@CODEPINK Associates Hot Summer Of Actions

Photo posted by Nancy Mancias July 2, 2013: #BARTstrike workers & #nurses join #socialsecurity march to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office 

Summer is underway and CODEPINK associates are busting out all over with actions challenging the status quo of drone strikes, wars/occupations, illegal detentions at Guantanamo, and austerity cuts to crucial programs for vulnerable populations so the Pentagon can continue to gobble up 57% of the federal budget.

Co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans along with Tighe Barry, Ann Wright and other allies visited Yemen in June to meet with families affected by drone strikes and Guantanamo indefinite detentions. Here's Medea explaining some of what she heard in Yemen, speaking in an interview with Dennis Trainor:

Support for whistleblower Bradley Manning was strong as CODEPINK Bay Area joined thousands of other supporters to march in San Francisco's Pride Parade 2013. Because Manning was removed as a Grand Marshall despite having been democratically selected for the honor, this was a perfect venue to support Manning during his court martial trial for providing evidence of war crimes to all of us via Wikileaks. Here are some of Manning's rocking Pink supporters in SF:

In Maine our most recent action on the streets in Portland called for a ceasefire to end the tragic levels of bloodshed in Syria and for the U.S. to abandon plans to send weapons there.

Local artist William Hessian designed and printed recycled t-shirts for CODEPINK Maine with a drone on the front and "One Nation Under Drones" on the back.  We'll be wearing them again on 4th of July when we march in Bath with a giant drone puppet and wearing our surveillance eyeballs. Maine recently passed a bill requiring law enforcement to obtain warrants before using drones to gather information -- but allowing military drones to be tested in Vacationland. Bad idea!

CODEPINK NYC is hot on the trail of Stolen Beauty with the call to boycott cosmetic products by Ahava, made from mud pillaged in settlements near the Dead Sea in occupied Palestine. Their petition to the department store chain Nordstrom to stop carrying products made illegally hopes to gather 5,000 signatures. Click here to sign the Causes petition or, if you are not on Facebook, you can sign the letter here instead.

A most inspiring ongoing action, pictured above, is the eloquent demand for justice at Guantanamo taking place regularly at the White House. Especially of note: Diane Wilson has been fasting since early May in solidarity with hunger strikers protesting inhumane conditions at the notorious prison where innocent men cleared for release are kept in limbo for years at a time. When Diane's weeks of fasting didn't get the attention of the President, who has the ability to release prisoners and even shut down Guantanamo, she hopped the fence. Diane and Medea and others were then arrested.

Here's Medea being slammed to the pavement by police on the sidewalk in front of the White House after protesters were told to clear the area and she paused to help another hunger striker who was having trouble walking:

It occurred to me that police might have been angered by the street theater enactment of forced feeding a la Gitmo, as shown here by Tighe Barry and a CODEPINK "prisoner":



As I watched this I reflected on news today that hunger strikers being held in Cuba would be force fed only after dark as they are Muslims observing Ramadan. Even George Orwell could not forsee this criminal absurdity.

Hot summer of actions ahead! Click here to find Codepink associates in your area.

Angus Favors Fracking + No Photos Of Guards Allowed

We arrived a few minutes early for our staff meeting at Maine's new senator Angus King's office in Augusta, the state capital. The federal building has a metal detector and about seven middle aged guards at the door, and it took us considerably longer than we had planned to pass through security.

My friend Abby Shahn had to remove her belt, shoes, and get wanded by a metal detector.

I had to drink the water from my water bottle in front of the one female guard, to prove that it was actually water. No, she was not kidding.

Marge Kilkelly -- who was a Democratic legislator in Maine before becoming senior policy advisor to Angus -- was in state for the congressional recess week, and she said it took her a really long time to get through security, too.

Apparently the guards at the federal building have been told to give the order that no one is supposed to photograph "a guard doing his (sic) work." An aggressive older man ordered me to erase the photo I took of Abby getting wanded, and I did it because 1) I wanted to get to my appointment and 2) apparently the guards did not realize that when someone holds a pink rectangle up in the air, she is also taking a picture. So we still got the clandestine photos above.

We did our meeting, which we had requested soon after Angus got elected in November, by presenting a lot of information we thought might lead Angus to conclude that riding the "stop war spending, it's bankrupting the Treasury" platform might be a path to public acclaim. 

Some info was to show that the will of the people of Maine is overwhelmingly in favor of low spending on "defense"( Penny Poll article  from the Kennebec Journal). National Priorities project trade offs and charts showed that the federal government is seriously out of whack, currently spending 57% of the discretionary budget on military. We also left behind a case study of Bring Our War $$ Home campaign as a coalition effort in Maine and in many other parts of the U.S. and articles about the U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution pleading with the federal government to spend less on wars, and more investing in the cities where people live.

We had printed a copy of the Pollin & Pelletier report "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending," which refutes the claim that military spending is a good jobs program. I consider this the clincher because it refutes the b.s. that is always trotted out when there are threatened cuts to the Pentagon budget: But we will lose jobs locally if this funding is cut! Read the report to find out why investment in several other ways produces far more jobs -- more than twice as many, in some cases.

It fell to Codepink associate Pat Taub to get down to business on drones. Since Angus had made a splash in the news asking a few pointed questions about drones of John Brennan, nominee for CIA director. He had also suggested a special court to review the extrajudicial assassination plans, but only those targeting Americans, so Pat had brought Desmond Tutu's op-ed calling for a respect for all the humans on the planet. She had much documentation of the effects of drone strikes, including photographs, and a copy of Medea Benjamin's book Drone Warfare, which is well-researched and current. 

Buy one for your senator.

We also shared a copy of NYU/Stanford law school report "Living Under Drones" a most substantial refutation of the claim that drones are in Angus' words a "humane" weapon as currently used by the U.S. 

Abby, going as usual to the heart of the matter, wanted to ask: How can the people's voices can be heard in government? She observed that this has consistently failed to happen. She has a long memory so she started back at Vietnam naming all the wars people haven't wanted that the U.S. has waged anyway. (A large campaign contribution would no doubt amplify the people's voices just like it does for corporations.) I wondered aloud who Angus would be representing in Congress: the people of Maine, or General Dynamics?


Then we all talked about energy policy and we found out that because Maine is so dependent on heating oil, Angus favors natural gas as a "transitional fuel" and that he favors FRACKING!!!!!

Objections to the folly of polluting ground water were waved away by Marge with the mantra "transitional fuel." 

We pointed out that we had been in "transition" since Jimmy Carter wore that cardigan and turned down the thermostat in the White House, which was so long ago it was the first presidential election where I was old enough to vote. Also that there is vast hydropower leaving the state on long distance lines, leaking energy as it goes, for the profit of wealthy people, while the Mainers whose rivers were dammed to make the electricity do not benefit from it. Also that many of us heat with renewables, use solar energy, and want to see sustainable sources like tidal and geothermal and wind explored.

As we were leaving I thanked Marge because she had supported all middle school kids and teachers in Maine getting laptops through a learning technology grant when she was in the state legislature and Angus was governor. Amazingly enough, this program is still in place years later, and it did revolutionize middle school. (It didn't solve the equity problem, though, because the local school districts were supposed to fund the high school end of the program, and if they were poor, fagedaboudit.)

In the absence of meaningful congressional oversight of the executive branch waging wars both overt and covert, it is hard to justify teaching kids about checks and balances as if they actually existed. I probably shouldn't have said that because it's one more black mark in my file.

I know many will think we were fools to waste our time and probably get iris scanned and who knows what else to meet with a representative of a broken government that no longer represents the people. We are all grandmothers and idealistic and we did once believe in the democracy we supposedly lived in. We're worried about the future for our grandchildren, like pretty much everybody is nowadays. So we visit our senators. But since money equals political speech, and we don't leave behind a big fat check, it mostly amounts to going through the motions.

We do it because you still can. That is, if you can get past Homeland Security.

Codepink associates with Angus King's senior policy advisor Marge Kilkelly in Augusta today.

What's In A Name? @SenFeinstein And Her "CODEPINK Associates"

Homework by Codepink to prepare for the Brennan hearings.

Since CODEPINK is the most visible presence among anti-drone lobbying citizens, Sen. Diane Feinstein presiding over the Intelligence (sic)  Committee of the U.S. Senate said:

I am going to ask that the room be cleared and that the Codepink associates not be permitted to come back in.

This delayed the confirmation hearing for torture and drone czar John Brennan who is the current president's pick to head up the CIA. Most citizens who don't want their government to torture, or to drone bomb children, with their tax dollars oppose Brennan's nomination.

Codepink at a candlelight vigil for civilian drone victims outside John Brennan's house in Herdon, Virginia.

My attention was snagged by Feinstein's use of the word associates. Was it pre-meditated? Why did she not say disruptors if she didn't want to say demonstrators or protestors? Or for that matter, why not just call them those rude people?

What does "associates" connotate?

It is the sort of bland bureaucratic word that lends itself to the distortion, even perversion, of language that occurs under oppressive regimes. The kind of language that George Orwell warned us about. It has the root to associate which is a vague concept if there ever was one. It could just mean people you are around on a regular basis; in the old days, it meant "and company" as appended to someone's name who was the head of a business firm. Nowadays the strongest connotation for "associate" would be as a term for someone working at Walmart or a place like that.

When jobs became McJobs, clerks became associates.

Really, anyone can become an associate. They are the endlessly interchangeable cogs in the machine of low-wage, no-benefits jobs. They are the worker bees, so to speak. (Drone bees, by the way, are not worker bees. They just hang around and eat a lot, mating occasionally.)

Codepink has worker bees, mostly volunteer, who stand in line for hours to exercise the rights of a citizen to witness the show confirmation hearings where senators pretend to ask hard-ball questions (ok, sometimes they don't even pretend to do that much) and the nominee gives vague non-answers without being challenged.

Chairing such a committee is usually not that difficult. It's a chance to appear as a senior statesman in charge of something terribly important, where everyone is super polite and deferential, with C-Span and networks covering the non-news event.

It can become a big headache however, like it did for Sen. Max Baucus when doctors and nurses had the audacity to stand up in the audience and demand to know why the hearings on reforming health care had no voices for universal healthcare seated among the insurance industry representatives.

Retired Col Ann Wright speaking outside the hearings about drone deaths: "And don't forget the Afghans!"

Sen. Feinstein had an especially thorny problem because she could only identify disruptors and potential disruptors as "Codepink associates" but they were mostly a bunch of adults in unremarkable clothing who blended in reasonably well with the lobbyists and policy wonks. I spotted a couple of people I know in the aidence that are perennially active around issues like torture , closing Guantanamo, or the trampling of the rule of law. They are not members of Codepink and I have never seen them wear that particular color while in action. Are they, therefore, Codepink "associates"? How would one determine who was, or was not, an "associate"?

Sen. Feinstein, as a bona fide Codepink associate in the SF Bay area told me, tends to speak in a "fusty old-fashioned way." We speculated about whether she coined the term on the spot (my Bay area friend added: "She probably wanted to call them those fools") or whether her staff came up with the word in advance.

Because when you're holding a hearing to confirm the man widely viewed as the architect of the president's CIA drone assassination program, you can be pretty sure Codepink will be in the house.

Expect us.