Sunday, October 08, 2017

In Boston-10/21 Resisting Lynching in India (Saturday) at 4pm

Charlie Welch via Act-MA
To  act-ma@act-ma.org  
*Resisting Lynching in India*
October 21st (Saturday) at 4pm
encuentro5, Boston
*Directions*: 9A Hamilton Place, Boston (close to the Park Street T-Stop
on the Green and Red Lines; near Orpheum Theatre)
http://www.encuentro5.org/home/directions
https://www.facebook.com/events/511268475888422/

http://encuentro5.org/home/node/411

*Event description*:
The menace of mob lynching has become a major issue in India. Muslims,
Dalits, elderly women often happen to be the targets of these hate
crimes, which flourish in an overall environment of hate and
intimidation, the pretext for which is often, though not always, the
consumption of 'beef'. India has seen a spike in these hate crimes since
the coming of Narendra Modi government into power, amid a culture of
impunity whereby lynching accused are not only let out on bail, but also
defended by people holding elected office.

Shehla Rashid, who is one of the people at the forefront of the
resistance to lynching and hate crimes in India, will familiarize the
audience with many aspects of the issue and discuss strategies for
fighting the menace.
Dorotea Manuela will briefly discuss the lynchings of African Americans
and the related challenges faced in the US today.
*Speakers Bios*:
*Shehla Rashid Shora* is a research scholar at the Center for the Study
of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in India. She
was the vice-president of JNU students union in 2015-16 and is a member
of All India Students’ Association (AISA). She is also a founding member
of the National Campaign against Mob Lynching and currently active in
the campaign.
*Dorotea Manuela* is a long-time activist in the Boston and NewYork
areas. She is a Puerto Rican independence activist, labor organizer, and
anti-racist educator.

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Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 

 

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber


One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in Johnny D’s over in Somerville [this night was several years before the recent 2015 announcement that that central spot for the blues tradition and up and coming newer musical genre was closing after a forty year run], over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin and picked up by Ralph along the way when drinking his life-time scotch whiskey became verboten after a bad medical check-up about ten years before Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired kind of naturally. A lot of their conversations of late, the last few years as they slid into retirement Ralph giving the day to day operations of his specialty electrical shop over to his youngest son and Sam giving the day to day management of his high volume printing business to his longtime employee, Jimmy Jones, who held the place together at the beginning while Sam headed West with a gang of other Carver corner boys in search of the great blue-pink American West night that animated much of the late 1960s had centered on their lifetime of common musical interests (except folk music which Sam came of age with, caught the drift as it came through Harvard Square where he would hang out to get out of the house when tensions boiled  o to some extent but which mostly even with Bob Dylan anti-war protest songs made him grind his teeth.




By naturally Ralph meant, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. Songs like The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid like Ralph born and raised in Troy, New York a strictly working class town then, and now,  although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery; Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus all the animals of the farm kingdom and their distinctive noises that still rattled Ralph’s head on hard drinking night if he got melancholy for his tortured childhood; Humpty Dumpty, a silly grossly overweight holy goof of the rankest order, an egghead to boot and that didn’t mean intellectual, far from it, who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression, that hell or high water expression, or used it in the high Roman Catholic Saturday-go-to-confession-to confess those damns, hells, and fucks that had entered you vocabulary through osmosis and Sunday-go-to-communion-to-absolve-all-sins Morris household out in Troy where Ralph still lives; and,  Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs but thinking about it later what were they really doing up there. All this total recall, or mostly total recall showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. you have embraced that music as a child in case you have forgotten. Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this sketch is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).


Sam nodded his head in agreement then chimed in with his opinion the music of junior high school as he thought, looking behind the bartender’s head to the selection of hard liquors displayed with the twinkle of an eye, about switching over to a high-shelf scotch whiskey, Haig &Haig, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. (Sam unlike Ralph suffering no medical warning about the dire consequences to his system about throwing down a few shots since his health was in better shape than Ralph, Ralph having taken a beating in that department with whatever hellious chemical his government, or rather the American government for which he refused to take any credit or blame, was throwing on the ground of Vietnam from the nightmare skies during that long, bloody lost war).


That “second coming” referring to guys, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta South of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  


Yeah, getting back to junior high, Sam thinking about that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third bottle of beer sipping had gotten him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on the poor, benighted man that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids said amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult in any era, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher (who on the side in those days, not unlike these days, when teachers couldn’t live on their teaching incomes led an old-time, old time to Sam and his classmates Benny Goodman-style swing and sway big band at special occasions and as a regular at the Surf Ballroom over in Plymouth on Friday nights), who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks. Thus  you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance, God Bless America, and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death.


Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that the Dasher was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain. And they were not putting their three selections for a quarter to hear hokey Home on the Range.   


Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had as he chuckled to himself and turned a little confession red although he not been into that stifling confession box on his gamy knees in many years, and it would not be nice either). Ralph added that some of the remembered music reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass against the Nips (his father’s term for the dirty bastard Japanese) and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II.


You know, guys like Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam’s and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters  and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms or could hardly wait to hear when the jukebox guy came into Doc’s to put the latest selections in (and to have his hand greased by Doc for “allowing” those desperately desired songs onto his jukebox to fill his pockets with many quarters, see he was “connected” and so along with the jukebox hand over fist money-maker cam the hand).


That mention of transistor radios got Ralph and Sam yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again since they had moved from the bar to a table near the stage to get a better view of the band if they were to make it through both sets that night (and Ralph thinking, just this once, just for this bluesy night he would “cheat” a little on that scotch whiskey ban). This transistor thing by the way for the young who might wonder what these old geezers were talking about since it was clearly not iPods was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that.


Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).


Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy, her word whether she knew the exact meaning or not, meaning all hot and bothered, according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television. Chuck Berry telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, all had to move over because there was a new sheriff in town.  Bo Diddley asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate. Buddy Holly crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.


The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station, WBZ and later WCAS. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit Sam although he would shutter his ears if Sam played some folk stuff).


The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting (and plenty taken away when the soldiers and sailors, white soldiers and sailors came home on the overcrowded troop transports looking to start life over again and raise those families they dreamed about in the muds of Europe and the salty brine of the atoll Pacific). But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, think about Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.


What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform down in Newport when everybody who was anybody that high school and college kids wanted to hear in that folk minute showed up there.  Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s while American rockers were basically clueless until the Brits told them about their own roots music) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band. Playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did.
They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. And he and his band did just that. Yes, that blues calling from somewhere deep in the muds is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    


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*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

 






A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical and electrified  work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, the going was tough which to say the least most of these efforts  were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works, reflected that long curve decline in the genetically-based illnesses that laid him low by the end.


After some thought, and some prodding by an old-time classmate who had stayed in town and who had been in the class with me, I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called "Dasher the Flasher" just for rhyming purposes when being a rhyming simon was the cat's meow and was the subject of many strange rhyme schemes, some not publishable even today, but which also with today’s sensibilities in mind about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.


Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female we could get our hands on at Chip's Record Shop downtown or on the jukebox at the Dew Drop Diner where we corralled ourselves on many an after school afternoon. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that particular Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.   

In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of import is when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being played in the fall of 1962 on the Boston sell-out rock stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned out to be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming as he walked down from the mountaintop). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine on WBNC at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short but all speaking to a low-down guy trying to get back with his sweetie come hell or high water). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well on that path until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare "reds under every bed" brush.

Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with father and son Lomaxes  did so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie treated like the bible-and stole like crazy from like Dylan did with Rabbit Allen's James Alley Blues, I think that).


Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday night illegal homemade jug and head to the electricity-less juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the self-same illegal and homemade  jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle as the mist rolled in from the damps.

Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.  Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles. 



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10/10 to 17 Cuban Writer Leonardo Padura tours the Boston Area

Charlie Welch
To  act-ma@act-ma.org  
Padura’s wide popularity is rooted in the series of noir detective
novels he’s written, the first four of which have been made into films.
The “Four Seasons in Havana” quartet is available on Netflix; it is
being made into an English language series for cable starring Antonio
Banderas.  Padura’s writing in general is deeply involved with Cuban
history and politics.

The festival will be screening two Padura films in Spanish with English
subtitles after which there will be Q&A with the author: “Vientos de La
Habana/Winds of Havana,” an expanded version of the first in the Netflix
series that is an introduction to the world of Mario Conde featuring the
whole crew from the old neighborhood and his high school days as well as
police colleagues and Havana itself. In “Regreso a Itaca/Return to
Ithaca,” Leonardo wrote the screenplay about a generation gathering for
a rooftop dinner in Havana and to make sense of the past and present.
The festival showing will be the first time the film has been screened
with English subtitles in this country.

* Tu, Oct 10: 6:30-8:30, Reading/book signing at Brookline Coolidge
Corner Library, 31 Pleasant St., at the Coolidge Corner Green Line
(C train) stop; the Brookline Booksmith will be bringing books.
Facebook Event
<https://www.facebook.com/events/926696674160261/?acontext=%7B%22action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22dashboard%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22calendar_tab_event%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%22[]%22%7D]%2C%22ref%22%3A1%2C%22source%22%3A2%7D>
* Wed, Oct 11: 7:00-9:00, U.S. premiere with English subtitles,
“Regreso a Itaca/Return to Ithaca,” Q&A, Boston University School of
Theology, 745 Commonwealth, at the BU Central stop on the Green Line
B train.
* Ths, Oct 12: noon-2:00 Northeastern University, 909 Renaissance
Park, 1135 Tremont, at/just south of the Ruggles St. station on the
Orange Line and the parking garage on Columbus Ave., #63 on the
campus map <http://www.northeastern.edu/campusmap/map/index.html>.
* Fri, Oct 13: 2:00-4:00, “A conversation about Culture and Politics
with Leonardo Padura (in Spanish)” Tufts University, Cabot Center,
7th floor, 170 Packard Ave. with parking and public access on campus
map <http://campusmaps.tufts.edu/medford/>..
* Fri, Oct 13: 7:00-9:30, “Vientos de La Habana/Winds of Havana,” Q&A,
Northeastern University, 010 Behrakis Health Sciences Center (BK),
30 Leon St., near the MFA Green Line stop (D train) on Huntington
Ave., #26 on the campus map
<http://www.northeastern.edu/campusmap/map/index.html>.
* Tu Oct 17: 2:00-4:30, “A Conversation with Celebrated Author
Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Boston University, Mugar Memorial Library,
Richards-Roosevelt Room, 1st Floor, 771 Commonwealth Ave, at the BU
Central stop on the Green Line B train.
* Tu Oct 17: 7:00-8:30 – July26.org/Leonardo Padura joint program with
the Witness for Peace-sponsored tour with Cuban poet and popular
educator Marcel Lueiro Reyes, Northeastern University, 305 Shillman
Hall, 115 Forsythe St., half a block from the Northeastern U Green
Line stop (D train) on Huntington Ave., turn left, #30 on the campus
map <http://www.northeastern.edu/campusmap/map/index.html>.

Padura’s wide popularity is rooted in the series of noir detective
novels he’s written, the first four of which have been made into films.
The “Four Seasons in Havana” quartet is available on Netflix; it is
being made into an English language series for cable starring Antonio
Banderas. Padura’s writing in general is deeply involved with Cuban
history and politics.

The festival will be screening two Padura films in Spanish with English
subtitles after which there will be Q&A with the author: “Vientos de La
Habana/Winds of Havana,” an expanded version of the first in the Netflix
series that is an introduction to the world of Mario Conde featuring the
whole crew from the old neighborhood and his high school days as well as
police colleagues and Havana itself. In “Regreso a Itaca/Return to
Ithaca,” Leonardo wrote the screenplay about a generation gathering for
a rooftop dinner in Havana and to make sense of the past and present.
The festival showing will be the first time the film has been screened
with English subtitles in this country.

https://july26.org/october-2017-leonardo-padura-festival/
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Supporters Condemn Decision to Deny Bail to Accused Whistleblower Reality Winner

Supporters Condemn Decision to Deny Bail to Accused Whistleblower Reality Winner

October 5, 2017
The Stand With Reality support group strongly condemns the court’s unfair decision today to continue the unjust imprisonment of Reality Leigh Winner. Winner faces a March 2018 trial for sharing a classified NSA document with the media that outlined how foreign agents attempted to undermine US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
Winner, a decorated Air Force veteran with no criminal record, who has already served four months in jail despite being convicted of no crime, and displaying every intention to face the single charge against her in court, will now be jailed for at least six more months, regardless of the jury’s eventual verdict.
Winner’s step-father Gary Davis stated, “A great miscarriage of justice has taken place today. Justice is supposed to be based on proof and evidence not unsubstantiated innuendo, fabrication, and misrepresentation of selected snippets of conversations taken out of context.”
This decision comes in spite of the prosecution’s admission it made false statements and misrepresented evidence in Winner’s original bail hearing on June 8th. Assistant U.S. attorney Jennifer G. Solari admitted she did not listen to the contents of a phone call used as evidence against Winner in her original bail hearing, instead relying on a “verbal summary” Solari later said was inaccurate.
Support group organizer, and previous director of Chelsea Manning’s defense fund, Jeff Paterson noted, “The prosecution falsely claimed that Reality had more classified documents in her possession, suggesting that she’d leak those documents too if given a chance. That turned out be a lie.”
“The prosecution also manipulated Winner’s politics to paint her as a danger to society and a flight risk,” added Paterson. “She expressed a desire to travel to conflict zones as a peacekeeper. The prosecution twisted her humanitarian outlook to characterize her as a future terrorist.”
“This is the opening salvo in the new war on whistleblowers and sets an extremely dangerous precedent,” explained government transparency advocate Rainey Reitman. “By this logic, anyone who has ever held a security clearance and disagrees with the U.S. government is a danger to society and should be in jail. But where does this end? Should Winner be in prison for life because of opinions and information she has in her head?”
Reitman continues, “Reality Winner is innocent of her charges under the Espionage Act. This 100 year old law, designed to prosecute spies during World War I, is being misused to deny Reality Winner legally-guaranteed whistleblower protections.”
Winner’s mother, Billie Davis-Winner, shared, “I am truly heartbroken and crushed. I am disappointed in the court’s decision and believe it is unfair. Her service to the country, and every community she has ever lived in, should have been weighted.”
Matt Boyle, a close friend of Winner’s, declared, “I’m incredibly saddened today. Reality will spend nearly a year in jail before even having her day in court. David Petraeus, on the other hand, didn’t serve a day behind bars. The degree to which our government has gone after her shakes my faith in our justice department.”
Winner has a top notch defense team determined to prove her innocence in court, despite the prosecution’s ongoing campaign to deny her the right to a fair and open trial. The Stand With Reality Winner support group has been the primary source of fundraising for Winner’s legal defense team and is leading public education efforts regarding this precedent setting First Amendment vs. Espionage Act case.
For complete campaign information:
https://StandWithReality.org
# # #


Eric Brooks
+1 317-796-1772
@ebrooks

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Veterans For Peace on Afghanistan-As We Enter Year 17

Veterans For Peace on Afghanistan

At the beginning of the 17th year of the U.S. war in Iraq, Veterans For Peace continues to call on the government of the United States to immediately withdraw all military and intelligence forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan. We call on the government of the United States to provide humanitarian aid directly to the people of Afghanistan, in non-coercive forms, to help the Afghan people rebuild their own nation and their lives in cooperation with other nations in the region; to allow the people of Afghanistan to freely determine their own government without interference by the US; and to issue an official apology to the people of Afghanistan.
President Trump is the third president to continue the depraved and failed U.S. war policy in Afghanistan. He and Presidents Bush and Obama have claimed that the U.S. has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and that the U.S. public must continue to support the war efforts to maintain U.S. security and to help the people of Afghanistan. However, the truth is the war is killing the people of Afghanistan. After 16 years, civilian deaths are rising. A New York Times July 27th article reported that the United Nations Afghanistan Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict report states 1,662 civilians were killed in the first six months of 2017, a 2 percent increase from last year and 3,581 additional civilians were wounded. The report also states there is a 23 percent rise in the number of women killed and child deaths are up 9 percent.
The presence of U.S. forces is the primary driver of violence in Afghanistan and that 17 years ago there was no negotiations or dialogue with the former Afghan Taliban government to extradite Osama bin Laden. Instead the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and ousted a government the U.S. had formerly worked with. War was the first and only tool employed by the U.S.  Since 2001, violence has increased significantly within Afghanistan, as well as the rise of militant groups.  It is beyond clear that our presence is only aiding the further destabilizing of that entire region.
War is a death factory. Thousands of U.S. and coalition troops have died. Tens of thousands of service members have been wounded. Veteran suicide rates have increased dramatically since 2001.  While the U.S. government claims to protect the people of Afghanistan, the Afghan people have lost the most to U.S. foreign policy. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, that as of mid 2016 the combined total of deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan stood at 173,000 with over 183,000 people seriously injured. Constant warfare and deaths can do nothing but inflame rage against the U.S. The U.S. must stop endless war. It is time to bring all our troops home now!
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