20 January 2001 ~ Washington, D.C.
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"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
-- President George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 1789 --
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Thousands of Americans demonstrate before the US Supreme Court building during the illegal coronation of George W. Bush on 20th January 2001.
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What's it All About?
On 20 January 2001, between 30,000 and 40,000 angry Americans turned out at sites throughout the capitol to protest the installation of George W. Bush into the federal beaurocracy's chief post. Despite unconstitutional restrictions on our speech, assembly and movement rights that were illegally enforced by thousands of police officers and soldiers, we succeeded in making our presence felt. Thousands of demonstrators were subjected to unwarranted and illegal searches of their property and persons. It was one small taste of what the illegal Bush administration has in store for all of us. Boss Tweed has returned, this time in a different party and on a grander scale. Posterity will acknowledge our presence in D.C., and our ancestors who struggled for freedom were honored by our presence there.
(William Marcy Tweed was the Democratic "boss" of Manhattan's Tammany Hall. In 1871, he said, "As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?")
Many also demonstrated against the Electoral College--the archaic, patrician means by which G.W. Bush was s/elected. The Electoral College has resulted in the imposition of an unwanted "President" chosen by a few hundred party ideologues -- a system and result that resembles the party rule of the Soviet Union. This coup was ennacted in blatant opposition to the expressed will of a clear majority of American (and Floridian) voters.
graphic courtesy of http://www.illegitprez.cjb.com/
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"If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
-- General George Washington, 1783 --
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Despite the declared illegality of puppets (an attempt to stifle free-speech by the U.S .Park Service, under command of the Secret Service), one artist was able to masterfully charicature the five Supreme Court "Justices" who delivered the death-blow to American democracy. This puppet periodically flashed its middle digit to dramatise the attitude of the partisan judges towards the disenfrachised voters of the United States. Their elitism and ruling-class condescension is parodied in the sign that hangs around their collective necks: "Our Vote Counted. Who needs yours?" These justices have overstepped the bounds of prescribed judicial motivation and deserve both impeachment and imprisonment. The judicial destroyers of democracy are: Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor.
Justice Stevens, in his dissent, writes: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
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"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-- John Adams, 1765 --
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The sign in the center of this photograph says it all in the plainest possible English: The election was STOLEN. The new "President" is a traitorous thief. In addition to active resistance, we must remember and teach our children about the coup d'etat ennacted by the corporations, the Republican Party, and the five criminal "Justices"
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How Did it Go?
Much American media coverage of the protests was biased and untruthful, but our agenda and actions were accurately reported by independent and international media. The travesty of the 2000 election was decried by pro-democracy demonstrators at more than 20 sites scattered throughout the city, by thousands along the "Presidential" parade route, and by roving bands of demonstrators who solved the permit problem by staying in motion --marching and chanting on the people's sidewalks. Many of the protesters traveled long distances to D.C. to call for election reform and to say that Bush is not duly elected and cannot represent the will, wishes, or interests of the American people and their natural environment. Concurrent protests, attended by thousands of other angry Americans, were held in scores of other cities around the nation. In total, hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out at these many locations on January 20th to voice their opposition to the illegal administration. Many feel strongly that G.W. Bush was illegally chosen by politically motivated "Justices" of the "Supreme" Court (the chief arbiters of the national legal industry) to represent the interests of the ruling class and its corporate tentacles. We must resist!
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"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."
-- Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1927 --
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Despite his song-and-dance about Christian values, George W. Bush is one of the most immoral and hypocritical politicians in living memory. His crimes against the American people already surpass his father's illegal arms smuggling in the Iran-Contra affair, and Richard Nixon's crimes led to his resignation rather than his coronation. American government is now "hypocrisy" writ larger than ever before. We need far more than lip-service to the Bill of Rights. The so-called "Christian" president will praise democratic ideals with his mouth, while stuffing the ballot boxes with one hand and pulling the electric-chair switch with the other.
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Why is Resistance Necessary?
We were reminded by this s/election that American "democracy" has seldom functioned in a healthy or representative way, and that the power to change our decadent system of government rests solely and absolutely with the people. The people must act to preserve their own interests and to maintain the delicate freedoms that so many have fought and died for, from Valley Forge to Birmingham. Our national government is in a period of extreme graft, corruption, and fraud, in which hard-won freedoms are gradually being chipped away--some eliminated altogether. Periods like these have happened before, and the people have arisen to demand justice and the eternal expansion of liberty. But the government and the corporations it serves now have unprecedented means of social control, so the need for dedicated and informed resistance is greater than ever. With the installation of an un-elected "President" by a cabal of corrupt, politically and economically motivated judges, the United States moved several strides closer to totalitarian corporatocracy, in which all talk about "democracy" and "rule of law" is only marketing gimmickery without substance or meaning. At present, our "freedom" depends only upon the whims of America's un-elected CEO's and their chief banker, the extremist libertarian-objectivist, Alan Greenspan. We must resist!
American Imperialism now has an Emperor, and the long-arms of American corporatocracy reach their cankerous fingers into the pockets of peoples around the globe. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the people's voice has arisen again and again against the imposition of contemporary colonialism by the U.S. corporate hegemony. The most basic freedoms -- including the right to vote -- are jeopardized both in the U.S. and abroad. We must resist!
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"This is the most magnificent movement of all! There is dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire. The people should never rise without doing something to be remembered -- something notable and striking. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can't but consider it as an epocha in history."
-- John Adams (on the Boston Tea Party), 1773--
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Signs read: "Even the Heavens Weep," "Great Speech of concession made by Wrong Man," and "We Demand Dramatic Campaign Finance Reform." This crowd was addressed by Granny D., a 91 year old woman who recently walked across the United States to demand campaign finance reform. She is an inspiration to all to make greater personal sacrifices for the sake of liberty. Granny D characterized Washington as a "whorehouse" in which politicians sell themselves to the highest bidder. I've included a link to her website on our links page.
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"The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratic council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor."
-- John Adams, 1815 --
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Before the Supreme Court building, signs read "How does it feel to appoint a king?" and "The Court is Disgraced"
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But ain't this the Promised Land?
The peoples of the world emphatically reject American-style governance and capitalist absolutism, prefering instead their traditional models or the parliamentary and democratic socialist models of other Western nations. Unfortunately, again and again, the world banks, national governments, and petit corporations of the colonized peoples have attempted to silence their opposition and have imposed the will of American-controlled corporations and banks. For a minute fraction of the profits, these people's national beaurocracies have sold their birthrights of sovereignty and political and social freedom. Billions of people around the world know -- all from direct observation and many from first-hand experience -- that the "American Dream" is an environmentally and culturally destructive illusion, both undesirable and unattainable. We must not only work for change in our own country, but must also demonstrate solidarity with the international victims of our consumptive excess. The unity we seek is not unity among a few tens of millions of Reublicans and Democrats, but unity amongst the billions of disenfranchised and oppressed peoples living in every nation on earth. George W. Bush has no popular mandate, no moral claim, and no intellectual capacity to serve as the prime director-of-destiny for the United States or its economic colonies. We must resist!
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"The United States is a warning rather than an example to the world."
-- Lydia Maria Child, 1857 --
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The moral force of economic collectivism may yet prevail over the demoralizing "money first" agenda of American corporatocracy. The pernicious idea that capitalism uplifts all is a patent lie, and we need look no futher than our our burgeoning American underclass for verification. No single economic or political arrangement is appropriate for all peoples of the world, nor is such hegemony desirable. From hunter-gather cultures to industrialism, the true stability of the world and its many communities rests with environmental, tribal, agrarian, shopkeeper and democratic socialist values, not with large-scale international capitalism. Bush's election theft is only one act in the ongoing drama of increasingly toltalitarian international corporatocracy. We must refute and destroy large-scale capitalism! We must resist!
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"When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendency, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder."
-- Karl Marx, Capital --
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The Ugly Face of the Anti-Democratic Opposition
George W. Bush is a Premier, not a President. We have been asked by the leaders of both parties to ignore the rife corruption, fraud, state-sponsored racism, and decimation of democratic ideals patently revealed in the 2000 election debacle. We're asked to do this for the sake of "unity," and are urged to submit to, rather than resist, the corrupt Supreme Court and its illegal President. Never since McCarthy and the Red Scare have our freedoms been so endangered. This time, the new McCarthy isn't a marginal Senator backed by a few staffers, but the (so-called) President of the United States, backed by more than half of the Supreme Court and more than half of the legislature (but decidedly NOT more than half of the American people). Rather than unify the American people through egalitarian appointments, Bush has stocked the cabinet and promises to stock more than 6,000 government positions with extremist conservatives and corporate ideologues, some of whom have even publicly legitimized the Confederate States of America. Our new CSA is the Corporate States of America.
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"We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature has placed in our power. ...The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."
-- Patrick Henry, 1775 --
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An African-American demonstrator graphically portrays the "lynching" of the Florida electorate. African-American Floridians were systematically defrauded and kept from the polls by police force on Nov. 7, 2000. Several protestors present risked their lives in the 1950s and 60s to secure the right to vote, a right which George W. Bush and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court have repealed.
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Tyranny Advances
In Bush's appointments, corporatocracy is being wed to Christian fundamentalism. Without resistance, the future of the United States and the world looks grimer than it has since the beginning of World War II. With resistance, we still have a chance to secure real liberty for ourselves and demonstrate alliance with the other oppressed peoples of the world. George W. Bush is an enemy of democracy, here as much as abroad. Bush deserves both impeachment and imprisonment. Justice demands nothing less. If we can't succeed in dethroning Bush, we CAN succeed in blocking his agenda while preserving hope that the next President will truly be chosen in the balloting booths rather than in the "access denied" chambers of a Washington, D.C. court house.
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"Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth."
-- General George Washington, 1776--
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Signs read "The people have spoken (all five of them)" and "Bush=Racism". Bush has already made several racist appointments and has excluded Jewish and other non-Christian Americans from his cabinet. He was aided by his brother, Jeb Bush (Rich Republican Governor of Florida) and by Katherine Harris (Rich Republican Secretary of State of Florida) in his systematic effort to deprive African-American and Jewish Floridians of the right to vote. He has already diminished liberty. He won't start expanding it tomorrow, and that's guaranteed.
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"The destiny of the colored American ... is the destiny of America."
-- Frederick Douglass, 1862 --
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The People Have the Power
Regardless of who holds office, we must perennially make it clear that real power rests with the people. We are the nominal citizens and active consumers who make their corrupt hegemony possible. We can stop it and we will stop it. We must resist!
The mechanism of popular election ostensibly still exists. But it won't for long.
Please find an organization whose ideas and modes of resistance you can support--and JOIN THE STRUGGLE. There is a link below that will take you to a page of pro-democracy, anti-Bush, and economic and social justice resources on the web. Resist Premier Bush and his globalizing corporate hoard!
We must resist! We must resist! We must resist!
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"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. ...If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
-- Frederick Douglass, 1857 --
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We were loud, strident and legion. And we will not go away!
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"Virtue is not always amiable."
-- John Adams, 1779 --
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Patricia Ireland and the National Organization for Women were out in full-force. George W. Bush and his cabinet, as well as his federal judiciary appointees, will attempt to repeal Roe vs. Wade and hundreds of other advances made by women in the 20th century. The full equality of women has never been more threatened since the Eisenhower administration.
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"The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took."
-- Alice Schaerr Rossi, 1973 --
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Sign in Dupont Circle reads "Bush = Anti-Woman, Anti-Choice"
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"Here in the first paragraph [of the Declaration of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to go to the ballot; for how can 'the consent of the governed' be given, if the right to vote be denied?"
-- Susan B. Anthony, "Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" (speech made prior to her trial for voting) -- 1873
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Protestors begin to amass in Dupont Circle at the Voter's Rights March.
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Thousands throng in Dupont Circle for Voter's Rights.
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My partner and me. We're holding one of our signs in front of the Supreme Court building. Our slogans read: "One Person, One Vote, One Nation" and "No Justice, No Unity--Democracy Now!"
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"Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust."
-- Grover Cleveland, Inagural Address, 1885--
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Pro-Democracy and Social Justice Links
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days 'til 20 January 2005.
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"It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."
-- Patrick Henry, Speech in Virginia Convention, 1775 --
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Walt Whitman prophetically voices both hope and necessity:
Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible,
They shall yet make Columbia victorious.
Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,
You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.
No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers,
If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.
One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian's comrade,
From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another Oregonese, shall be friends triume,
More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.
To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.
It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection,
The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,
The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.
These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,
I ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.
(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)
-- from Leaves of Grass
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(Oh, the Irony)