Effort to hide the hungry continues across the United States.
October 9, 2013
Advocates for the poor were told to stop sharing meals with the hungry in a Sacramento and Santa Monica, California; Taos, New Mexico; and Olympia, Washington on the weekend of October 5th and 6th.
http://blog.foodnotbombs.net/effort-to-hide-the-hungry-continues-across-the-united-states/
Nearly every week some one contacts me about news that local authorities are threatening to stop the sharing of food in public. This was a particularly busy time for such news. At the same time hunger is on the increase and Congress is voting to cut 39 billion dollars in food stamps. There has never been a more important time to make the struggle for food justice visible.
Some officials claim they are just enforcing food safety laws but there has not been one complaint of anyone being made ill eating with Food Not Bombs. The food is vegan and shared within three hours. Not only that the food is often organic consisting of whole grains, fresh produce and high end baked goods often the best quality meals people depending on food programs ever get. In our 33 year history sharing in over 1,000 cities without one case of reported illness related to our meals it is clear food safety is not an issue. The excuse of needing permission is also false. Every state in the U.S. recognizes that food sanitation permits are only required for people and groups that would profit from cutting corners by ignoring food safety standards. Our meals are free and a gift to anyone without restriction. Not one of us is paid and has any reason to ignore food safety standards. Sharing food and ideas is an unregulated activity protected activity. We are seeking to change society by sharing vegan meals, free literature under the banner Food Not Bombs. The attempt to require permits is based on the goal of the authorities to deny us a permit and provide a “Legitimate” excuse for stopping the sharing of food in public.
Why would officials want to drive our meals out of sight? For one they do not want pressure to divert tax money on solutions for hunger and poverty from projects wanted by the wealthiest in their communities. On a national level military contractors, bankers and other corporate leaders are concerned the public will see the hungry gathered in the streets and it will highlight the fact that we have plenty of tax dollars to provide huge profits for the 1 percent yet little is clearly being done to provide for most of those paying the taxes.
The eight of us that started Food Not Bombs were profoundly influenced by our participation in the October 6, 1979 Occupation Attempt of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. Three decades later it is clear those of us who’s lives were changed by the violent military response to our effort to stop the dangers of nuclear power were tragically correct in our concern. The October 6, 2013 edition of the Washington Post reported that “Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday that Japan is open to receiving overseas help to contain widening radioactive water leaks at the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, with leaks and mishaps reported almost daily.“We are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem,” Abe said in his English speech to open the conference on energy and environment. “My country needs your knowledge and expertise.”
The dangers of nuclear power have a more direct connection to hunger than we realized in 1979 as teargas rained down on us from helicopters and the National Guard smashed us across our heads with five foot long clubs. Hundreds of millions of people depend on seafood to survive. Fish that are now highly radioactive and may not survive. On October 4, 2013 at least 430 liters of water 6,700 times more radioactive than the legal limit spilled into the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear station and the crisis is only increasing. We have no idea what impact this is having on sea and how many will go hungry as their food supply is poisoned.
This October 6th I have had the honor to participate in the Resolve to Fight Poverty Conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill organized by students from around the United States. Their knowledge and dedication is inspiring. The conference opened with a presentation called “The Faces of Homelessness” where three formally homeless people spoke about their lives and the hunger they faced living on the streets. We watched the film “A Place at the Table” and shared conversations about possible solutions to hunger. Brett Weisel the Director of Advocacy for Feeding America spoke just after I had received an email about the city of Olympia, Washington seeking to stop the sharing of meals by the charity Crazy Faith Outreach. The article reported that “two weeks ago the outreach hit a snag when several nearby business owners, including Pam Tuttle, complained to the city. ‘We end up with a lot of traffic,’ Tuttle said. ‘We have had problems with garbage.’ City Manager Steve Hall said after he received those complaints, Olympia police investigated and found several safety violations, including dozens of people walking into traffic and blocking cars.”
Just as the conference was about to start I get a call from one of the Santa Monica Food Not Bombs organizers. He told me that a paster Ron Hooks of West Coast Care had been trying to get the group to stop sharing their vegan meals on the downtown promenade. According to several newspaper articles Ron describes West Coast Care as a nonprofit working with the Santa Monica Police Department’s Joint Homeless Outreach Program. Santa Monica Food Not Bombs shares every Thursday evening at the Third Street Promenade long after the shops are closed.
An article in the July 11, 2103 edition of the Boulder Weekly reported that “Groups that feed the homeless in downtown Boulder on Saturdays say the city is trying to run them out of the area in yet another attempt to get rid of those the city considers undesirable.”
”But city officials insist that they support the feeding operations, and that they are just trying to alleviate congestion in the area and reduce criminal activity.”
Back in North Carolina the Raleigh police told groups that they would be arrested if they continued to share meals in public. After news of the threat was posted all over the web and it was clear that there was opposition to the closing of the meals city officials stop the police. In mid August 2013 news was posted on a number of activist website. ” This story is exploding on social media since it was posted by Love Wins, a ministry in Raleigh. Human Beans Together is another group suddenly barred by the Raleigh police from giving out food to the homeless in Moore Square on the weekends, when soup kitchens don’t operate.”
”Folks are heading to Moore Square today at 4, when Food Not Bombs is intending to do its regular food distribution — or try, anyway.”
On August 25th it was reported that “Food Not Bombs did bring food and they were allowed to distribute it. The Raleigh police stood down after Mayor Nancy McFarlane and numerous Council members intervened today with Police Chief Deck-Brown and Acting City Manager Perry James.” The article notes that “A permit to use Moore Square is apparently $800 a day.”
As I was watching the Oxfam staff prepare for that evening’s Hunger Banquet I get a text from the Food Not Bombs volunteers in Taos. The State of New Mexico Environmental Health official stopped by our weekly meal and asked if I was still in Baltimore as he handed one of our volunteers David Lewis a $500 citation issued to me for selling food at the Taos Plaza on October 5th without a permit. Another volunteer David Cortez filmed the exchange and posted it to my Facebook minutes after it happened. The same official issued me another $500 citation on June 1, 2013 crossing out the words selling writing in sharing. At the time rumor had it that a new food vendor from out of town had filed a complaint but they have moved on so it is not clear why the officials working for America’s hungriest state would issue a citation to someone who was busy participating in a hunger and poverty conference in North Carolina.
When I visited the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program website it said “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.After funding has been restored, please allow some time for this website to become available again.”
Just before the government shut down the U.S. Congress approved a three-year nutrition bill (H.R. 3102), with a partisan 217-210 vote, that aims to cut about $40 billion over 10 years for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and provide various reforms to the program. House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said the bill includes “reasonable changes” to address the “growing and growing and growing” amount of SNAP recipients. “There are still jobs available in America,” Sessions said. “They may not be ones you want to stay in your whole life.” Democratic congress people said that 4 million low-income people, including 170,000 veterans would be cut from the food stamp program because of the vote.
The government shit down will stop payments to over 9 million low-income women and children who qualify for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children also known as WIC. Feeding hungry children is not considered essential yet 350,000 furloughed civilian employees of the Pentagon will return to work on Monday.
On Monday October 7th I received an email from Sacramento Food Not Bombs volunteer Petey. “Well, yesterday Sacramento Food not Bombs was kicked out of the Cesar Chavez Park by the Sacramento police. We were greeted by about 15 officers when we arrived at the park when we normally do in time to start sharing the meal we created by 1:30pm. We were told that our stuff would be confiscated and we would get a summons due to an ordinance that has yet to even be passed that would prevent any group from handing out free hot meal in the park.”
The federal government and corporate leaders understand the power of groups like Food Not Bombs and work hard to reduce our influence. Officials arrested nine volunteers sharing food and information at the entrance to Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988. The police told the media that they did not mind that we were feeding the hungry. They objected to our message stating that we “were making a political statement and that is not allowed.” They told the media that the city would provide buses to take the hungry out of sight to a military facility out by the beach and we could feed people there but we could not have banners and literature and share food where the public could see us.
I was invited to be the keynote speaker at “The Great Food Fight” in North Hampton England. It turned out that the lest expensive way to fly to Europe was through Reykjavik, Iceland so I arranged to visit the local Food Not Bombs group. We prepared the meal at a volunteers home took it to the main intersection downtown and retrieved several signs from a pub next to the serving location. One sign had the complete text of a flyer explaining about Food Not Bombs written with a marker in English on one side and in Icelandic on the other. They also provided a suit case full of literature.
People gathered to eat and soon were busy debating the ideas expressed on the signs and flyers. Before long the people were telling me about how a people started a lively debate about reform of the government or a fundamental change of society. The discussion was sparked by the statements on the signs and information on the flyers. They said the conversation continued at the next weeks meal and it was agreed that they should march on the parliament building and off they went. Word spread and many more people came to the next Food Not Bombs meal. Lunch ended in a second march. When I arrived they had just taken down the government. Several people had been arrested after removing the flag of Iceland and replacing it with a flag of the county’s discount chain Bónus with its logo of a pink piggy bank. Protesters march to the jail demanding the release of the prisoners.
The protests grew so large that prime minister Geir Haarde resigned in 2009. He was prosecuted in a special trial for bringing the country to ruin. “A court ruled that he failed to hold cabinet meetings focused on the spiraling crisis ahead of the North Atlantic island’s financial implosion, which marked one of the seminal moments of the global panic caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.” but he was spared any time in prison even though he could have been sentenced to two year. The Icelandic people started to rewrite their constitution and refused to bail out the banks. The banner and literature at our meals can mean trouble for those in power and the state knows this.
The message from nearly every speaker at the Resolve to Fight Poverty Conference came to the same conclusion. We have abundant resources. We just don’t have access to food, housing and healthcare because of policies that benefit the 1 percent and have turned what should be a basic human right into a commodity. The biggest change in perspective I witnessed was with Feed America when Brett Weisel stated that there focus was on “shortening the line for food” and working to for a society when Americans were paid a living wage and could buy the food they desired, a message Food Not Bombs has expressed from our founding. A message that has placed Food Not Bombs on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watch list.
In April 2009 C-Span aired a lecture by two U.S. State Department officials comparing “the people that share vegan meals in the parks” and al-Qaeda. The speaker concluded that the vegan meals were a greater threat to national security than al-Qaeda because the young people sharing the meals were friendly and the message was powerful. The officials feared that the public would be moved and press Congress to divert military spending to things like education, healthcare and other social services.
It really could be that simple. If every Food Not Bombs group made a point of having banners, signs and literature at meals shared at a time and location where the most people possible would visit we might inspire change. Along with literature encouraging a transition to a future free from corporate domination each meal provided a place for musicians and puppeteers to preform and a forum for the public to share their ideas and dreams who knows what would happen. Indymedia, Food Not Lawns Gardens, Bikes Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails and the Really Really Free Markets all sprang from conversations inspired by the literature and banners at Food Not Bombs.
It is no wonder the authorities want to stop our meals and have banned or limited the sharing of food in public in over 50 U.S. cities. The meals could be revolutionary. They could bring people together and end the country’s system of hunger and poverty.
Food Not Bombs
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514 USA
1-800-884-1136
http://www.foodnotbombs.net
The October 5, 2013 citation issued in Taos, New Mexico.
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/october_5_violation.html
The first wiretap memo – http://www.foodnotbombs.net/wiretap1.html
Message sent to Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry on October 7, 2013
Hi Keith.
Well, yesterday Sacramento Food not Bombs was kicked out of the Cesar Chavez Park by the Sacramento police. We were greeted by about 15 officers when we arrived at the park when we normally do in time to start sharing the meal we created by 1:30pm. We were told that our stuff would be confiscated and we would get a summons due to an ordinece that has yet to even be passed that would prevent any group from handing out free hot meal in the park.
When it rains we move over to the east side of the park and across the street where there is an awning in front of three businesses that are not open on Sundays. So , this is where we moved to yesterday to actually continue with what we set out to do which is sharing the hot meal we created.
The police harassment began when we arrived at the park to try and serve the meal, continued when we moved across the street, and persisted until finally packed up. At one point a Food Not Bombs volunteer was accosted by a bicycle cop while she went to her truck to get a bread donation and then return to where we were set up – he was trying to continue to tell her that the Sacramento police do not want homeless people in the Cesar Chavez Park or even around the park. I was accosted by the same bicycle cop when I left where we were set up to walk a couple blocks and let everyone know where we were set up. Eventually – I’m guessing it was the captain stood on the park side of the street and began video taping us where we were set up for about the final 10 -15 minutes.
We moved across the street reluctantly and would really like to continue to stay in the park every Sunday at 1:30pm. Wed like to start preparing and making contacts to begin mobilizing.
Would you please give me the contacts for every Food Not Bombs chapter in northern California?
Thank you, Keith.
I hope all is well with you.
-Petey
Sacramento Food Not Bombs
Is It Legal … To Feed The Homeless?
By Rachael Mason
http://news.thelaw.tv/2012/11/20/is-it-legal-to-feed-the-homeless/
Is it legal to feed the homeless?
Depending on where you live and how you’re planning to provide food for the needy, it might indeed be against the law to feed the homeless.
This year, Philadelphia enacted a ban on serving food in city parks, which affects local charities’ efforts to feed the homeless, reported Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “Under additional rules recently adopted by the city’s health department, those who want to feed the hungry on a sidewalk, road, or other public place outdoors must take a food-safety course and obtain a permit from the city,” reported BusinessWeek.
In Dallas, those who want to give food to homeless people must first become “certified food handlers,” reported the Los Angeles Times. The National Coalition for the Homeless maintains a page detailing the laws that affect sharing of food with homeless in cities across the country.
Examples include Atlanta, which has required all food given to the homeless must be facilitated through one of eight approved providers since 2003. In Baltimore, every food service provider—even if the food is given out for free—must be licensed. In Las Vegas, a permit must be obtained for gathering of more than 25 people gather in a city park.
What other laws affect the homeless?
In many cities, it’s illegal to be homeless, according to a report from the NLCHP. Many of the activities performed by homeless people, like sleeping on the street, are against the law.
“Of the 234 cities surveyed, the report shows that: 40 percent prohibit sleeping in public places, 33 percent prohibit sitting/lying in public places, 56 percent prohibit loitering in public places and 53 percent prohibit begging in public places,” the NLCHP said.
Why should I be concerned about the homeless?
The homeless population includes more people than you might imagine. For example, many residents of the areas hit by Hurricane Sandy still don’t have a place to live.
Every year, more than 2 million kids across the country will experience a period of homelessness every year, according to Covenant House. The nonprofit organization helps homeless kids by providing shelter and other basic necessities and works to help get them off the street.
The number of homeless young people in the U.S. continues to increase. Public schools have reported more than 1 million homeless students are enrolled, according to a June 2012 report released by the U.S. Department of Education.
When it comes down to it, helping the homeless is more cost-effective than sending them to jail. Cost studies in 13 cities and states reveal that, on average, cities spend $87 per day to jail a person, compared to $28 per day for shelter,” according to the NLCHP.
What can I do to help the homeless?
Instead of organizing your own efforts to feed the homeless, consider donating time, money or goods to established nonprofit groups in your area. You might work at a soup kitchen, collect canned goods for a local food bank or donate to an organization that hosts holiday meals for the needy. Rather than buying gifts this season, perhaps you’ll make a donation in the names of your loved ones.
Like executives did recently in Washington, D.C., you might even sleep outside for a night as part of a movement designed to raise awareness of homeless. In Nov. 2012, the group in D.C. spent the night outside Covenant House Washington. Through pledges from family and friends, raised more than $60,000 for the organization, reported the Washington Post.
To find out more about the issue of homeless, visit the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ website at http://www.endhomelessness.org.
Effort to hide the hungry continues across the United States.
October 7, 2013
Nearly every week some one contacts me about news that local authorities are threatening to stop the sharing of food in public. This was a particularly busy time for such news. At the same time hunger is on the increase and Congress is voting to cut 39 billion dollars in food stamps. There has never been a more important time to make the struggle for food justice visible.
The eight of us that started Food Not Bombs were profoundly influenced by our participation in the October 6, 1979 Occupation Attempt of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. Three decades later it is clear those of us who’s lives were changed by the violent military response to our effort to stop the dangers of nuclear power were tragically correct in our concern. The October 6, 2013 edition of the Washington Post reported that “Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday that Japan is open to receiving overseas help to contain widening radioactive water leaks at the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, with leaks and mishaps reported almost daily.“We are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem,” Abe said in his English speech to open the conference on energy and environment. “My country needs your knowledge and expertise.”
The dangers of nuclear power have a more direct connection to hunger than we realized in 1979 as teargas rained down on us from helicopters and the National Guard smashed us across our heads with five foot long clubs. Hundreds of millions of people depend on seafood to survive. Fish that are now highly radioactive and may not survive. On October 4, 2013 at least 430 liters of water 6,700 times more radioactive than the legal limit spilled into the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear station and the crisis is only increasing. We have no idea what impact this is having on sea and how many will go hungry as their food supply is poisoned.
This October 6th I have had the honor to participate in the Resolve to Fight Poverty Conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill organized by students from around the United States. Their knowledge and dedication is inspiring. The conference opened with a presentation called “The Faces of Homelessness” where three formally homeless people spoke about their lives and the hunger they faced living on the streets. We watched the film “A Place at the Table” and shared conversations about possible solutions to hunger. Brett Weisel the Director of Advocacy for Feeding America spoke just after I had received an email about the city of Olympia, Washington seeking to stop the sharing of meals by the charity Crazy Faith Outreach. The article reported that “two weeks ago the outreach hit a snag when several nearby business owners, including Pam Tuttle, complained to the city. ‘We end up with a lot of traffic,’ Tuttle said. ‘We have had problems with garbage.’ City Manager Steve Hall said after he received those complaints, Olympia police investigated and found several safety violations, including dozens of people walking into traffic and blocking cars.”
Just as the conference was about to start I get a call from one of the Santa Monica Food Not Bombs organizers. He told me that a paster Ron Hooks of West Coast Care had been trying to get the group to stop sharing their vegan meals on the downtown promenade. According to several newspaper articles Ron describes West Coast Care as a nonprofit working with the Santa Monica Police Department’s Joint Homeless Outreach Program. Santa Monica Food Not Bombs shares every Thursday evening at the Third Street Promenade long after the shops are closed.
An article in the July 11, 2103 edition of the Boulder Weekly reported that “Groups that feed the homeless in downtown Boulder on Saturdays say the city is trying to run them out of the area in yet another attempt to get rid of those the city considers undesirable.”
“But city officials insist that they support the feeding operations, and that they are just trying to alleviate congestion in the area and reduce criminal activity.”
Back in North Carolina the Raleigh police told groups that they would be arrested if they continued to share meals in public. After news of the threat was posted all over the web and it was clear that there was opposition to the closing of the meals city officials stop the police. In mid August 2013 news was posted on a number of activist website. ” This story is exploding on social media since it was posted by Love Wins, a ministry in Raleigh. Human Beans Together is another group suddenly barred by the Raleigh police from giving out food to the homeless in Moore Square on the weekends, when soup kitchens don’t operate.”
“Folks are heading to Moore Square today at 4, when Food Not Bombs is intending to do its regular food distribution — or try, anyway.”
On August 25th it was reported that “Food Not Bombs did bring food and they were allowed to distribute it. The Raleigh police stood down after Mayor Nancy McFarlane and numerous Council members intervened today with Police Chief Deck-Brown and Acting City Manager Perry James.” The article notes that “A permit to use Moore Square is apparently $800 a day.”
As I was watching the Oxfam staff prepare for that evening’s Hunger Banquet I get a text from the Food Not Bombs volunteers in Taos. The State of New Mexico Environmental Health official stopped by our weekly meal and asked if I was still in Baltimore as he handed one of our volunteers David Lewis a $500 citation issued to me for selling food at the Taos Plaza on October 5th without a permit. Another volunteer David Cortez filmed the exchange and posted it to my Facebook minutes after it happened. The same official issued me another $500 citation on June 1, 2013 crossing out the words selling writing in sharing. At the time rumor had it that a new food vendor from out of town had filed a complaint but they have moved on so it is not clear why the officials working for America’s hungriest state would issue a citation to someone who was busy participating in a hunger and poverty conference in North Carolina.
When I visited the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program website it said “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.
After funding has been restored, please allow some time for this website to become available again.”
Just before the government shut down the U.S. Congress approved a three-year nutrition bill (H.R. 3102), with a partisan 217-210 vote, that aims to cut about $40 billion over 10 years for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and provide various reforms to the program. House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said the bill includes “reasonable changes” to address the “growing and growing and growing” amount of SNAP recipients. “There are still jobs available in America,” Sessions said. “They may not be ones you want to stay in your whole life.” Democratic congress people said that 4 million low-income people, including 170,000 veterans would be cut from the food stamp program because of the vote.
the government shit down will stop payments to over 9 million low-income women and children who qualify for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children also known as WIC. Feeding hungry children is not considered essential yet 350,000 furloughed civilian employees of the Pentagon will retune to work on Monday.
The federal government and corporate leaders understand the power of groups like Food Not Bombs and work hard to reduce our influence. Officials arrested nine volunteers sharing food and information at the entrance to Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988. The police told the media that they did not mind that we were feeding the hungry. They objected to our message stating that we “were making a political statement and that is not allowed.” They told the media that the city would provide buses to take the hungry out of sight to a military facility out by the beach and we could feed people there but we could not have banners and literature and share food where the public could see us.
After making nearly 1,000 arrests the authorities realized that the most effective method to reducing our visibility was to discourage the display of literature, signs and banners. One very vocal volunteer started an email campaign in 1997 suggesting Food Not Bombs would feed more people if we removed the banner and flyers. He also offered to post my first book on the web. I had moved to Lawrence Kansas at that time to volunteer with the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. The volunteer flooded the original Food Not Bombs list serv with messages about our need to become a charity and end our effort to change society. It was not until I received an email from food activist Sandor Katz
asking to use a section of the book “Food Not Bombs – How to feed the hungry and build community” in his book “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved” that I discovered that the volunteer had edited my online book to remove the social change aspect from the text. The section of my book that Sandor Katz emailed to me was clearly not my work so I asked him where he found it. He directed me to the website where I discovered that my book had been radically changed.
People became so frustrated with his constant posting on the subject they left the list and in a year it was abandon and closed down. In 2003 a journalist from Australia flew to the United States to film Food Not Bombs. She wished to film the group in San Francisco because it was so famous. We drove to San Francisco and joined a volunteer who was cooking in an apartment in the Haight District. While waiting for the pot of soup to cook he told me that there had been a box of literature and some banners left in a closet and wondered if I would be interested in taking them. I suggested he could use them at his meal but he said it was too much work. He explained that items had been placed in the closet by the past volunteer who turned out to be the one that altered my book and waged the campaign to be less visible. We traveled to United Nations Plaza to film the meal. Eight or nine people wondered up to enjoy a cup of soup. Four or five young people stood near by. As someone came for soup they would give them a flyer about their church service and talk with them about being saved. The filmmaker was disappointed having traveled so far to video tape the group that had made history and was sharing meals twice a day seven days a week to several hundred people each meal.
I was invited to be the keynote speaker at “The Great Food Fight” in North Hampton England. It turned out that the lest expensive way to fly to Europe was through Reykjavik, Iceland so I arranged to visit the local Food Not Bombs group. We prepared the meal at a volunteers home took it to the main intersection downtown and retrieved several signs from a pub next to the serving location. One sign had the complete text of a flyer explaining about Food Not Bombs written with a marker in English on one side and in Icelandic on the other. They also provided a suit case full of literature.
People gathered to eat and soon were busy debating the ideas expressed on the signs and flyers. Before long the people were telling me about how a people started a lively debate about reform of the government or a fundamental change of society. The discussion was sparked by the statements on the signs and information on the flyers. They said the conversation continued at the next weeks meal and it was agreed that they should march on the parliament building and off they went. Word spread and many more people came to the next Food Not Bombs meal. Lunch ended in a second march. When I arrived they had just taken down the government. Several people had been arrested after removing the flag of Iceland and replacing it with a flag of the county’s discount chain Bónus with its logo of a pink piggy bank. Protesters march to the jail demanding the release of the prisoners.
The protests grew so large that prime minister Geir Haarde resigned in 2009. He was prosecuted in a special trial for bringing the country to ruin. “A court ruled that he failed to hold cabinet meetings focused on the spiraling crisis ahead of the North Atlantic island’s financial implosion, which marked one of the seminal moments of the global panic caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.” but he was spared any time in prison even though he could have been sentenced to two year. The Icelandic people started to rewrite their constitution and refused to bail out the banks. The banner and literature at our meals can mean trouble for those in power and the state knows this.
The message from nearly every speaker at the Resolve to Fight Poverty Conference came to the same conclusion. We have abundant resources. We just don’t have access to food, housing and healthcare because of policies that benefit the 1 percent and have turned what should be a basic human right into a commodity. The biggest change in perspective I witnessed was with Feed America when Brett Weisel stated that there focus was on “shortening the line for food” and working to for a society when Americans were paid a living wage and could buy the food they desired, a message Food Not Bombs has expressed from our founding. A message that has placed Food Not Bombs on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watch list.
In April 2009 C-Span aired a lecture by two U.S. State Department officials comparing “the people that share vegan meals in the parks” and al-Qaeda. The speaker concluded that the vegan meals were a greater threat to national security than al-Qaeda because the young people sharing the meals were friendly and the message was powerful. The officials feared that the public would be moved and press Congress to divert military spending to things like education, healthcare and other social services.
It really could be that simple. If every Food Not Bombs group made a point of having banners, signs and literature at meals shared at a time and location where the most people possible would visit we might inspire change. Along with literature encouraging a transition to a future free from corporate domination each meal provided a place for musicians and puppeteers to preform and a forum for the public to share their ideas and dreams who knows what would happen. Indymedia, Food Not Lawns Gardens, Bikes Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails and the Really Really Free Markets all sprang from conversations inspired by the literature and banners at Food Not Bombs.
It is no wonder the authorities want to stop our meals and have banned or limited the sharing of food in public in over 50 U.S. cities. The meals could be revolutionary. They could bring people together and end the country’s system of hunger and poverty.
Food Not Bombs
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514 USA
1-800-884-1136
http://www.foodnotbombs.net
The October 5th ticket – http://www.foodnotbombs.net/october_5_violation.html
Effort to hide the hungry continues across the United States.
OCCUPYING OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
September 17, 2013
Constitution Day – September 17th
After spending 17 days in the Orange County Jail for violating Orlando’s Large Group Feeding Law I returned to my swamped email account to discover Ad-busters net me an announcement to “Occupy Wall Street.” on September 17th. Before the city started their arrests of our volunteers at Lake Eola Park we had been helping Margaret Flowers, Kevin Zeese and other activists organize the Occupation of Freedom Plaza on the tenth anniversary of the U.S invasion of Afghanistan. We had posted an announcement on our Food Not Bombs website months before the Orlando arrests. They had already contributed $500 for rice.
On December 17, 2010 twenty-six year old produce vender Mohammed Bouazizi douses himself in paint thinner and sets himself on fire in front of a local municipal office in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia literally sparking a nationwide uprising forcing their dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Al from office on January 14, 2011. Egyptians were insipid by events in Tunisia and after an 18 day occupation of Tahrir Square dictator Mubarak stepped down. As we were preparing to resist Orlando’s law imitating the sharing of meals and information to two times a year per park the 15-M Movement was starting to occupy plazas in over 50 Spanish cities on May 15, 2011. The Orlando police make their first arrests attempting to silence our twice weekly meal and information table on June 1, 2011 minutes before we were about to march to city hall to start our occupation against the criminalization of poverty.
We had chosen to set up occupations on the first of every month in solidarity with the Strategy-31 movement in Russia that had chosen to protest on the 31st of the month to honor Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution also guarantees freedom of assembly and free speech.
The struggle to bring dignity and rights has always been challenging. My great great grandfather’s grand father Dr James McHenry was the seventh delegate to sign the U.S. Constitution at Independence Hall in the colonial port of Philadelphia on September 17, 1787 that we now celebrate as Constitution Day. Dr. McHenry immigrated from Dublin, Ireland seeking to studying under Doctor Benjamin Rush but not long after arriving in the colonies McHenry was asked to travel to Cambridge Port in the Massachusetts colony. There had been a battle between the colonists and the King’s forces in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. More battles were expected so McHenry wrote our his will and rode north from Philadelphia to organize a field hospital. On June 17, 1775 the King’s Red Coats clashed with the colonists in what has become the Battle of Bunker Hill. McHenry helped direct the medical care of nearly 450 wounded colonists. Sadly 140 Minute Men died of their injuries. The Red Coats suffered 226 dead and 828 wounded. George Washington arrived to command the just formed Continental Army meeting the young doctor at the field hospital on the banks of the Charles River. Washington and McHenry became friends soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill and worked together throughout the War for Independence, participated with the Continental Congress signing the U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787. McHenry continued the friendship after the formation of the Federation joining Washington’s cabinet as Secretary of War.
This Constitution Day we might want to reflect on the startling pace with which the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have become little more than a memory.
Years before Snowden inspired the current national dialog about the erosion of our Constitutional rights many of us were shocked at President Obama’s support of many policies that turned the ideas of the founders upside down. Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) late on New Years Eve 2011. The new law makes it legal for the military to pick up any American even on American soil and detain them without trial until the end of the War On Terror. This law claims that the United States it self is in the theater of the War On Terror. After 9/11 a radical change in policing was introduced called the United States Northern Command that directs the Consequence Management Response Force from its base in in Colorado Springs and is charged with joining civilian law enforcement in investigating community activists in the United States. Reports claim the military is prepared to use force against civil unrest suggesting that they may be needed in the event of an economic crisis. A nonviolent movement like Occupy might if it is able to encourage enough Americans to demand their Constitutional rights could be a target of the U.S. Army’s Consequence Management Response Force.
Very few Senators or Congress People voted against this law. There is also a question about Obama’s “Kill List” that includes Americans. Three U.S. citizens have already been killed and were on this list. Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16 year old son Abdurrrahman Al awlaki and Samir Khan. A secret Presidential panel has drafted and continues to update this list. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told an audience at Northwestern in Chicago that ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.” A month before the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, did told a Yale Law School audience that “it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances.”
Occupy Wall Street organized against the passage of the NDAA as we experienced a nationwide assault on our legal nonviolent protest. What we did not know until a document obtained from Houston FBI office in December 2012 as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund noted on page 61 that some one had wanted to “formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.” Even though the police stopped and questioned me eight times during Occupy and arrested me once on a 1983 warrant for taping a flyer against the war on El Salvador on a light pole in Cambridge not one officer told me I that I could be killed “via suppressed sniper rifles.”
This week Food Not Bombs volunteers are facing new trouble with the authorities. Over 50 cities have passed laws banning or limiting the sharing of free meals in public. This week I received a call from our volunteers in Santa Monica asking for support. News has leaked that the police want the group to stop providing meals to the hungry. Authorities suggest that the group may need an environmental health permit but as we learned during ten years of arrests in San Francisco the law is clear, people sharing food with the hungry as a gift are not required to have a permit from the health department. Such permits are reserved for companies that could profit from ignoring food safety issues.
The effort to close Santa Monica Food Not Bombs follows news that the on September 12th the Suffolk County police on Long Island arrived to the meal threatened our volunteers with arrest if they returned for next weeks Food Sharing. The police stated that complaints were made, but did not elaborate on what those complaints were nor offer any option to our community besides ending our weekly Farmingville Food Share.
Reports of efforts by the authorities to silence Food Not Bombs have become routine since the police violently crushed the Occupation movement. In April 2009 a U.S. State Department official gave a lecture comparing Food Not Bombs to Al-Qaeda making the point that our message which should be considered Constitutionally protected speech was a greater threat to national security than suicide bombers.
On September 17, 2013 American’s are dizzy from revelations of massive spying. SInce Snowden shared news about the Fourth Amendment violations of National Security Agency the public has learned that the government is able to monitor nearly every aspect of our personal lives. Our license plates are video taped as we travel through our community with the time, date and location of our movements converted into a computer loge for local, state and federal officials to review. All phone calls, every email and web visit is also logged as is all of our snail mail.
While these and other programs are clear violations of the U.S. Constitution they are also important tools in the government’s campaign to silence opposition to their pro corporate policies. The surveillance state used the information it collected to frame and entrap Food Not Bombs volunteers Jeremy Hammond, Eric McDavid Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens all of whom are doing a decade or more in prison. The FBI targeted Baxter and Stevens at the Occupy Cleveland kitchen spending tens of thousands of tax dollars to involve them in an FBI May Day Bombing plot designed to make sure we did not occupy as planned. Hammond simply shared information about illegal surveillance by Stratfor with WIkileaks. He faced life in prison but maybe sentenced to ten years having used the threat of never seeing freedom again to force a plea bargain. Eric McDavid did absolutely not one thing that could be considered a crime yet he was sentence to 20 years in prison after the FBI sent an informant Anna to be his girlfriend. After several years volunteering with Food Not Bombs and other activists groups Anna was not able to convince Eric to commit any crime at all so the government had to resort to pitting Eric’s co-defendants against one another using the information of Wren’s love for Eric and the attention Eric paid to Anna and threats of life in prison to suggest Eric was the center of an FBI created bombing plot. The last action they had participated in before their arrest in California was the coordination of the 2005 Food Not Bombs World Gathering in Philadelphia. Anna caused the closing all group meeting to break out into a fight when she announced that the “women at the gathering had not yet dealt with the issues between themselves and their fathers,” a subject not on the agenda which did include future actions of the Food Not Bombs movement, inter group coordination and a rededication to taking nonviolent direct action subjects that were never discussed after her outbreak.
if we do not organize to save our Constitution September 17th might well be remembered as the anniversary of a good idea that was crushed on behalf of protecting corporate power and the government hired to defend the interests of the wealthiest one percent.
This is a great day to reconsider the strategy of Occupation. It is a strategy that had impact during the Great Depression when the Bonus March occupied Washington DC. We have Social Security and many other programs in part because of the power of the Bonus March. In 1989 the Occupation of Tiananmen Square challenged the Chinese authorities sparking years of civil resistance. The Tiananmen Square occupation also inspired the 1989 Tent City Protest at Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco forcing the authorities to temporarily end their violent campaign against the homeless. More importantly we learned a lot from that 27 day occupation. Skills we were able to use when we occupied the entrance to George Bush’s Ranch in Crawford, Texas during Camp Casey and our relief efforts after Katrina and Sandy.
After participating in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico in September 2003 a group of us meet to critique the action. I was a couple yards away from South Korean farmer Lee Kyang Hae when he stabbed himself to death clinging to a chain linked fence in protest to the policies of the WTO. Hae was president of the South Korea’s Federation of Farmers and Fishermen. “His death is not a personal accident but reflects the desperate fighting of 3.5 million Korean farmers,” said Song Nan Sou, president of the Farmers Management Association. Plain clothes police responded by throwing chances of concrete at us. I ducted under a parked car to avoid being injured. Official labor unions, Mexican and U.S. authorities controlled the protest disempowering many of us. Those of us that met proposed the strategy of occupation. I volunteered to post a website on the strategy.
Many of us had participated in the 1999 protest in Seattle. Rather than blockade the next economic summit we thought we would have more impact organizing occupations in communities all over the world. We could organize democratic communities that provided for the public good providing a contrast to the social order being implemented by the WTO and institutions working for corporate domination.
I offered to encourage support for this strategy. Occupations have proven to be one of the most powerful forms of nonviolent direct action. The economic and political crisis will continue so we have all winter to organize for to reoccupy this May Day. We may wish to have another name for the action and seek to simplify our message but the basic idea could work.
We learned a lot from the last wave of occupations. The government was effective at stopping the re-occupation on May Day 2012 by encouraging the use of violence. The FBI spent the winter implementing a bombing plot in Cleveland, encouraging some of those cooking at Occupy Cleveland to use C-4 on a bridge in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund posted internal FBI and Homeland Security memos about the government’s work with corporate security to stop the occupations. I believe we can over come many of the strategies used by the authorities to disrupt the occupations detailed in the internal FBI and Homeland Security memos provided by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
One way may be the formation of affinity groups to reduce the chaos at general assemblies. Another is the adoption of a nonviolence code as we did before the 1999 blockades in Seattle. We can also organize Nonviolence trainings and preparations in communities all across the United States. As author and permaculturalists Starhawk noted in her article “How We Really Shut Down the WTO” she recalls that “Each participant in the action was asked to agree to the nonviolence guidelines: To refrain from violence, physical or verbal; not to carry weapons, not to bring or use illegal drugs or alcohol, and not to destroy property. We were asked to agree only for the purpose of the 11/30 action–not to sign on to any of these as a life philosophy, and the group acknowledged that there is much diversity of opinion around some of these guidelines.”
This made it possible for thousands of us to work in coordination using a process we had all agreed to and practiced during the year before the protest.
We organized the UnFree Trade Tour in 1997 to educate the public about the dangers of the World Trade Organization suggesting a strategy for the nonviolent blockade of the economic summit. Food Not Bombs also formed Indymeda in preparation of the 1995 International Gathering in San Francisco and shared the idea of forming Indymedia Centers or IMCs during a number of tours including the Rent Is Theft and The UnFree Trade Tour. Having IMCs all across the world made it possible to share news of the Seattle Protest breaking corporate media silence. It is interesting to recall that Facebook and other mega corporations used the self publishing code designed by Indymedia to build their empires.
We could start preparing for the next re-occupation of public space as we also remember the successes and failures of Occupy Wall Street. We could start organizing local meetings to form affinity groups and announce plans to hold nonviolent direct action preparations.
I for one can not sit by hopeless as the rights once protected by the U.S. Constitution vanish. This struggle wont be easy but it wasn’t easy for people like Washington and McHenry during the dark days of Valley Forge yet they persevered and provided a guide for future generations moving from the authoritarian rule of kings and queens towards a belief that everyone has the right to determine their own destiny. It would be devastating for our community and the environment if we stood by and allowed a return to dictatorial rule.
OUR NINE ELEVEN
September 12, 2013
A local Taos man suffering a heart attack on May 21st could not be saved. According to the Taos News when volunteer fire fighters dialed 911 “The call went unanswered. Dispatchers in Taos heard only a faint rasp. The man died.” We have money for war but when it comes to real National Security issues like 911 emergency services the funds are not there.
This September 11th we woke to news that Obama still claims he may need to bomb Syria if negotiations with Russia and Assad fail. Remember that Saddam complied with every U.S. demand letting inspectors in to seek for weapons of mass destruction taking away every U.S. excuse for war but proving a negative was impossible and America bombed Iraq anyway. That war continued to this day. A limited attack on Syria may ignite a global war and maybe an economic collapse as oil prices sore after the Strait of Hormuz is too dangerous to navigate. The murder and chaos that would follow an Al-Qaeda victory in Syria would be staggering. All Al-Qaeda needs is U.S air support.
This September 11th is also the one year anniversary of an event in Libya that should remind us of just how well Obama’s limited wars can work out. On September 11, 2013 CNN reported that “A car bomb exploded outside a Foreign Ministry building in the Libyan city of Benghazi Wednesday, state media said, on the anniversary of an assault on the U.S. Consulate there that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.” By the time you read this essay news of this reminder may well be eclipsed by an even more dramatic “Pearl Harbor” type event.
Imagine if Obama spent as much energy encouraging America to change our policies to slow climate change or spoke on every network pleading to congress to pass a universal healthcare bill, fund research and development on alternative energy or pass a farm bill that would subsidize organic agriculture. Sadly he would rather go all out for another war while ignoring the real national threats of climate change, hunger, poverty or the student loan crisis.
For most of my life September 11th reminded me of the US backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chili and the public murder of folk musician Víctor Jara who’s hands were cut off before thousands of other prisoners at the Santiago Stadium. But in 2001 nine eleven marked the day I was added to the official U.S. “black list” and banned from official employment in the United States, first being fired from United Way, than Sun Sounds Radio for the Blind where my boss told me naïvely of the Homeland Security “Black List” followed by my last official job at Western National Parks Association.
Banned from employment I headed out on the “Drop Bush Not Bombs Tour” first visiting Food Not Bombs groups in North America followed by a three month tour of Europe and the Middle East funded by friends and the sale of my first book “Food Not Bombs – How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community.”
The tour took me the Balkans where I visited Belgrade Food Not Bombs in October 2003. As we prepared that weekend’s meal at the Rebel Squat local volunteers asked me if Michael Moore’s move “Bowling for Columbine” was based on reality. Did Americans really have guns and used them against one another? They were surprised to learn that civilians are allowed to be armed something I often hear when traveling outside the states. I also shared that I had just read Moore’s book “Hey Dud Where’s my Country?” and mentioned he finished the book calling on the American people to vote for General Wesley Clark for president. Everyone in the room gasped and started to recount Wesley Clark’s 1999 bombing Serbia. One volunteer, Emma, told me how she was an intern at a local hospital that cared for over 750 deformed children some with two heads, others with five arms and others with just one eye. Depleted uranium was America’s choice of “chemical weapon” in that assault. Food Not Bombs activists painted targets on t-shirts daring Clark to kill them. They told of the fear caused when Cruise Missiles slowly floated above the streets of Belgrade seeking targets. Everyone lost friends and family and almost lost hope but they bounced back eager to share the trauma of a US Air War on a modern city. Their toilet was the Cruise Missile crater that had forced the occupants the home they were squatting to flee to France.
Imperialism has a long history of using chemical weapons. Professor Howard Zinn started “The People’s History of the United States” with an account of the first use of weapons of mass destruction in service of imperialism in the “new World” the ever effective blankets of small pox. His history book continues with America’s use of one brutal advance in mass murder after another from simple bombs dropped on Mexican Rebels to the nuclear bombing of Japan.
While the U.S. media seems to have forgotten America’s use of banned chemical weapons the rest of the world remembers. After the last U.S. war on Iraq started the British Parliament ordered a study of the invasion and issued a report on the United States use of Mark 77 – 750 pound fuel gel napalm bombs on civilians during the early days of “Shock and Awe.” Before that invasion American leaders including my neighbor Rumsfield provided Iraq with chemical weapons that were used against Iran and during an internal war against the Kurdish population.
The U.S. also used more fuel gel bombs and white phosphorus on the people of Fallujah in November 2004. The March–April 2005 online Field Artillery magazine has confirmed the use of WP (white phosphorus) in so-called “shake ‘n bake” attacks, so the use of white phosphorus is substantiated by US Army sources only for screening and psychological effects: The Iraqi ministry of health installed by the Bush administration announced that their surveys and studies after the 2004 assault “confirm that US forces used substances that are internationally prohibited – including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals – in the course of its attacks on the city.”
According to a study released by the Switzerland-based International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in July 2010 noted that “the increases in cancer, leukaemia and infant mortality and perturbations of the normal human population birth sex ratio in Fallujah are significantly greater than those reported for the survivors of the A-Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.” Hundreds of children deformed by the U.S. chemical attacks suffer in Iraqi hospitals as the war America continues to rage across Iraq.
At the same time Obama and Congress are investing so much energy drumming up support for another war it turns out that one in two civilians in the United States are still struggling to survive. The government may close in October. According to a September 9, 2013 Washington Post article “The fiscal year ends Sept. 30, and government agencies will start shutting down if some type of budget bill isn’t enacted by then.” It also says that “The government’s ability to borrow more money will probably end in late October if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.” This real “National Security Threat” seems to be off the agenda as Millions of Americas face delays and reductions in Food Stamps while food prices continue to increase. Two days of bombing Syria could feed all the refugees fleeing the war for months or save one hundred Taos Hospitals from the painful budget cuts our community must make this week laying off healthcare workers, reducing services and increasing fees. Taos isn’t the only hospital forced to make huge budget cuts. The Bend Bulletin’s September 11, 2013 article starts with “A federal budget-cutting proposal threatens to reduce Medicare payments to 15 rural Oregon hospitals, and hospital and state officials said the impact could be devastating. The proposal involves “critical access hospitals” that get higher Medicaid payments under a program started in 1997 amid a wave of hospital closures in rural America.” So calling 911 may not lead to emergency treatment at your local hospital. When you call 911 in my community you have no idea what might happen. A local man suffering a heart attack on May 21st could not be saved. According to the Taos News when volunteer Fire Fighters called 911 “The call went unanswered. Dispatchers in Taos heard only a faint rasp. The man died.”
Congress has not been able to pass a federal budget, not even a budget that would continue to redirect America’s resources to the very corporations that enjoy using our nation’s infrastructure of highways, power grids and surveillance without having to pay one dime in federal taxes.
A desperate man called our hunger hot line today. Like others that call our toll free number he had not eaten in seven days. He told me that the Sheriff’s Department visited his home but told him they were not in the business of feeding people. Food Bank couldn’t help either but 211 was able to give him our number. We still plan to help even though we don’t have the funds necessary to drive to his home in Madrid, New Mexico. Our last dollar was used to transport food to hundred of hungry children in Nairobi Kenya but that is fine, the funds seem to arrive just in time. The people come through even if the state can not.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York Food Not Bombs arrived with hot vegan meals to support the rescue workers. Arby’s Roast beef showed up a couple days latter but the first responders remarked that their sandwiches smelled like Ground Zero so their help was short lived. When the carbon industry Super Storms Katrina and Sandy attacked our communities we joined the citizen rescue squad with our joyously prepared meals, cleaning supplies, fresh water and commission. Every week during the perpetual war of poverty volunteers faithfully arrive on street corners, parks and plazas ready to nourish the local community.
The other emergency call this nine eleven is to the Senate Intelligence Committee and Obama’s web of spy agencies. News revealed on this 9/11 shows that “The National Security Agency openly shares unfiltered intelligence files with the Israeli government, according to a classified document leaked to the Guardian newspaper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”
Domestic spying has consequences. For example Food Not Bombs expected to receive the final payment of $500 from a grant provided by World Peace Earth to help secure the water pump at the Free Skool from this winter’s freezing nights. Two other urgently needed donations also failed to arrive. When I went to pick up the mail on August 21st, the day of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria our post box was empty. It was empty again the next day and every day since. Our mail box was empty for 21 days in a row with at least $1,200 in promised donations lost to the winds or as Senator Tom Udall’s very helpful office suggested it may have been lost to the F.B.I. as had been the case when not one piece of mail arrived from June 1, 2008 to November 1, 2008 the same time the F.B.I. started to infiltrate Minneapolis Food Not Bombs. The informants suggested that bombing the police or Republican delegates might be a great strategy. Even though the Food Not Bombs volunteers declined to support the plot the Food Not Bombs house was raided the morning before the Republican National Convention and eight volunteers were charged under the Minnesota Patriot Act.
Food Not Bombs volunteer Jeremy Hammond was targeted by the FBI for sharing the Stratfor or Strategic Forecasting files with Wikileaks. Like Snowden, the information Hammond made public has been critical in understanding the impossibility of forming a free and democratic America unless we dismantle the Intelligence industry. The freejeremy.net website asks that everyone write Judge Loretta Preska and ask that she give him a sentence of time served. He has been held since March 2012 often in solitary confinement. They suggest you include a statement such as this in your letter. “I am appalled that Jeremy Hammond is facing a decade in prison for exposing corporate spying. Already, he has been incarcerated since March 2012, held in solitary confinement, and at times has been denied the ability to communicate with his family. Jeremy has done enough time already. Please consider granting him a sentence of time served.” Jeremy’s sentencing is to occur on November 15, 2013 in the Southern District of New York.
Food Not Bombs volunteers Eric McDavid, Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens are in prison today as a result of F.B.I. infiltration, surveillance following the government’s elaborate and expensive creation of phony bombing plots.
The programs revealed by Snowden are more than curiosities or a violation of our Constitutional rights. The principle task of the Intelligence Industry to make sure democracy never comes to America and protect corporate power’s freedom to ravage the environment, exploit labor and guarantee that they can operate not only tax free but absorb as much of the public coffers as they can before there is a revolution in the streets.
The crushing poverty and hunger is our 911 and the people are as always the first responders in the economic and political terrorism attack of corporate greed.
You can respond by joining Food Not Bombs. Start or join a Food Not Bombs group in your community and provide organic vegan meals and inspiring literature under the banner Food Not Bombs. Also consider bringing Food Not Bombs cofounder Keith McHenry to your community this fall. The presentation will bring hope and a realistic strategy to transform our society for the better. Food Not Bombs will respond to your 911 call.
The Smashing Hunger, Squashing Poverty Tour
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
menu@foodnotbombs.net
1-800-884-1136
Eleven people in Santa Cruz were charged with felonies after being accused of the temporary “occupation” in November 2011 of an abandoned bank building at 75 River Street that was owned by Wells Fargo. District Attorney Rebekah Young targeted eleven local community organizers with trespass and vandalism charges. The perfect political target in a city where banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America had illegally foreclosed on families forcing them on to the streets where it is illegal to sleep outside and must risk arrest just for living in their own community.
The case of the Santa Cruz Eleven comes during an important time when millions of people are taking action against the corrupt economic system. The real criminals are those who designed and implemented the policies that have ruined families and caused the suffering of so many. Wells Fargo executives Donald James, John Stumf and the other board members should be held at the county jail waiting trial for grand theft. In my June 2013 visit to Santa Cruz several people told me how the banks and government officials robbed them of their homes taking all they had after working hard their entire lives.
In March 2011 people organized a protest outside the Watsonville Branch of Wells Fargo in Santa Cruz County. They were outraged that the bank had taken the homes of so many people in the community. Lauro Navarro came to the protest because the banks had just evicted him and his family from a home he had built with his own hands. Mayor Daniel Dodge of Watsonville attended the protest saying that “This is a real crisis that hits home.” He also told the media that more than 8,000 homes locally had been affected since 2008 worth $4 billion and a loss of $26 million in property taxes. Nearly 200 teachers had to be let go as a result.
The stress of foreclosure can be too much for some. Newbury Park resident Norman Rousseau was preparing to move his family into an RV in May 2012 when he shot himself to death distressed from a year long struggle with Wells Fargo. The bank had claimed Rousseau had not made his May 2009 mortgage payment using this to justify the taking of his home but during the law suit the bank admitted there had been a mix up. “Our thoughts are with the friends and family of Mr. Rousseau at this difficult time. The eviction has been postponed and we will continue to work with Mrs. Rousseau,” a Wells Fargo spokesperson told The Huffington Post in an email. “Despite current reports, we tried repeatedly to find affordable options for the family.” Evidence that the banks systematically robbed thousands of families of their homes and saving. In a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts Bank of America employees have come forward to describe how they intentionally mislead homeowners using the Home Affordable Modification Program to take their homes. I have heard the story over and over from people eating with Food Not Bombs. They were told to qualify for a mortgage modification that they had to stop making payment for two or three months using the default to justify foreclosure. “Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.”
The Santa Cruz Eleven are understandably worried about having to spend time in prison if convicted and considering the evidence of a major nationally coordinated effort to permanently silence the movement this is a realistic concern. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund recovered nearly 200 pages of FBI and Homeland Security internal memos that showed that the authorities believed that Occupy could become a threat to corporate power so much that there was even a plan to use suppressed sniper rifles to kill the leadership if necessary.
So what is the most effective way defend activists like the eleven facing prison in Santa Cruz? The first thought of coarse is hire lawyers and formulate a legal defense but that might be enough under the currant atmosphere. I say this from experience having faced 25 to life in prison for my work with Food Not Bombs in San Francisco. I had the best attorneys but the pressure to silence me was larger than the fact that all the evidence made it clear I had never participated in any of the crimes I had been accused of. The only thing that keep me out of prison was political organizing.
The business and political leaders pulled out all the stops in an effort to make sure that the public would not be moved to support the idea that food should have a priority over bombs. The law was manipulated, a permit process was invented to justify an end to our effort to change public opinion. The corporate media and most local political leaders sided with the campaign to drive Food Not Bombs out of site. When injunctions, arrests, beatings and infiltration failed to work the authorities framed the “leader” of the movement making me out to be a violent irrational terrorist attacking city officials and stealing beepers and milk crates in my crazed attempt to redirect military spending towards social services like education and healthcare.
Our legal defense was nearly impossible since those that organized my “crimes’ controlled the evidence, media and the legal system. On the other hand we had the truth on our side which we did all we could share. That truth was that our society is broken and that is easy to see when hundreds of people line up twice a day to eat with Food Not Bombs outside City Hall in San Francisco while billions are spent on the military to fight wars for oil, profits and power.
We video tapped nearly every arrest of our volunteers for providing vegan meals and free literature to the public. We filmed hungry families horrified and distressed as they watched the police drag their meals away to the trash. One by one volunteers would be smashed into the sidewalk for sharing bagels or tossed salad. The images told the ugly truth of an America that would rather let its people starve then threaten the profits of the military industrial complex.
So our focus moved from the courts to the streets and offices of influential human rights groups. We organized a letter writing campaign providing flyers at every meal asking for support. The flyers included a request to write President Clinton’s Justice Department Civil Rights Division, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission seeking an investigation into our case. Each organizations’s address was included on the flyer. We also provided internal government and police memos, photos, affidavits and our video of our arrests to the organizations listed on our flyer and delivered additional copies to the offices of foreign governments at the United Nations. We also provided copies to the American Civil Liberties Union and other local allies and activist groups and asked them to ask for an investigation.
While we had our campaign to gain the support of human rights organizations and activist groups we also organized on the streets. Central to the campaign was the sharing of our meals and literature twice every day to show we would not give up. Before each meal we determined who would be willing to risk arrest. We divided the food into three parts and two or three volunteers would share the first smaller portion until they were arrested. As soon as they where hustled off to the police station a couple more volunteers would arrive and share some more food until they were arrested. After the police took them away we would bring out enough food to provide for everyone. The police rarely stopped us the third time. We also organized a campaign called “Risk Arrest One Day a Month with Food Not Bombs” and community groups, unions and religious organizations would share our food and go to jail.
The other strategy was to provide food outside the court house before each court appearance. This too could result in a number of arrests but it also had the impact of discrediting the legal system before people who themselves had been dragged into the system.
Our campaign was dedicated to nonviolent resistance even if at time people would yell at the police during the arrests. Amazingly our persistence slowly won over the rank and file police who started to object to their participation in efforts to stop us.
Our effort to reach President Clinton worked. His office claimed to have reviewed our information and video deciding that city officials were acting lawfully in there brutal campaign to shut down our protest. They would take no action to stop the violence. We shared copies of Clintons’s letter to Amnesty International and the United Nations. This was the final straw and they both announce support for Food Not Bombs. Amnesty International announced that they would declare our volunteers “Prisoners of Conscience” and work for our unconditional release if convicted and made a public statement of condemnation of the United States on the floor of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Switzerland.
Finally one day when my “Three Strikes” trial was about to start the local media turned on the mayor and city officials. The power structure cut their loses. The arrests in San Francisco did stop and I settled my case being sentenced to credit of 500 days served and a year probation. Maybe not a total victory but a lot better than doing 25 years in prison and the campaign helped encourage the start of Food Not Bombs groups in a few hundred cities.
The global wave of protests during the summer of 2013 provide many lessons. Social change takes time. The people of Egypt mobilized to drive out the dictator Mubarak only to replace his authoritarian rule with a new dictator. Just as happened after the Berlin Wall fell global financial institutions and Western governments rushed in to fill the power vacuum.Those risking their lives to bring about change were not prepared to replace the dictatorial system with one that represents the interests of the majority. The increase in hunger and poverty in Egypt was predictable. Morsi quickly became an ally of the United States and other powerful nations agreeing to provide access to the global financial institutions and transnational corporate interests while ignoring the needs of his people. It will take more than the ousting of a dictator to bring about the change required to provide food, healthcare and education. Those of us seeking to bring democracy and economic security to the United States must build an alternate system ready to replace the failing political and economic system.
The struggle of the Santa Cruz Eleven provides a good example of how we can address the growing austerity crisis. While waging an aggressive legal defense is important it may be a more effective defense to build a movement against the real criminals at Wells Fargo like Donald James, John Stumf and the other board members. The authorities were fearful of the occupations organizing a campaign to claim we did not have a coherent message and that we had failed. However the details revealed in the internal FBI and Homeland Security documents recovered by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the criminal case against the Cleveland Five and the Dissent-or-Terror files obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show that the Obama administration and corporate leaders were worried that the occupations were a real threat to the economic and political system. Wells Fargo’s coordination with the FBI, Homeland Security and other financial institutions to silence Occupy is another aspect of the criminal conspiracy of the economic elite. Those responsible for destroying the economic security of millions remain free and continue to force families out of their homes, implement policies that criminalize those driven into poverty and clearly have no limits to their own crimes against society.
by Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs
Eleven people in Santa Cruz were charged with felonies after being accused of the temporary “occupation” in November 2011 of an abandoned bank building at 75 River Street that was owned by Wells Fargo. District Attorney Rebekah Young targeted eleven local community organizers with trespass and vandalism charges. The perfect political target in a city where banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America had illegally foreclosed on families forcing them on to the streets where it is illegal to sleep outside and must risk arrest just for living in
their own community.
The case of the Santa Cruz Eleven comes during an important time when millions of people are taking action against the corrupt economic system. The real criminals are those who designed and implemented the policies that have ruined families and caused the suffering of so many. Wells Fargo executives Donald James, John Stumf and the other board members should be held at the county jail waiting trial for grand theft. In my June 2013 visit to Santa Cruz several people told me how the banks and government officials robbed them of their homes taking all they had after working hard their entire lives.
In March 2011 people organized a protest outside the Watsonville Branch of Wells Fargo in Santa Cruz County. They were outraged that the bank had taken the homes of so many people in the community. Lauro Navarro came to the protest because the banks had just evicted him and his family from a home he had built with his own hands. Mayor Daniel Dodge of Watsonville attended the protest saying that “This is a real crisis that hits home.” He also told the media that more than 8,000 homes locally had been affected since 2008 worth $4 billion and a loss of $26 million in property taxes. Nearly 200 teachers had to be let go as a result.
The stress of foreclosure can be too much for some. Newbury Park resident Norman Rousseau was preparing to move his family into an RV in May 2012 when e shot himself to death distressed from a year long struggle with Wells Fargo. The bank had claimed Rousseau had not made his May 2009 mortgage payment using this to justify the taking of his home but during the law suit the bank admitted there had been a mix up. “Our thoughts are with
the friends and family of Mr. Rousseau at this difficult time. The eviction has been postponed and we will continue to work with Mrs. Rousseau,” a Wells Fargo spokesperson told the Huffington Post in an email. “Despite current reports, we tried repeatedly to find affordable options for the family.”
Evidence that the banks systematically robbed thousands of families of their homes and saving. In a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts Bank of America employees have come forward to describe how they intentionally mislead homeowners using the Home Affordable Modification Program to take their homes. I have heard the story over and over from people eating with Food Not Bombs. They were told to qualify for a mortgage modification that they
had to stop making payment for two or three months using the default to justify foreclosure. “Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of B of A executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.”
The Santa Cruz Eleven are understandably worried about having to spend time in prison if convicted and considering the evidence of a major nationally coordinated effort to permanently silence the movement this is a realistic concern. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund recovered nearly 200 pages of FBI and Homeland Security internal memos that
showed that the authorities believed that Occupy could become a threat to corporate power so much that there was even a plan to use suppressed sniper rifles to kill the leadership if necessary.
So what is the most effective way defend activists like the eleven facing prison in Santa Cruz? The first thought, of course, is hire lawyers and formulate a legal defense but that might NOT be enough under the currant atmosphere. I say this from experience having faced 25 to life in prison for my work with Food Not Bombs in San Francisco. I had the best attorneys but the pressure to silence me was larger than the fact that all the evidence made it clear I had never
participated in any of the crimes I had been accused of. The only thing that keep me out of prison was political organizing.
The business and political leaders pulled out all the stops in an effort to make sure that the public would not be moved to support the idea that food should have a priority over bombs. The law was manipulated, a permit process was invented to justify an end to our effort to change public opinion. The corporate media and most local political leaders
sided with the campaign to drive Food Not Bombs out of sight. When injunctions, arrests, beatings and infiltration failed to work the authorities framed the “leader” of the movement making me out to be a violent irrational terrorist attacking city officials and stealing beepers and milk crates in my crazed attempt to redirect military spending towards social services
like education and healthcare.
Our legal defense was nearly impossible since those that organized my “crimes’ controlled the evidence, media and the legal system. On the other hand we had the truth on our side which we did all we could share. That truth was that our society is broken and that is easy to see when hundreds of people line up twice a day to eat with Food Not Bombs outside City Hall in San Francisco while billions are spent on the military to fight wars for oil, profits and power.
We video tapped nearly every arrest of our volunteers for providing vegan meals and free literature to the public. We filmed hungry families horrified and distressed as they watched the police drag their meals away to the trash. One by one volunteers would be smashed into the sidewalk for sharing bagels or tossed salad. The images told the ugly truth of an America that
would rather let its people starve then threaten the profits of the military industrial complex.
So our focus moved from the courts to the streets and offices of influential human rights groups. We organized a letter writing campaign providing flyers at every meal asking for support. The flyers included a request to write President Clinton’s Justice Department Civil Rights Division, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission seeking an investigation into our case. Each organizations’s address was included on the flyer. We also provided internal government and police memos, photos, affidavits and our video of our arrests to the organizations listed on our flyer and delivered additional copies to the offices of foreign governments at the United Nations. We also provided copies to the American
Civil Liberties Union and other local allies and activist groups and asked them to ask for an investigation.
While we had our campaign to gain the support of human rights organizations and activist groups we also organized on the streets. Central to the campaign was the sharing of our meals and literature twice every day to show we would not give up. Before each meal we determined who would be willing to risk arrest. We divided the food into three parts and two or three volunteers would share the first smaller portion until they were arrested.
As soon as they were hustled off to the police station a couple more volunteers would arrive and share some more food until they were arrested. After the police took them away we would bring out enough food to provide for everyone. The police rarely stopped us the third time. We also organized a campaign called “Risk Arrest One Day a Month with Food Not Bombs” and community groups, unions and religious organizations would share our food and go to jail.
The other strategy was to provide food outside the court house before each court appearance. This too could result in a number of arrests but it also had the impact of discrediting the legal system before people who themselves had been dragged into the system.
Our campaign was dedicated to nonviolent resistance even if at time people would yell at the police during the arrests. Amazingly our persistence slowly won over the rank and file police who started to object to their participation in efforts to stop us.
Our effort to reach President Clinton worked. His office claimed to have reviewed our information and video deciding that city officials were acting lawfully in there brutal campaign to shut down our protest. They would take no action to stop the violence. We shared copies of Clinton’s letter to Amnesty International and the United Nations. This was the final straw and they both announce support for Food Not Bombs.
Amnesty International announced that they would declare our volunteers “Prisoners of Conscience” and work for our unconditional release if convicted and made a public statement of condemnation of the United States on the floor of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Switzerland.
Finally one day when my “Three Strikes” trial was about to start the local media turned on the mayor and city officials. The power structure cut their loses. The arrests in San Francisco did stop and I settled my case being sentenced to credit of 500 days served and a year probation. Maybe not a total victory but a lot better than doing 25 years in prison and the campaign helped encourage the start of Food Not Bombs groups in a few hundred cities.
The global wave of protests during the summer of 2013 provide many lessons. Social change takes time. The people of Egypt mobilized to drive out the dictator Mubarak only to replace his authoritarian rule with a new dictator. Just as happened after the Berlin Wall fell global financial institutions and Western governments rushed in to fill the power vacuum. Those risking their lives to bring about change were not prepared to replace the dictatorial system with one that represents the interests of the majority.
The increase in hunger and poverty in Egypt was predictable. Morsi quickly became an ally of the United States and other powerful nations agreeing to provide access to the global financial institutions and transnational corporate interests while ignoring the needs of his people. It will take more than the ousting of a dictator to bring about the change required to provide food, healthcare and education. Those of us seeking to bring democracy and economic security to the United States must build an alternate system ready to replace the failing political and economic system.
The struggle of the Santa Cruz Eleven provides a good example of how we can address the growing austerity crisis. While waging an aggressive legal defense is important it may be a more effective defense to build a movement against the real criminals at Wells Fargo like Donald James, John Stumf and the other board members. The authorities were fearful of the occupations organizing a campaign to claim we did not have a coherent message and that we had failed.
However the details revealed in the internal FBI and Homeland Security documents recovered by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the criminal case against the Cleveland Five and the Dissent-or-Terror files obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show that the Obama administration and corporate leaders were worried that the occupations were a real threat to the economic and political system.
Wells Fargo’s coordination with the FBI, Homeland Security and other financial institutions to silence Occupy is another aspect of the criminal conspiracy of the economic elite. Those responsible for destroying the economic security of millions remain free and continue to force families out of their homes, implement policies that criminalize those driven into poverty and clearly have no limits to their own crimes against society.
TAKING DIRECT ACTION TO MAKE KING’S DREAM A REALITY
August 28, 2013
On August 28, 1963 over 250,000 people participated in the “Marched on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” where eighteen luminaries spoke for an end to racism and support for policies that would provide economic security for all Americans. The program for the march ended with the text “WE SHALL OVERCOME.” The speech by Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Dr. Martin Luther King Jr is remembered to this day. Millions continue to make his dream a reality.
I remember visiting the hardware store in Luray, Virginia with my father around the time of King’s speech where it was possible to buy a mass produced “Colored Men,” “White Men,” “White Women” or “Colored Women” signs for your public rest room, swimming pool or other facility needing segregation. Many stores in town placed the popular “No Jews Allowed” signs in their shop windows, most bought at that same hardware store. My elementary school was forced to let African Americans attend classes on our side of the tracks when I started the sixth grade. All black students were diagnosed as having Down Syndrome and assigned to the Special Education Class with the white students that did need some special education.
The”desegregated” Luray Elementary also had mandatory weekly Christian Education classes that noted each Easter that “jews had killed Jesus” a message many students shared with our only jewish classmate as he sat alone in the hall way during bible class waiting to be ridiculed. My parents were Episcopalians and were not pleased that our public school was forcing their children to be told that the Pentecostal denomination was the “only true religion.” My family was also close to the jewish family so my mother and father spoke for a separation of church and state at during a Parents Teachers Association meeting. That evening my classmate’s parents surrounded our home at Shenandoah National Park Headquarters yelling hateful curses as they threw rocks at our house. A few parents even arrived with flaming torches giving a Ku Klux Klan atmosphere to the fearful assault.
As we struggled over the issue of discrimination in rural Virginia a war was raging far off in a country called Viet Nam that was televised each night to our family’s dinner table on a huge Ethan Allen black and white TV. My mother’s brother was eager to join the battle as an Army Ranger. His father spent the war trying to get General Curtis LeMay and General Robert McNamara to drop the nuclear bomb on Hanoi.
Every once in a great while our TV would show news of a protest in Washington DC. A local family would send a child off to the jungle and at times a classmate would arrive at school in shock after learning that their older brother or father had been killed in Asia. Frustrated young teachers employed to avoid the draft would provide corporal punishment with a bread board costume drilled for maximum pain. The war had come to Virginia.
My father supervised a dozen college students that worked as Seasonal Park Rangers leading nature walks, giving campfire programs and helping tourists at the visitor centers. One of his employees gave him a copy of “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. After reading the classic he passed it on to his fifth grade son and having just learned to read I started with the shorter essay in the back, “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s lecture explained his reasons for protesting the war against Mexico responding by spending a night in jail for refusing to pay is war taxes. Thoreau’s essay made a huge impression on this elementary student helping inspire a life dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action towards a world free of war, poverty and racism along with a Park Service kid’s natural interest in defending the environment. Many of us that heard King’s words stayed in the struggle even though the corporate media has done all it can to conceal this fact.
Fifty years later America has made a lot of headway. No more lunch counter sit-ins for those that can buy lunch and anyone that can afford to ride the bus can use any seat. Now people of color are treated “equally” with their desperate and homeless white “neighbors.”
This anniversary could not be more bitter sweet. The August 2013 memorials at the Lincoln Monument have been marred by hypocrisy as the Democratic Party spits on King’s Dream. It was difficult to see now Congressman John Lewis have to once again temper his speech forced by current events to direct his attention to defending the rights of all to vote.
Who let Congresswoman Pelosi speak after she had supported a decades long campaign of violence against the homeless and Food Not Bombs volunteers in San Francisco? A campaign of civil rights violations she vocally supported even to the extent that she had me arrested after I complemented her for her support of human rights in China following up with a suggesting she support efforts to stop San Francisco Mayor Jordan’s “Quality of Life Matrix Program” to drive the poor out of town. Pelosi statements attacking Snowden should have been enough to keep her speaking at the 50th anniversary of King’s I Have a Dream Speech.
Another travesty was the speech of Attorney General Holder who used the FBI to frame, arrest and brutally drive the Occupy Movement off America’s streets while he and Obama are bending over backwards to protect corporate power. How many bankers have been jailed compared to those of us participating in peaceful occupations? We are watching our civil liberties disappear as each day exposes another elaborate domestic surveillance operation. The type of COINTELPRO techniques used by the FBI and other agencies to disrupt and ultimately murder Martin Luther King.Jr because of his dream continue to be implemented by Holder’s FBI.
According to internal memos obtained by Partnership for Civil Justice Fund Holder’s FBI silently watched or maybe even helped “formulate a plan to kill the leadership (of Occupy) via suppressed sniper rifles” yet he and Pelosi denigrated King’s legacy by speaking from the stage during the 50th anniversary commemoration. Obama is marking the anniversary by blocking UN weapons inspectors from discovering that the chemical weapons attack in Syria was launched by rebels.
He may spend billions on bombs just to send his message that America is the only country free to use weapons of mass distraction. Billions that could be used for education, universal healthcare or repair of America’s Infrastructure. Clinton is also speaking at the Lincoln Memorial yet one in two Americans are struggling to survive as a direct result of his policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deregulation of the banking industry. My friends in Serbia can tell you how ‘humanitarian” Clintons war was. Belgrade Food Not Bombs volunteer Emma shared her stories of being a nurse at a special hospital for children deformed by America’s depleted uranium bombs. Over 700 children some with two heads, four arms, one eye or even more freakish birth defects. America’a chemical weapons attacks in Iraq crossed the Reddest of Red Lines with nerve gas and phosphorous attacks on the people of Fallujah and tons of Depleted Uranium used across the country. Iraq is still at war and the special hospitals like those in Serbia are busy treating freaks born to loving families left behind in another war based on lies of weapons of mass distraction.
As you read this Obama may have already launch his “humanitarian” war” on Syria. Russia may be participating in the conflict taking the first steps towards a world war. America’s surveillance state may be in high gear busy silencing protest against the bombings. If the pressure for peace, freedom and an end to poverty grows too strong Obama may order the assassination of today’s Martin Luther King Jr. Gas prices in the United States may rob families of their next meal. Crop failures caused by climate change and GMO industrial agriculture are sure to increase food prices. The new cuts in food stamps and higher grocery costs might lead to food riots and groups like Food Not Bombs may be facing arrest in even more American cities than we are today.
It is more important than ever to build community and organize for King’s Dream. You could start or join a local Food Not Bombs chapter. Help staff one of our literature tables, write and design publications to distribute at your public meals. Maybe start preparing vacant lots in your community for next springs Food Not Lawns Garden. In the next few weeks we may want to organize local protests against the global war or join in actions to stop fracking, tar sands pipelines, mining, clear cutting and nuclear power. Banking criminals and foreclosures still need to be stopped. Consider rehousing our community by organizing a Homes Not Jails group and providing food to the occupations. There isn’t a protest that does not require a great vegan meal. We will be sharing food at the Taos Protest Against the War on Syria this Saturday at noon on the Taos Plaza.
If you are about to attend college you can make a huge difference by asking those who are leading student groups on your campus to bring the Smashing Hunger Squashing Poverty tour to your school. The tour starts in late September so don’t wait. It is a great way to help inspire your classmates to join you in making positive change. Please share our website with your classmates.
Thanks for having taken the time to consider taking nonviolent direct action on our path to overcoming the crisis we face today.
Keith McHenry
co-founder of the Food Not Bombs Movement
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514 USA
1-800-884-1136
menu@foodnotbombs.net
TAKING DIRECT ACTION TO MAKE KING’S DREAM A REALITY
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY PRESENTATION AND COOKING DEMONSTRATION
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY
https://www.facebook.com/tofuspread
Please share, thanks
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY TOUR with Food Not Bombs Co-founder Keith McHenry
August 15, 2013
I hope you had a great summer. We sure did. The Food Not Bombs Free Skool really made progress and next summer promises to be even better. This is the 25th anniversary of the first arrest of our volunteers for sharing ideas and food. Since that day on August 15, 1988 the authorities have tried to stop our progress by arresting our activists as they provided food to the hungry.
Each wave of arrests inspired the formation of another wave of Food Not Bombs groups. This summer Food Not Bombs groups have once again been threatened with arrest and over 50 cities in the United States have passed laws banning or restricting our work. August 15, 2013 is also the final day to donate to the Food Not Lawns Solar Pump House so please consider making a contribution at the website below. Today it is more important than ever to seek change and one of the most effective ways to help is to volunteer. We encourage you to bring Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry to speak with your community. His cooking demonstration is an inspiration and will not only encourage participation in Food Not Bombs but support any effort you may be involved in.
As you start back to school and the many other fall activities I hope you will consider bringing Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry to your school or community venue. Keith’s presentation is sure to inspire your classmates, friends and family. Visit our website and read all the positive comments students have made about past presentation. You don’t want to miss this opportunity. Speak with club leaders at your campus and ask them to host the Smashing Hunger Squashing Poverty tour. Don’t wait to book Keith as soon as possible before his schedule is filled.
Email us at menu@foodnotbombs.net today.
Visit our website to learn more.
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY TOUR
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
The last day to contribute to the completion of the Food Not Lawns Solar Pump House at the Food Not Bombs Free Skool.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/free-skool-solar-pump-house-taos
Food Not Bombs thrives even as it faces repression.
http://blog.foodnotbombs.net/food-not-bombs-thrives-even-as-it-faces-repression/
###
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY TOUR with Food Not Bombs Co-founder Keith McHenry
Food Not Bombs volunteers have been smashing hunger and squashing tofu in protest to the exploitation of capitalism for over three decades. During Keith’s tofu spread demonstration he will talk about the principles, history and Food Not Bombs participation in the global transformation away from corporate domination. Hunger and poverty are intentional features of capitalism and will increase as corporate power increases. Over 25,000 people die every day because of hunger often as tons of food pass them on the way to better prices.
Oxfam and the UN are reporting that hunger will be on the increase this year leading to civil unrest and violent police repression. The capitalist food system is not only causing millions of animals to suffer but is directly responsible for an increase in food insecurity, disease and the climate crisis. Keith’s presentation will inspire you to participate in the transition to a future free from violence and exploitation.
Copies of Keith’s book “Hungry for Peace” with the tofu spread recipe will be available at the presentation
THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING POVERTY TOUR
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514 USA
575-770-3377
menu@foodnotbombs.net
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
Food Not Bombs thrives even as it faces repression.
(The anniversary of the first arrest on August 15, 1988 )
http://blog.foodnotbombs.net/food-not-bombs-thrives-even-as-it-faces-repression/
Keith McHenry cooking demonstration the Taos Food Pecha Kucha on August 11, 2013 (8:33 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXmdZrWXFus
Keith’s book Hungry For Peace “is a self-defense guide for the compassionate, a catering cookbook for the generous, and a history of social change, but above all it’s a hymn to compassion. “
Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved
HUNGRY FOR PEACE – How you can help end poverty and war with Food Not Bombs
http://foodnotbombs.net/hungry_for_peace_promotional.html
Please share – 
Food Not Bombs thrives even as it faces repression
August 7, 2013
The San Francisco Police Department made history on August 15, 1988 when they made the first arrests ever for sharing food with the hungry. Nine volunteers arrived at the entrance to Golden Gate Park with organic vegan food prepared to share with the several hundred souls that were making the dense wooded park their home. A reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle learned of the the department’s plan to deploy 45 members of the Tactical Squad to Haight and Stanyan to arrest the cooks and shortly after noon the nine Food Not Bombs volunteers were captured, cuffed and driven off to jail. The activists sang “we will not be moved” as the police vans removed them from the scene.
After spending most of the night in a holding cell at police headquarters they were released to discover that the Chronicle had published a huge photo of riot police guarding the food from the hungry with a headline proclaiming “Nine Volunteers Arrested For Feeding the Homeless at Golden Gate Park.” The Food Not Bombs answering service on Polk Street was swamped with calls from people wanting to help. Offers of food, legal support, help with cooking and even commitments to risk arrest if necessary flooded in. The August 15, 1988 arrests marked a change in American societies view of the homeless and sparked a global movement. The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrests for the “crime” of “making a political statement” by sharing food with the hungry in public. Remove the Food Not Bombs banner and literature and provide your meals inside the National Guard Armory on the edge of the city or be arrested on felony conspiracy charges.
Twenty five years after the first arrest the act of showing compassion and effort to encourage the redirection of resources from war to providing for our community is as threatening to the authorities as it was in the summer of 1988. In response to the impact of Occupy Wall Street and other occupations over 50 cities in the United States have banned or passed laws restricting the sharing of food in public. Authorities are currently threatening to stop Food Not Bombs meals in Seattle, Portland, Boulder and Detroit. Yes Detroit, just as the city is filing for bankruptcy and has unimaginable need to feed its hungry the authorities are threatening to arrest Detroit Food Not Bombs.
Hunger and poverty are on the increase yet so is the desire to respond to the crisis. New Food Not Bombs groups form every week. Volunteers from Umuahia, Nigeria and New Paltz, New York asked to have their chapters included on http://www.foodnotbombs.net today. Activists reported that there are over 100 groups in Indonesia and 30 chapters in the Philippines with the Davao City chapter posting photos of their 13th July 5th anniversary celebration on our Facebook last week. A new chapter started in the southern zone of Mexico City and groups in New Zealand announced their next Really Really Free Market.
The impact of the August 15, 1988 arrests continues to this day having inspired people to start the first wave of Food Not Bombs groups that in turn inspired others to start a chapter in their own communities so that there are volunteers recovering food, cooking vegan meals that they share with the public in over 1,000 cities around the world.
You can join this inspiring movement. The most important thing you can do is start or join an already active Food Not Bombs group in your community. To learn more you can visit http://www.foodnotbombs.net or call us at 575-770-3377.
You may want to get a copy of our book “Hungry For Peace” to learn more about Food Not Bombs. You could also participate with the Food Not Bombs Free Skool in Taos, New Mexico to gain more experience.
Another great way to make a difference is to invite Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry to speak at your school, cafe, book store or other community space. This is a great way to inspire your friends, family and classmates to join you in taking action.
Another way you can build interest is to invite the Autonomous Play House to perform their puppet show in your community. Their shows are sure to inspire participation in your community organizing efforts.
Finally you can help by contributing to the completion of the Food Not Bombs Free Skool Solar Pump House and support another season of gardening, education and organizing at the school in Taos, New Mexico. Check out the cool video about the construction of the solar pump house. The pump will be powered by a donated solar cell and our showers will be heated by the sun as will the entire building. We intend to complete our fundraising drive by the 25th anniversary of the first arrest of Food Not Bombs on August 15, 2013. Please share this email and ask your family, friends and classmates to support Food Not Bombs.
Thanks so much for your interest.
Keith McHenry – co-founder of the Food Not Bombs Movement
Food Not Bombs thrives even as it faces repression
http://blog.foodnotbombs.net/food-not-bombs-thrives-even-as-it-faces-repression/
CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMPLETION OF THE SOLAR PUMP HOUSE BY AUGUST 15, 2013 – Thanks!!!
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/free-skool-solar-pump-house-taos
SOLAR PUMP HOUSE PROJECT VIDEO by David Cortez in Taos, New Mexico
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJDCmFIhHS8&feature=youtu.be
Invite THE SMASHING HUNGER SQUASHING CAPITALISM TOUR with Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry to your community.
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
THE AUTONOMOUS PLAYHOUSE
http://foodnotbombs.net/autonomous_playhouse_portfolio.php
THE FOOD NOT BOMBS FREE SKOOL
http://fnb-freeskool.org/free_skool_photos.html
Food Not Bombs Thrives Despite Repression
http://www.popularresistance.org/food-not-bombs-thrives-despite-repression/
Food Not Bombs
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514 USA
1-800-884-1136
http://www.foodnotbombs.net
http://foodnotbombs.net/dollar_for_peace.html
(Email us at menu@foodnotbombs.net to be removed from this list.)
please forward and post. Thanks… Keith McHenry
August 6th – Remembering the Nuclear Bombing of Hiroshima
August 7, 2013
Fire Bombing of Tokyo by John Phelan
I visited my grandfathers home often during the time of the Vietnam War. Every Christmas “Grampy Phelan” would pace below his photos of the fire bombing in heated phone conversations to General LeMay or General McNamara and argue the value of dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. As I remember the argument my grandfather feared the Soviet Union and China would not believe the United States was capable of using the bomb a third time and take advantage of America’s weakness. The mass murder of Viet Nam with an even larger nuclear warhead would “prove” the United States was so depraved no country would dare question another direct order of our leaders. Decisions about taking so many lives was a burden our family had to endure as the responsibility of the genetically superior New Englanders.
He tried to prepare me for the brutality that would be my responsibility by taking me fishing on Middle Lake on Cape Cod. Smashing each perch and bass to death on the side our our dingy would be the first lesson. Looking into the eyes of those helpless creatures as I followed my grandfather’s directions made my heart sink. Butchering my first seven roosters was enough to introduce me to the world of vegetarians as my mother’s hens and goats screamed in painful solidarity during the massacre.
One sunny spring day in 1977 I took a break from my job at the Old South Meeting House where I spent my days sharing the history of the BostonTea Party with tourists and walked over to Park Street Station to eat lunch on the Commons. A small woman stood on top of a plastic Hood Dairy Milk Crate explaining that there were thousands of nuclear missiles that could be launched in a minuted notice. The Soviet Union could kill millions of Americans if they believed the United States was about to attack and the U.S. Military could kill millions in the Soviet Union. I later found out she was Doctor Helen Caldicott who came to Boston in her campaign to end the threat of nuclear war.
I could see how regular people, people like my mother’s father could rationalize horrible acts like the use of nuclear weapons and the murder of a million civilians in a quest to defend corporate power. I slept next to the two filing cabinets of Digital Electronics formulas before my grandfather soled them to Ken Olsen during the years he argued for the use of the nuclear booming of Hanoi. A few years later I happened to have a job trimming produce at an organic grocery in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was alarmed by how many cases of nutritious produce I was expected to discard so I took it to the hungry residence at the housing projects near the store. Very skinny children played outside the dilapidated brick buildings in the shadow of a modern glass tower where scientists were developing guidance systems for intercontinental nuclear missiles. Our society clearly valued bombs over food. That August 6th our new group Food Not Bombs march from Cambridge City Hall to the front of that weapons laboratory. I took the Boston phonebook from a bucket of gas, held it up to those assembled. “If a one megaton nuclear weapon were to hit Boston today all the people listed in this phone book would die in a flash!” I set a match to the book and up it went in flames.
Thirty years later we still face this very real danger. As we feared Reagan started a policy of redirecting our resources from healthcare, education and the real security that Americans need to the world’s largest military build up. On the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki appeared in court in Orlando, Florida along with many others for the “crime” of sharing free vegan meals with the hungry in protest to war and poverty. It is hard to imagine that any city official could justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to drive hunger out of sight knowing their citizens are suffering and have no prospects of jobs and are unable to find regular meals or affordable housing. But Orlando Mayor Dyer and his friends have the nerve to arrest and prosecute those volunteering to help seek an end to hunger.
And the crisis is growing. This year I joined a small group at Los Alamos. Speakers reported on the current production of America’s new Reliable Nuclear Arsenal. Auditors also announced that it is not possible to account for all of the weapons grade plutonium and that over 150 bombs worth of materials have been lost. Scientists at the national lavatory are developing conventional bunker buster bombs with more power than those dropped on Japan as waves of radio active poison from the ongoing meltdown of Fukushima grows more dire. West coast Americans have already experienced a dramatic increase in birth defects from the disaster.
At the same time authorities have announced a suspiciously phony terrorist alert that seem to be designed to justify the demonization of NSA contractor Ed Snowden and other whistleblowers just as one intelligence officer after another is coming forward to denounce the political system they have been hired to protect. The amount of covert surveillance operations exposed this summer is stunning. Tens of millions of innocent Americans are being tracked by the police through vast license plate scanning systems, according to new documents obtained by the ACLU in July 2013. We learned that all cell phones are monitored and that local police can follow your every move. Every internet and web actions is recored and identified to every user. There was even a suggestion that the “leaders” of the Occupy movement be killed using “suppressed sniper rifles.”
Millions already face hunger and live in poverty but this could just be the beginning of a desperate future for billions of others as they are driven from the middle class by the failing economic and political system. Every week someone will come to eat with Food Not Bombs reporting they have not had a meal in days. This story is becoming more common as we collapse into another “Great Depression” our volunteers will be required to help an even larger number of people seeking their first meal in days. The U.S. empire is in it’s last days and not taking it well.
Fortunately the collapse of capitalism is providing an opportunity to reshape our future. Sure it is a race to transform our society before there is a complete ecological failure but the magnitude of the crisis is so great many more people are rising to the occasion wiling to risk their freedom and security to confront corporate power.
I invite you to join or start a local Food Not Bombs group. You can help us recover, prepare and provide food to the hungry and those who are protesting the dangerous policies of austerity, war and environmental destruction. There really is no time like the anniversary of America’s first atomic massacre to join the struggle to protect our future.
Thanks so much.
Keith McHenry
cofounder of the Food Not Bombs movement.
http://www.foodnotbombs.net
The seven steps to starting a local Food Not Bombs group
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/seven.html
The Smashing Hunger, Squashing Capitalism tour
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/speaker.html
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