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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