Postmaster General Gets Mic Checked

Posted on December 1, 2011 by admin

Brian Tierney (left) and Kenneth Lerch (right) outside the National Press Club

LISTEN TO BRIAN TIERNEY AND KENNETH LERCH:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

“The Postmaster General is really trying to dismantle the United States Postal Service and have it privatized,” said Kenneth Lerch, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 3825 in Montgomery County, Md.

As he joined protesters associated with Occupy DC outside the National Press Club last week, Lerch told TheFightBack, “They want to privatize the Post Office under the guise that [it’s] losing billions of dollars a year, which is just an outright lie.”

Inside the Press Club, Postmaster General Patrick Donahue was interrupted when he attempted to explain why eliminating 200,000 postal jobs was necessary, along with ending Saturday delivery, among other proposed cuts.

Continue reading →

Posted in District of Columbia, Labor/Jobs, Occupy Movement | Comments Off on Postmaster General Gets Mic Checked

The Diverse City Fund

Posted on November 28, 2011 by admin

Nigel Greaves and Ayize Sabater of the DC Fund, with Lucretia John of the Funding Exchange

LISTEN TO VOICES FROM THE DC FUND CELEBRATION:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

Last week, the newly-created Diverse City Fund awarded $45,000 in grants, ranging from $1,000 to $2,500, to twenty-three grassroots organizations working in D.C.’s communities of color. The grant recipients focus on “housing, media, sexuality and gender equality, urban gardens, and more,” according to a press release from the “DC Fund.”

“We really wanted to find a way to support organizations that were off the radar screen for most foundations,” Brigette Rouson, a founding member of DC Fund’s “Board of Instigators,” told TheFightBack at the organization’s Nov. 22 inaugural celebration at Busboys and Poets. We want to “make sure that people of color continue to be residents of this city and get the resources that they need and deserve,” said Rousson. Continue reading →

Posted in District of Columbia, Gentrification | Comments Off on The Diverse City Fund

Is the FBI Targeting Anti-War Activists?

Posted on November 27, 2011 by admin

Meredith Aby

LISTEN TO MEREDITH ABY:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

Meredith Aby is a peaceful anti-war activist. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the 38-year-old mother, who teaches at a Twin Cities high school, is the target of an FBI investigation and may face terrorism related charges.

Around 7 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 24, 2010, as her young daughter slept, eight FBI agents and one Minneapolis police officer knocked loudly on Aby’s front door, then “they came barging in and they shoved a warrant in my face,” she told TheFightBack at last weekend’s School of the Americas Watch protest in Columbus, Georgia. Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-war | Comments Off on Is the FBI Targeting Anti-War Activists?

SOA WATCH: Father Louis Vitale

Posted on November 26, 2011 by admin

LISTEN TO FATHER LOUIS VITALE:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

Unlike the past two years, Father Louis Vitale’s participation in last weekend’s protest outside the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) didn’t lead to his spending months behind bars. The 79-year-old Franciscan priest, who’s been arrested “probably at least a couple hundred times,” decided against committing civil disobedience this time around because he’s “putting a lot of effort into the occupations going on in the country” and doesn’t want to miss out on participating in a movement “that can change things,” he told TheFightBack while standing in front of heavily fortified gates at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-war, Occupy Movement | Comments Off on SOA WATCH: Father Louis Vitale

SOA Watch: “The Ballad of Roy Bourgeois”

Posted on November 22, 2011 by admin

LISTEN TO STEVE JACOBS:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

“Oppression needs complicity of silence to go on,” activist and singer/songwriter Steve Jacobs sang for TheFightBack outside the U.S. Army base at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the School of the Americas (SOA). Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2000, over the years SOA has trained tens of thousands of Latin American soldiers, many of whom have gone on to commit human rights abuses.

This past weekend, more than a thousand activists protested outside the gates of Fort Benning as part of the annual gathering which takes place on the anniversary of the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. “I’ve been coming down here since 1996 to protest the fact that the U.S. government is providing weapons and training to Latin American soldiers that have killed members of my Catholic faith,” Jacobs said. Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-war | Comments Off on SOA Watch: “The Ballad of Roy Bourgeois”

Some One Percenters Stand with the 99

Posted on November 15, 2011 by admin

LISTEN TO BURKE STANSBURY:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

“The One Percent are… being targeted by this movement, and rightfully so,” Burke Stansbury, an activist who inherited over a $1 million at age 25, told TheFightBack yesterday in an interview livestreamed from Occupy DC at McPherson Square on K Street. “Taxes on the wealthy are at a historic low,” he said.

Right now in the U.S., said Stansbury, “we have a discussion about a budget crisis instead of what it really is, which is a revenue crisis.” The problem could be addressed by increasing the capital gains and estate taxes, as well as implementing a tax on financial transactions, explained Stansbury.

“There’s tons of ways that we could create revenue if Congress had the nerve, had the guts, to do that… [but] clearly a lot of the interests in this country, from banks to corporations to rich people, don’t want that to happen,” he said.

Continue reading →

Posted in Occupy Movement | Comments Off on Some One Percenters Stand with the 99

At Occupy DC, a Veterans Day Discussion with 21-Year-Old Vet

Posted on November 12, 2011 by admin

Michael Patterson (right) speaks with Pete at Occupy DC. Photo credit: Darrin Smith

Listen to Michael Patterson:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

“‘Terrorists’ and ‘insurgents’ [are] just dehumanizing terms so that you can do your job more efficiently and without any sort of objections to your conscience,” 21-year-old Michael Patterson told TheFightBack in an interview at Occupy DC at McPherson Square this Veterans Day. Patterson, who conducted some 300 interrogations while serving in Iraq as a member of Task Force 714 in late 2008/early 2009, described his experience as “eye-opening.”

“They’re people. They’re Iraqis. They’re Afghans. They have families. They have feelings. They’re just trying to do the same thing we’re trying to do, which is survive and make a better life for their kids,” said Patterson, who’s originally from Anchorage, Alaska, and is now living at Occupy DC. Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-war, Occupy Movement | Comments Off on At Occupy DC, a Veterans Day Discussion with 21-Year-Old Vet

Reporter John Hanrahan Responds to Councilmember Jack Evans’ Attack

Posted on November 10, 2011 by admin

LISTEN TO JOHN HANRAHAN: 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download MP3

“I think Mr. Evans needs a course in anger management and constituent relations,” former Washington Post reporter John Hanrahan said in response to being called “a f—ing idiot” by Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans. “I’m amazed that he would let a potential conflict of interest matter linger for two years just because he doesn’t like the person who raises questions about his recusals on an issue of such deep public importance,” Hanrahan told TheFightBack in a Nov. 8 interview livestreamed (at OccupyDC.org) from the ongoing occupation at McPherson Square on K Street.

In a series of articles and letters to officials, Hanrahan pointed out that Evans hasn’t complied with the law and filed a written explanation for his sudden recusals on the convention center hotel financing package in June 2009. The deal, which Evans spent years working on, provides $272 million in public subsidies to assist Marriott in building a 1,167-room hotel. Continue reading →

Posted in District of Columbia | Comments Off on Reporter John Hanrahan Responds to Councilmember Jack Evans’ Attack

The Civil Rights Movement – and the Deacons for Defense and Justice – in Bogalusa, Louisiana

Posted on November 7, 2011 by admin

Chuck Hicks

 

“We were a marked family,” said Chuck Hicks, who grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana during the civil rights movement. Hicks’ father, the late Robert Hicks, helped found the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group whose members carried weapons in order to protect against Klan attacks.

“[Bogalusa was] a small town so everybody knew the Hicks family. They knew our car and they knew us. They had taken pictures of us and all that. Our life was just totally different [once my dad joined the Deacons],” Hicks told TheFightBack Oct. 6 in an extended must-listen-to-interview at D.C.’s Freedom Plaza, on the first day of that space’s occupation. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Civil Rights Movement – and the Deacons for Defense and Justice – in Bogalusa, Louisiana

WPFW Discusses Jack Evans’ Conflicts, the Proposed Adams Morgan Hotel and the Removal of WTU VP Candi Peterson

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

LISTEN TO THE LATINO MEDIA COLLECTIVE WITH GUEST PETE TUCKER:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Last night on the Latino Media Collective on Pacifica Radio WPFW 89.3 FM, TheFightBack‘s Pete Tucker joined hosts Oscar Fernandez and Norberto Martinez for a discussion on Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans’ conflict of interest regarding the convention center hotel and the lack of coverage it has received in the Washington Post.

The proposed Adams Morgan hotel was also discussed on the program. The project attempts to use $46 million in government subsidies to demolish the building which presently houses WPFW in order to construct a 175-room luxury boutique hotel to be operated by Marriott (which will also own and operate the convention center hotel). Continue reading →

Posted in District of Columbia | Comments Off on WPFW Discusses Jack Evans’ Conflicts, the Proposed Adams Morgan Hotel and the Removal of WTU VP Candi Peterson