunishes its best.

NICO D’AMICO-BARBOUR:

2011-10-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Canvass for a Cause Organizeron Marriage Equality, Occupy San Diego

radio interview by MARK GABRISHCONLAN

Sneak audio preview of aninterview scheduled for publication in the December 2011 Zenger’s!

Streaming:http://zengersmag.posterous.com/nico-damico-barbour-regional-director-canvass#

Download: https://rapidshare.com/files/1024242343/01_Nico_D_Amico-Barbour__10_13_11__radio_edit_.mp3

Welcome to Zenger’son the air, the radio program based on Zenger’s Newsmagazine, a print publication of alternative lifestyles, media,politics, culture and health in San Diego since 1994. Today we’re presenting aninterview with Nico D’Amico-Barbour, regional field organizer for the Queerrights and marriage equality group Canvass for a Cause. Founded in the wake ofthe defeat for marriage equality in California when Proposition 8, which bannedlegal recognition of same-sex marriages, was passed by voters in November 2008,Canvass for a Cause was started to get the marriage equality message out toresidents not only in San Diego’s so-called “Gayborhoods” of Hillcrest, NorthPark and University Heights, but throughout the city. It was also designed toraise money so its members could not only spread the message of marriageequality but get paid for doing so. Nico started off as a canvasser and rosethrough the ranks, and is now helping not only to run the Canvass for a Causein San Diego but to start a second chapter in Los Angeles.

Of course, Nico and I had a lot more to talk about thanthat. By chance, the day I interviewed him, October 13, was also the date theSan Diego police announced their crackdown on the ongoing Occupy San Diegocamp-out in the Civic Center Plaza. The police originally ordered everyone outof the plaza, then relented and allowed them to stay but only as long as theydidn’t have tents. Nico so strongly supports Occupy San Diego that he’s beenspending time at the occupation site and originally wanted us to do theinterview there, though his duties with Canvass for a Cause made him reschedulefor the Canvass headquarters at — ironically — an old Mormon church just southof 10th Street and Robinson in Hillcrest. While we were doing theinterview, we were interrupted by a young man coming to apply for a job withCanvass for a Cause, a long-time staff member who needed Nico’s attention, anda phone call from a person Nico was letting go. They’re certainly a busy group,not only with the marriage equality canvass but also with a subsidiaryorganization called Gay Groups Give Back, which raises money for non-Queercauses like earthquake relief for Haiti.

Nico’s remarks went beyond his work with Canvass for aCause. Stressing that he was speaking as an individual and not for the Canvass,he talked about Occupy San Diego — including what he thinks distinguishes itfrom the Right-wing Tea Party movement — and also gave his personal opinionabout the decision of the statewide Queer lobbying organization EqualityCalifornia not to seek an initiative torepeal Proposition 8 on the November 2012 ballot. Nico is clearly anup-and-coming leader in the equality movement and for progressive causes ingeneral, and for that reason, and to preserve his comments on Occupy San Diegoand other cutting-edge issues and get them before the public as soon aspossible, we’re taking the unusual step of presenting this interview in audioform before it’s published in the print version of Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Accordingly, reproduction of this interview in text form,either on paper or online, is strictly prohibited without the express writtenpermission of Mark Gabrish Conlan. Non-commercial reproduction of the actualaudio is allowed and, indeed, encouraged.

To contact Canvass for a Cause, visit their headquarters at3705 10^th Avenue in Hillcrest, phone (619) 630-7750, e-mail them at info@canvassforacause.org, contact theCanvass for a Cause page on Facebook, or visit their Web site at www.canvassforacause.org. That’s (619)630-7750, e-mail info@canvassforacause.org,or www.canvassforacause.orgon the Web.

Equality Nine Have Their Latest Day in Court Oct. 17

2011-10-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Prosecution Offers Plea after 2,500 People Demand ChargesBe Dropped

by CHARLES NELSONand MARK GABRISH CONLAN

The “Equality Nine” — Michael Anderson, Brian Baumgardner, Sean Bohac, Felicity Bradley, Kelsey Hoffman, Mike Kennedy, Zakiya Khabir, Chuck Stemke, and Cecile Veillard, members of the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) who were arrested August 19, 2010 while staging a demonstration for same-sex marriage rights at the San Diego County Clerk’s office — had their latest court hearing Monday, October 17 at the San Diego County Courthouse downtown.

At an earlier hearing in August, the judge in the case, Joan P. Weber, made a comment to the effect that the Nine “might not face jail time” even if they were convicted. On October 17, the prosecutor asked the judge to withdraw that statement. He also announced an offer that the city attorney is refusing to drop the charges, but is offering a plea bargain that would require any of the Nine who accepted it to plead guilty to violating California Penal Code section 415, which says that “any person who maliciously and willfully disturbs another person by loud and unreasonable noise” can be punished by up to 90 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $400.

The plea deal the prosecutor offered would involve a “waiver of time” — apparently meaning a suspended jail sentence — and would require them to do eight hours of community service unrelated to marriage equality. Once anyone who accepted the deal presented documentation that they performed the community service, they would be allowed to “withdraw the plea” and end the case with no criminal record against them. The prosecutor made the offer to the defendants as individuals and gave them until October 28 to decide. One member of the Nine, Felicity Bradley, has already taken the deal and done her eight hours of community service. Another, Mike Kennedy, plans to take the deal, according to his attorney.

Other members of the Equality Nine were more defiant. Michael Anderson, who with his partner Brian Baumgardner participated in the protest by attempting to enter the County Clerk’s office to request a marriage license, said he definitely would not plead out the case. If any of the Nine turn down the plea and insist on going to trial, the next scheduled hearing in the case will be on November 1 to set the trial date.

Judge Weber denied the defense motions to dismiss the case. She ruled that the First Amendment does not necessarily give you the legal right to block access to a public building, and she interpreted the law under which the Equality Nine are being charged, California Penal Code section 602.1 (b), as a “time, place and manner” restriction rather than an outright ban on speech. But the judge also said that if the protesters didn’t actually block access to the County Clerk’s office, Penal Code section 602.1 (c), which says, “Section (b) shall not apply to any person on the premises who is engaging in activities protected by the California Constitution or the Constitution of the United States,” would give them the right to be there to make their political point.

She said the factual issue in the case would be whether heterosexual couples were actually able to get married despite the defendants’ presence. “We will be making law here,” the judge said, adding that as far as she knows no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under this statute before.

“This case will be important,” said Equality Nine defendant Zakiya Khabir, “because Occupy San Diego is facing similar issues with police interference with a peaceful protest.” At the support rally S.A.M.E. held outside the courthouse before the hearing, another defendant, Cecile Veillard, also compared the Equality Nine to Occupy San Diego and said they were both fighting for the right to protest in public spaces.

“The Deputy City Attorney said in court today that we are being tried based on ‘blocking equal access to other members on the public attempting to conduct business,’” said Veillard after the court hearing. “First of all, this is a lie. Though we did sit in front of the doorways to the clerk’s office, not a single heterosexual couple was prevented access to the clerk’s office to obtain their marriage licenses that day. Secondly, the irony of the DCA’s statement should be obvious. Not only were we denied licenses for same-sex couples who had appointments that day, but we were in fact denied our rights to equal access to even enter the clerk’s office that day. A guard outside the door of the clerk’s office barred us from even entering the clerks’ office to speak with the desk clerk about honoring which had already been made [for] Tony and Tyler Dylan-Hyde and other same-sex couples that day. It is we who were denied equal access to conduct our business in the county clerk’s office on that day.”

The support rally before the hearing drew 40 people, many of whom came over from the Occupy San Diego action at the Civic Center Plaza to join in. A woman who did not identify herself, but was addressed by others present as “Jersey,” called Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California the Equality Nine were protesting, “trickle-down homophobia.” She said that what Proposition 8 and other anti-Queer laws “trickled down” to included teen bullying and suicide.

S.A.M.E. has been circulating a petition asking San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith to drop all charges against the Nine. On September 28, they staged a rally in the Civic Center Plaza — ironically, where the Occupy San Diego action started nine days later — following which they took petitions containing nearly 2,500 signatures to Goldsmith’s office and gave them to his assistant, Carmen Sandoval.