Now What? So Bush Won, Let's Get To Work, L.A. Kauffman, Free Radical
The radical community was conspicuously silent about the whole presidential election mess. '[T]here's been a sense in which we outside-the-system types have been on hold, waiting to see which of the two evils would prevail,' writes radical historian L.A. Kauffman in her web column Free Radical: A Chronicle of the New Unrest. Now that the country has picked its poison, Kauffman says, it's time to get down to business. 'There's never been such a... sterling opportunity to show our disaffection with the many faces of plutocratic rule: the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Florida; the role of big money in elections; the corporate domination of our political system; and the insult of having an idiotic twerp and serial executioner installed as president.' Kauffman gives us a glimpse at what's on the activist calendar in coming months. First off, there are the Inauguration Day protests being planned for January 20, when hordes of activists will crash the Bush-Cheney bash. At the same time, activists are preparing for next April's Summit of the Americas, when the heads of state of every nation in the western hemisphere (sans Cuba) will gather in Quebec City to negotiate a [region-wide] free-trade pact that Kauffman calls 'NAFTA on steroids.' Kauffman continues with a status report on several key activist organizations, including New York's Direct Action Network and the anti-consumerist Church of Stop Shopping, which organized the 'Starbuck's Ate My Neighborhood' campaign. And she looks at the crumbling lawsuits filed by the Philadelphia police against several organizers of the August protests outside the Republican convention.
--Leif Utne
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