coup. The first item was incorrect, as stated here. My sincere apology.
From: "Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz" <rdunbaro@pacbell.net>
To: <epearlag@earthlink.net>;
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: Updates on Honduras
False rumor, Hamm is alive
From my I-phone
Ed, I know; it was quite irresponsible of Narcosphere to put that
misinformation out without confirming it, and then not to put out a
mass mailing correcting it. When I first received it early this
morning, I went to their website to check and found that they had
retracted the claim. I see that the url got lost in the shuffle by
the time you sent it out. It's important that we on the left don't
discredit ourselves by making false claims, as is happening with the
Iran situation.
Roxanne
----- Original Message -----
From: Williams Camacaro
To: bosanovanuevoyazul@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 7:23 PM
EMERGENCY RALLY TO RECEIVE HONDURAN PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA AT THE UN
Grassroots movements and the solidarity organizations in NYC are
mobilizing to receive Manuel Zelaya, President of Honduras, who will be
attending to the General Assembly at the UN to denounce the coup d'etat
against his government and the people of Honduras
When: Tuesday, June 30, 2009, from 10 AM to 12:30 P.M.
WHERE: Ralph Bunch Park
(to the west of 1st Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd streets), Manhattan, NYC
END THE COUP NOW! RESTORE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MANUEL ZELAYA TO POWER!
NO TO US INTERVENTION! YES TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS
AND ALL OF THE AMERICAS!
Manuel Zelaya is backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements
in Honduras. This coup was carried out in a way that mirrors the removal of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti and the attempted coup against
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who was brought back to power by the
Venezuelan people. Clearly, this is an act of economic and political elites
in Honduras, the US, and elsewhere who are desperate to prevent Honduras
from continuing to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in
Latin America.
Following the kidnapping of Zelaya, Honduras' foreign minister and
ambassadors from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were also kidnapped - in
clear violation of international laws. Now, the people of Honduras of taken
to the streets in protest and Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez
of Venezuela, and others have made public statements condemning the coup
d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to
ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated.
Washington, on the other hand, remains silent as of now.
JOIN THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN CONDEMNING THE
COUP D'ETAT AND DEMANDING THAT MANUEL ZELAYA BE REINSTATED.
(Some of the information above is excerpted from an article by Eva Golinger
at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554. Additional information is
available at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com)
This rally is sponsored called by the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of NY
and other progressive organizations and movements throughout NYC. For more
information, email cbalbertolovera@gmail.com.
----- Original Message -----
From: Williams Camacaro
To: bosanovanuevoyazul@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 7:23 PM
EMERGENCY RALLY TO RECEIVE HONDURAN PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA AT THE UN
All the grassroots movements and the solidarity organizations in NYC are
mobilizing to receive Manuel Zelaya, President of Honduras, who will be
attending to the General Assembly at the UN to denounce the coup d'etat
against his government and the people of Honduras
When: Tuesday, June 30, 2009, from 10 AM to 12:30 P.M.
WHERE: Ralph Bunch Park
(to the west of 1st Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd streets), Manhattan, NYC
END THE COUP NOW! RESTORE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MANUEL ZELAYA TO POWER!
NO TO US INTERVENTION! YES TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS
AND ALL OF THE AMERICAS!
Manuel Zelaya is backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements
in Honduras. This coup was carried out in a way that mirrors the removal of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti and the attempted coup against
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who was brought back to power by the
Venezuelan people. Clearly, this is an act of economic and political elites
in Honduras, the US, and elsewhere who are desperate to prevent Honduras
from continuing to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in
Latin America.
Following the kidnapping of Zelaya, Honduras' foreign minister and
ambassadors from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were also kidnapped - in
clear violation of international laws. Now, the people of Honduras of taken
to the streets in protest and Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez
of Venezuela, and others have made public statements condemning the coup
d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to
ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated.
Washington, on the other hand, remains silent as of now.
JOIN THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN CONDEMNING THE
COUP D'ETAT AND DEMANDING THAT MANUEL ZELAYA BE REINSTATED.
(Some of the information above is excerpted from an article by Eva Golinger
at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554. Additional information is
available at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com)
This rally is sponsored called by the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of NY
and other progressive organizations and movements throughout NYC. For more
information, email cbalbertolovera@gmail.com.
----- Original Message -----
From: Williams Camacaro
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 7:23 PM
EMERGENCY RALLY TO RECEIVE HONDURAN PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA AT THE UN
Many grassroots movements and the solidarity organizations in NYC are
mobilizing to receive Manuel Zelaya, President of Honduras, who will be
attending to the General Assembly at the UN to denounce the coup d'etat
against his government and the people of Honduras
When: Tuesday, June 30, 2009, from 10 AM to 12:30 P.M.
WHERE: Ralph Bunch Park
(to the west of 1st Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd streets), Manhattan, NYC
END THE COUP NOW! RESTORE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MANUEL ZELAYA TO POWER!
NO TO US INTERVENTION! YES TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS
AND ALL OF THE AMERICAS!
Manuel Zelaya is backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements
in Honduras. This coup was carried out in a way that mirrors the removal of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti and the attempted coup against
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who was brought back to power by the
Venezuelan people. Clearly, this is an act of economic and political elites
in Honduras, the US, and elsewhere who are desperate to prevent Honduras
from continuing to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in
Latin America.
Following the kidnapping of Zelaya, Honduras' foreign minister and
ambassadors from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were also kidnapped - in
clear violation of international laws. Now, the people of Honduras of taken
to the streets in protest and Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez
of Venezuela, and others have made public statements condemning the coup
d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to
ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated.
Washington, on the other hand, remains silent as of now.
JOIN THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN CONDEMNING THE
COUP D'ETAT AND DEMANDING THAT MANUEL ZELAYA BE REINSTATED.
(Some of the information above is excerpted from an article by Eva Golinger
at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554. Additional information is
available at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com)
This rally is sponsored called by the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of NY
and other progressive organizations and movements throughout NYC. For more
information, email cbalbertolovera@gmail.com.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28rich.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 27, 2009
LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the
1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and
protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the
several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided
a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 - 40
years ago today.
Then again, I didn't know a single person, student or teacher, male or
female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay.
And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era's
political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do,
really. The Times - which would not even permit the use of the word gay
until 1987 - covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them
but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.
But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my
generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights
wasn't on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of
harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As
David Carter writes in his book "Stonewall," at the end of the 1960s
homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime
punishable by castration in seven states. No laws - federal, state or
local - protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a
homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder
or suicide.
The younger gay men - and scattered women - who acted up at the Stonewall on
those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their
contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often
lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by
their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the
Village because they'd heard it was one American neighborhood where it was
safe to be who they were.
Stonewall "wasn't a 1960s student riot," wrote one of them, Thomas
Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York
Public Library in the exhibition "1969: The Year of Gay Liberation." They
had "no nice dorms for sleeping," "no school cafeteria for certain food" and
"no affluent parents" to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any
kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to
prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that "the mystery of history" could happen
"in the least likely of places."
After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of
history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of
gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay
people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national
awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them
even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room
reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical
of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a
"fierce advocate" for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased
this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal
under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely
a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA - which hardly
mitigates the brief's denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six
states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted
that its Stonewall ceremony was "long planned" - even though it sure looks
like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last
Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors dropped out of a
Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.
In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard
several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and
foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA and
Don't
Ask Don't Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was following a
deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals through long-term
game plans. After all, he's only five months into his term and must first
juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care and Iran. Some speculated
that the president is fearful of crossing preachers, especially black
preachers, who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Still others said
that the president was tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House
circle lacks any known gay people.
But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White
House alumni with painful memories, doesn't want to risk gay issues upending
his presidency, as they did his predecessor's in 1993. After having promised
to lift the ban on gays in the military, Clinton beat a hasty retreat into
Don't Ask once Congress and the Pentagon rebelled. This early pratfall
became a lasting symbol of his chaotic management style - and a precursor to
another fiasco, Hillarycare, that Obama is also working hard not to emulate.
But 2009 is not then, and if the current administration really is worried
that it could repeat Clinton's history on Don't Ask, that's ludicrous.
Clinton failed less because of the policy's substance than his fumbling of
the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 percent) supported
an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton blundered into the issue
with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the Joint
Chiefs and Congress. That's never been Obama's way.
The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75
percent of Americans support an end to Don't Ask, and gay issues are no
longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving
faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex
marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of
Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from
the right-wing "family values" trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter.
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. "There's a perception in
Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people
and that gay people will be satisfied with that," said Dustin Lance Black,
the screenwriter who won an Oscar for "Milk," last year's movie about Harvey
Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such
"crumbs," Black added, cannot substitute for "full and equal rights in all
matters of civil law in all 50 states."
As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president
abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing
of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of
federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the
most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is
forbidden by DOMA.
One gay leader invited to the Oval Office that day was Jennifer Chrisler of
the Family Equality Council, an advocacy organization for gay families based
in Massachusetts. She showed a photo of her 7-year-old twin sons, Tom and
Tim, to Obama. The president cooed. "I told him they're following in Sasha's
footsteps, entering the second grade," she recounted to me last week. "It
was a very human exchange between two parents."
Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president on behalf of her boys.
"The worst thing you can experience as parents is to feel your children are
discriminated against," she told him. "Imagine if you have to explain every
day who your parents are and that they're as real as every family is."
Chrisler said that she and her children "want a president who will make that
go away," adding, "I believe in his heart he wants that to happen, his
political mistakes notwithstanding."
No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama's inaction on gay civil
rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The
Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president
than any of his own words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given
major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. "People are
waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights," she said, "and
the time is now."
Action would be even better. It's a press cliché that "gay supporters" are
disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren't just
another political special interest group. They are Americans who are
actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to
properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what
happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even
a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen
in the least likely of places.
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