Tag Archives: Hispanic Americans

March on DC with your own protest message, not one dictated by NGOs. Yes, you’ll need a banner and poles.

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Denver Womens March 2012Organizers of the post-inaugural WOMEN’S MARCH in Washington DC this weekend are telling participants not to bring poles for signs or flags, or even knapsacks. Ha ha ha. As you travel across the country to march, remember who’s making the real sacrifice. The march coordinators are paid. You are spending the time and expense because you have something to express. Bring it. The only reason organizers want you unequipped is so your [rogue] message won’t stray from theirs. Does that sound democratic? They also have a different goal than you. Their mission is to pull off a smooth event. Yours is to make history.

As a veteran of countless protest marches, national, regional and international, I encourage newcomers to stick to their nonconformist inclinations. Independent critical thinking is what led you to take action in the first place.

To begin, THIS IS YOUR MARCH.
Washington DC belongs to you. Inauguration Day and its aftermath belong to you. Just because someone squats a Facebook event on a day conducive to public gathering doesn’t give them dibs to call the shots. A stand-alone call to arms, such as MLK’s Million Man March or CodePink’s A Billion Rising, is another matter. Spontaneous uprisings against historic events are no one organization’s to control or temper. Especially if they begin with capitulations to the state.

Here’s the usual pattern. After a FB event goes viral, nonprofit activist groups jump in to offer their expertise, resources and manpower. The nonprofits thus dominate the details and the event originators have little ground to object. Thrilled to see “their” event succeed, these new-to-the-spotlight activists don’t know that street protest is anathema to nonprofits whose existential foundation is not to disrupt politics as usual. Falling into the trap of coordinating ineffective demonstrations is often blamed on newbie error, but in Washington DC, newbies making the newbie mistakes are employees of nonprofits seeded to pretend the event had a grassroots origin. What the NGOs are really doing is setting a prescribed burn, or backfire.

Backfire: a fire set intentionally to arrest the progress of an approaching fire by creating a burned area in its path, thus depriving the fire of fuel.

Bastards! Fortunately backfire has a further meaning, probably not unrelated to the sketchy forestry strategem.

Backfire: rebound adversely on the originator; have the opposite effect to what was intended.

Just as DC lobbyists monopolize your representatives, professional activists have staked out the capitol and squatted on what is the public’s only access to speak to power. Accept their invitation to come to DC. Thank them for their legal support, their logistics and water bottles, but you’ll handle your messaging thank you.

NOTES FOR NEXT TIME
(If you’d prefer not to dwell on criticism, please skip to the section on RULES. For me, these counterproductive “mistakes” set us back every time we give them a pass.)

1. Telling participants they can’t bring stuff like food or chairs! The event’s duration is being throttled to what can be endured between meals, without a pause for rest. Do you go to meetings without chairs? In the cold outdoors one can’t even sit on the ground.

2. Hiring private security contractors, “some identifiable, some undercover”. WTF? DC’s cops, National Guard, Secret Service, and “Shadow Teams” aren’t enough?

3. Coordinating with police. What? What?! To whom Black Lives Can’t Even Matter? Sorry no.

4. Stifling expression with limits on how to carry signs. Without sticks. “Flags but without poles.” Restricting marchers to signs reinforced with only cardboard tubing. Viewed from a perspective to show the numbers, the march will bear no legible message at all.

5. Telling marchers they must handcarry small bags. You’d think they don’t want marchers’ hands free to carry signs at all.

6. Stooping to a permit, as an excuse to self-police and make participants feel honor bound to unecessary concessions (the permit terms). You don’t need a permit for First Amendment activities. NGOs use permits to effectively reserve public areas and restrict their concurrent use by others. It’s a means to control public space.

7. Scheduling the march on the day after the main event, in time to disrupt nothing. Diluting the inherent outcry, expending from everyone’s discretionary resources to converge on DC. As a result we’ll have two mobilizations. Both massive, hopefully, intead of one which could have TIPPED THE SCALE.

RULES ARE
Meant to be broken. Permit holders can enforce rules within the confines of their event area, with the assistance of authorities if needed, but not outside it. Organizer “rules” can’t be enforced on Metro, or on public streets, or along march route. DC police may pretend they have that authority but they don’t. Cops lie. Know your rights.

To hold a sign where it’s visible in a march, and big enough to where it can be seen among multitudes, you need poles.

BRING POLES.
There is no safety reason whatsoever, in Washington DC, for forbidding the use of sign poles. We’ve seen pole restrictions attempted at national conventions, in close-in urban areas with vulnerable storefront windows, but Washington’s boulevards and setbacked facades evolved with political marches. Demonstrations, parades and motorcades are everyday for DC. Your sign poles pose zero threat and you don’t have to relinquish them. Not Post-911, nor in the Age of Trump. If an NGO-deputized cop won’t allow your entry to their rally, their privatized-park, have someone wait with the contraband outside its bounds. Banners are best seen on the edges of rallies anyway. When attendance numbers reach overload, you’re golden. Move with the numbers. Otherwise wait and join in as the march departs from the rally.

What’s best for poles? Lengths of bamboo from garden nurseries. Bamboo is stiff, light, and utterly non-threatening. Eight footers will hold a banner above marchers’ heads while still allowing you to rest the poles on the ground when the march lags. Six foot lengths give you adequate leverage to keep the banner taut but are more work. Either are cheap and expendable. Bring extra. Bamboo are thin enough to hold reserve pieces bundled. You can grasp a bundle of three as readily as a single pole. Those extra poles can be allocated as you see other marchers in need.

Let’s rule out pipe, lumber and dowels for being too heavy. Broom handles are expensive. Wooden stakes are uncomfortable and too short, and apparently, too “pointy”.

Various widths of PVC are rigid enough to about eight feet. Steel electrical conduit can give you ten feet. Both are cheaply available at neighborhood hardware stores. The baggage holds of charter buses can’t accommodate pieces over eight feet.

Alternatives to fixed lengths poles would be telescoping poles such as hiking sticks or monopods. Usually these do not extend beyond five feet. Longer telescoping tool handles used for painting for example extend but won’t contract to shorter than five feet or so.

Sectional poles such as geodesic tent poles can be folded to different length permutations. Depending on the weight of your banner material, multiple tent poles may be required to provide sufficient stiffness.

The benefit of collapsible poles is that you can conceal them until you are ready. Provided you have a BAG.

BRING A BAG
There are plenty of ordinary reasons to need a bag. Lunch. Extra layers of clothing. Hat, sunglasses, bandana. Extra gloves, hand warmers, snacks, literature to share, stuff handed you at the rally.

As a banner holder you’ll need supplies like duct tape, markers and string to fix signs, and those aforementioned extra tent poles. Maybe a backup banner or gag props for an alternative photo op.

We bring bags to work, school and play. Who expects that a day traversing DC doesn’t call for a bag?

Don’t be fooled into believing that for safety reasons all bags must be clear plastic. DC surveillance can spot the excess heft of dangerous materials such as explosives or weapons, without having to see them. What they’re really looking for are items like ropes, carabiners, harnesses, goggles, which activists can use for nonviolent fun, to mix things up and entertain, provide media moments and get attention.

Besides which, clear bags will make for unsightly messy photos. Neither does your bag need to be restricted in size. Bring a backpack or knapsack. Leave your hands free to carry that sign!

The best reason for you to shoulder an ordinary opaque knapsack is to give cover for others to bring bags with necessities you overlooked. Cameras, accessories, extra socks, bullhorns, batteries, umbrellas etc.

There’s nothing so heartbreaking as a mass of people who’ve come from across the country to participate in a march that goes nowhere. An uneventful demonstration garners no press, wins no recruits, and only burns out those who thought they came to DC to effect change.

I watched half a million hispanic Americans assemble on the National Mall for Immigrant Rights. Many of those half million took a great risk marching in DC. It’s possible many as a result were deported. They could only follow the rules of course, received no media coverage, and accomplished fuck-all.

BRING CHAIRS
Come to DC with a demand, but bring more than the leverage of numbers. Carry with you the potential that you might LINGER. That’s the pressure the media can’t ignore.

Chairs, umbrellas, canopies, tents, enhance your stamina and protect you from the elements. The longer your protest runs, the more time there will be for latecomers to join in. That’s the momentum the state is worried about. Project that.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass

Douglass also said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Your march organizers have promised their DC colleagues a toothless beast. It’s not what they tell their donors, nor how they phrased their invitation to you. You brought your physical body to DC to support the cause. Is it theirs to squander?

Growth Busters’ all white cast asks dark skinned people not to have kids

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COLORADO SPRINGS- Local filmmaker, city council candidate, and critic of urban sprawl, Dave Gardner, screened his new doc GROWTHBUSTERS to a receptive hometown audience last night, on the heels of its world premier in Washington DC. Gardner has long defined his personal mission as questioning the wisdom of “growth”. Finally his unpopular theme is gaining traction. With GrowthBusters Gardner addresses economic growth, rampant consumption, carbon footprints and over-development, building to what he’s decided is the most elephantine challenge in the room, global population growth. Except, I’m sorry, that’s an elephant of another color. I resisted the Q & A, not wanting to pull down the evening’s celebratory curve. A giddy panel of white folk is for me as much a temptation as the easy target Gardner chose. In the privacy of the internet, we at Not My Tribe don’t have bubbles we’re too reluctant to burst.

Dave Gardner’s long unrewarded campaign against our city’s recidivist, graft-driven, and ever tragically unsustainable growth is so damn laudable, and his chopping away at the Capitalist assumptions of neoclassical economists is so urgently pertinent. But by folding both into the Inconvenient Truth of exponential global population rise, does Gardner mean the Colorado Springs audience takeaway to be we must distribute condoms to our Machiavellian land developers?

Let me first applaud Gardner’s critique of our region’s imbecilic growth. It’s ugly and residents are unhappy but powerless to depose the greedy exploitative speculators in charge. A memorable segment describes the Southern Delivery system being built to bring Pueblo water northward to serve El Paso County’s endless eastward developments. The energy to pump that water uphill will require the output of an average coal fired power plant, that much more emissions, pollution and coal ash.

Over the years Gardner has proven to be more than a gadfly battling our land barons. When he challenged Jerry Heimlicher, a pro-growth incumbent for a seat at the city council, the otherwise like-minded progressive adversary beat him, only to resign after his victory to make a sudden move out of town, leaving the position to be chosen by the usual undemocratic powers, looking suspiciously like his campaign had been a desperate measure to keep Gardner’s anti-growth voice off the council. There’s more to applaud about Gardner locally, but first–

I know this is easy to overlook in Colorado Springs, but Dave, the demographic character of the Stargazer Theater audience was what, last night, entirely white? It was, and probably not coincidentally, the dozens of experts you interviewed onscreen were also with one single exception white. Further, I’m sure we can agree the economic class represented was equally homogeneous; let’s call it comfortable. Tell us then, Dave, what does Middle America’s middle class white birthrate add to the worrisome arc of population growth?

Not that I think any socioeconomic group should address itself to out-breeding the next, but an audience with a zero or negative birthrate hardly needs to concentrate on curbing its numbers. Anticipating the challenges of exponential population growth is important, but HOW UNSEEMLY for a white community to plot counter-reproductive measures for the larger masses, specifically the darker-complected Global South, virtually all of its peoples lesser advantaged?

And let me add, how embarrassing that a Grist Magazine editor wants to brag about her lifestyle choice not to have a family, exchanged for the benefit of a “more dynamic schedule” which leaves her more easily free to join three similarly unencumbered friends for coffee.

We’re trading our biological imperative to live a Seinfeld episode?

I am not accusing anyone of deliberate racism, unlike the Sierra Club, who was certain this documentary took aim at Hispanic Americans. This was a detail we learned from the post-screening panel discussion. The local Sierra Club chairperson who sat on the panel last night told us that the national office was alarmed to learn that its Colorado Springs chapter was cosponsoring a documentary which called for curbing population growth. She assured her headquarters that she knew Dave Gardner personally and that GrowthBusters‘s thesis was above reproach. In particular, she explained, it didn’t target illegal immigration, which she presumed was their worry. To clarify, she was thinking: not birthrate but immigration rate, not global population growth but national population growth.

Population growth as it threatens America.

Once again we are reminded of the provincial brain freeze that characterizes our community. Even progressive ideals become distorted by the gravitational pull of our Tea Party tendencies. We support national reformist campaigns, but only to the limit of our stunted conservative comprehension.

Yes, discussing how to limit the birthrate of people of color is racist. It’s White Man’s Burden theology to believe that it is the privilege of the developed white world to decide for our lesser brethren whether they can procreate.

How is rushing to Dave Gardner’s defense, vouching for him that no racist insensitivity was intended, very much different from the excuse given by Congressman Doug Lamborn when he called President Obama a Tar Baby? Lamborn explained that he didn’t know black people were offended by “Tar Baby”. Would it really surprise Gardner that his call for White America to be alarmed about population growth, would threaten the of-color communities whose cultures still encourage having children?

Dave Gardner partnered with strange bedfellows when he took his anti-growth message to what he thought was the next level. The experts he interviewed are well aware their prognostications invite accusations of racism. I found it rather odd that one of them, speaking for the Club of Rome, was not introduced with his organization’s repute fully disclaimed.

If I were to guess, hitting upon the population question is where Gardner’s production finally took wing. Friends were recounting last night how he’d labored on the project for over half a decade, one scene shows Gardner lamenting the lack of financing available for a subject such as his. In the local sequences of GrowthBusters, the subject was about development and sustainability, while all the national interviews concerned population growth. When Gardner described the last year spent immersed in the project, I’m guessing that’s when underwriting for the population meme kicked in. The small cadre of usual suspects advancing today’s equivalent of eugenics theory were probably eager to add a fresh name to their roster. Yesteryear’s infamous population doomsayer Malthus was reviled because people inherently equated dire population projections with depopulation solutions. Malthus’ inheritors are accustomed to the same heat.

It is hard not to wonder if the First World’s cavalier disregard of climate change is because depopulation programs are being readied on the front burner. Peak oil, diminishing resources, declining agricultural yields and higher ecological toxicities cease to threaten human survival with the implementation of depopulation scenarios. Presentations like Gardner’s which reinforce the imperative of reducing the world population, create the popular consent with which population control compliance can be manufactured.

I’d have no problem with population growth engineering if it meant applying in the Third World, the proven method that has subdued the birthrate in the First World. Prosperity. If developed nations could share their abundance and education with the developing world, rendering the wealth of Africa’s natural resources back to Africa’s people for example, they’ll arrive at zero birthrates just like ours.

SPOILER ALERT: Redistribution of resources is not in the cards among the solutions which GrowthBusters suggests. Instead the feel good conclusion of this movie revolves around local applications of sustainability measures. Here I should confess I have a prejudice to corpulent over-eaters lecturing others on sustainability. Austerity measures are danced around, and a suggestion of cutting work hours to twenty one hours a week masks obviously a 50% cut in income.

Just as Gardner celebrates a return to hands-on farming, the oversimplified doubt he casts on the benefit of financial growth ignores the technological progress we all enjoy as its result. Gardner lampoons government planners who look to compensate for trends toward zero birthrates. They’re not “pro-growth”, they mean to fill diminishing labor pools. This is why the US invites its illegal immigrant workers. An increasingly idle population, mostly aging, needs people to service it. The benefit of growth and development was by design at least a rising tide for all.

I say we all, but who is comforted by Gardner’s thesis? How many of us have the savings to invest in a house with land to farm, install an orchard and solar panels to take ourselves off the grid, prepared to barter with our neighbors for the necessities we cannot make ourselves? Few of us live near an American dairy brave enough to defy government regulations against raw milk, I dare say that demographic has shrunk to approximate, no coincidence, the currently proverbial “one percent”. How many of us have access to community shared farms? I’ll hazard a guess you probably can’t afford to buy shares in the farms we have already, Grant Farms or Venetucci.

Let’s be honest about who’s supposed to be cutting back on having babies, and who’s in the position to weather the austere future mankind faces. One of the final scenes of Gardner’s domestic sustainable bliss depicted a model family unit belonging to one of the population growth think tanks. I’d like to think this was an oversight, but in a passing bit of the b-roll footage the audience was let to see that one of the white affluent women was pregnant.

Mexico’s election and ours, the different and the same

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Across the US political spectrum it is now widely understood that the US government does aggressively intervene in Latin America, no matter whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. So no matter what political stripe your average Joe and Jane neighbor may be here in Colorado Springs, you are not too likely to have one deny that the US has historically intervened South of The Border in some form or another; militarily, economically, and culturally. The neighbor leaning Left might say that this has been negative for those countries, while the Rightist will most probably sing interventionism’s praises. The memory of Reagan’s Central American wars of the ’80s remains strong, because some of these wars were so widely covered in the press.

There is one caveat to mention here. The belief that the US is intervening, and has intervened in the past in Latin America, is mostly confined within opinion by the American public, that this is so only south of Mexico. Why? The answer is in that the US press as a whole, treats mention of US interventionism in Mexico and its politics as its grand taboo. Despite the fact that Mexico is a huge and populous country and is where the Third World meets the US to our South, the US press does all it can to keep Americans just as ignorant about Mexico as they can be made.

As one example, just how many non Hispanic Americans can name the Mexican states that border the US? How many of these same Americans know that Mexico is divided into states even? But how many of these same folk yet have strong and basically uninformed opinions regarding immigration from that country? The sum total of belief the US non Hispanic public has been taught by the English language US press, is that Mexico is poor and that many want to live here because of that. Further information is kept back, and the widespread Anglo public view is that Mexicans run their own country and the US has nothing to do with that. Unfortunately, that perception is totally false.

To illustrate the point that the US in fact has a major role in directing Mexican life, let me just mention a few facts about Walmart in Mexico. This American company is Mexico’s largest private employer with over 100,000 employees and over 800 stores there. It now is entering into the countries banking structure as a major player, too. It is just ridiculous to imagine that the Walton family of Arkansas is just standing to the side when political and economic decisions are being made, whether in Spanish, or not.. They have an agenda, and push it just as hard in Mexico as they do in the US. Their agenda, in short, is to make profits in that country and to move those billions to Bentonville, USA.

I don’t want to pick on Walmart here. They are just one of many prominent examples of US presence in Mexico, and exploitment of it. They have high level company officials, as other US companies and the US government itself do, that interact with the Mexican elites themselves to maintain a ‘good business climate’. What existed before the year 2000, was the longest running one-party dictatorship in the world. Both Mexican and US elites decided was that this was not good for business at that time. Previously, they had agreed that this dictatorship was absolutely just the thing for business and US government support for the PRI dictatorship was kept solid. And the US press’s silence about this ran solid for decades, too.

In the last 2 US presidential elections, the results left many believing that fraud had carried Bush into office twice. At any rate Bush received less votes (called popular votes, as if that made them insignificant) than Al Gore did in 2000, and yet got the office! Gore realized that though he had won the vote count and that the Republicans had fraudently purged voter lists of largely eligible Black voters, that he was not as popular amongst the US elite as Bush was at the time. So he laid down his claim for the presidency, and conceded without a struggle! And America has been as it has, ever since.

Mexico had its presidential election about 10 weeks ago. News of it was kept quiet in the US daily press, as if it was of no real concern to Americans. Pretty strange behavior for what bills itself as the ‘free press’, but not real shocking if we consider how the US press has been largely lap dogs in support of Bush’s multiple invasions, occupations, and wars. Not much coverage of Bush in Haiti these days, neither. How much real examination has there been of whether the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had roots in the White House?

But what came out of this election south of us was a fraudulent result that will possibly impact the US as much as Iraq now does. After all, the US and Mexico are intertwined on the North American continent, and neither country will ever become an island into itself,no matter how hard it is tried. I could go into the many details of why the results were fraudulent, something that is now being denied in US daily editorial after another. That would seem arcane and boring to most readers though. What counts, is that about half of the Mexican population is certain that the results are fraudulent and the official president stands with little legitimacy in their eyes. And the US supports that man, as do the Mexican church, government, and economic elites that have long impoverished that country.

What really is fearful to the US media, is that the official ‘loser’ of the Mexican presidential race, Antonio Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), has chosen a path completely in contrast to that of our US loser of the past, Al Gore. He has decided to struggle against the fraud rather than to meekly surrender to it. Despite the effort to reconstruct Gore’s image amongst the US public as Mr. Ecology, he will probably go down in history as the goat that led to the construction of the Bush Administration. Mexico’s ‘loser’, AMLO, may well go down to being seen as a hero in the struggle against US control of his country, and the destruction of its national integrity.

The situation in Mexico now is quite complex. The country’s highest court just put a man in office, that even with fraud in his favor, gathered less than 40% of the votes! The south of the country went for AMLO, and the north went more to Calderon, now the official ‘president’. About 30% of the country stuck with the PRI, party of the no supposedly defunct one-party dictatorship of the past. Fact is, that both Calderon’s party and the PRI have been acting in conjunction with each other, as if they were but 2 wings of one corporate party. Does this ring a bell for some Americans?

Our government and institutions should not fall into line accepting Mexican electoral fraud as they are now doing. The fact that they have done so bodes poorly for our own embattled system. Neither country can afford to continue where only elites make decisions that effect all of us. Neither country needs Tweedle-Dee/ Tweedle-Dumb governance. That way leads to national insecurity for both nations.