Public i Contact

Bruce Nestor of the National Lawyers Guild
Called For a Probe Into Police Conduct.
Bruce Nestor: “What happened in St. Paul, Minnesota
from—really going back to the infiltration and surveillance
two years, but from September 1 to September 4,
2008—had happened in any other country, that’s the type
of coverage and description of it we would have read. And
I think that you can either be for or against that political
repression, depending where you fall on the political spectrum,
but that is an objective description of what happened
and of the political content of why people were in
the streets, why people were demonstrating, and the political
nature of the response that was organized by the $50
million gift by the federal government. It was a targeted
abuse of force and of security forces to suppress political
activity, to scare people from coming out into the streets.”
More than 800 people were arrested during the fourday
convention.
Fascistic New Normal in St. Paul
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/fascistic-new-normal-st-paul
August 29, St. Paul, Minnesota. Police in full riot gear raided
the “RNC Welcoming Committee” (which described
itself as “an anarchist/anti-authoritarian organizing body
preparing for the 2008 Republican National Convention”)
This raid, referred to in the media as a “pre-emptive strike,”
marked the beginning of a weekend of terror and intimidation
brought down by the state on activists, organizers,
protestors, and journalists throughout the four-day span of
the Republican National Convention.
Leading up to the anti-war protests planned during the
convention, police raided several houses in the St. Paul-
Minneapolis area, surrounding them, and breaking down
doors. The police told people to get down on the ground
and shoved guns in their faces in the middle of the night
while they were sleeping in their beds. Over the course of
the weekend, five people were arrested in these raids, at
least 100 were put in handcuffs and then questioned by
police. At the Welcoming Committee’s convergence center,
the police photographed people and held them for over an
hour—no arrests were made, but materials were confiscated
and the police issued a fire code violation.
Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, Minneapolis and
St. Paul police, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and
other agencies were involved. Police confiscated normal
household items claiming they were going to be used for illegal
activities. They searched through the houses and the welcoming
center, taking computers, laptops and video cameras.
BREAKING: RNC 8 Charged With “Conspiracy to
Riot In Furtherance of Terrorism”
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/breaking-rnc-8-chargedconspiracy-
riot-furtherance-terrorism
In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges
under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot
Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8
alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with
Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. Monica
Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland,
Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald,
and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under
the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50%
increase in the maximum penalty. […]
Cops In Violation of Ordinance Requiring Display
of Their ID Numbers
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/cops-violation-ordinancerequiring-
display-their-id-numbers
The cops are in violation of an ordinance requiring the display
of each individuals ID numbers prominently on their riot gear
for tonight’s protest on John Ireland bridge, according to a Minneapolis
City Council staffer who is observing the protests.
Many videographers, photographers and other
observers have documented this violation and their work
will serve as grounds for legal action against the police in
the near future. […]
Sheriff Admits That Intent Was To Inconvenience
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/sheriff-admits-intentwas-
inconvenience
Outisde the jail in St. Paul on the evening of September
3rd, this Ramsey County Sheriff in his statement was
asked why the prisoners were being released in undisclosed
locations instead of right there at the jail where
there was support and would not answer. When asked if it
was to inconvenience folks he said “yeah, there you are.
Ok?” Watch the video:
www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/04/18532904.php
RNC Denies Iraq War Veterans
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/rnc-denies-iraq-war-veterans
In the early hours of Monday September 1st a formation of
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) marched to the gates
of the Republican National Convention. Wesley Davey, a
retired St. Paul police officer and Iraq veteran, led the group.
With a permit to march from the Capital building to the
RNC location at the Xcel center, the group took the streets
at 8:30 local time, arriving at their destination at approximately
9:30. Upon their arrival, Mr. Davey was escorted
through the police lines carrying a tri-fold American flag, a
document addressing the needs of returning service members,
and a copy of the U.S. Constitution to be delivered to
a representative of the McCain campaign. […]
FBI Intel Bulletin #89—Roadmap to Repressing
Dissent (2003 edition)
twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/fbi-intel-bulletin-89-
roadmap-repressing-dissent-2003-edition
This document is five years old, but it does provide the
roadmap for the criminalization of dissent—in particular
the part about how demonstrators may use the Internet to
expose police brutality is quite interesting. (additionally
the concept of ‘law enforcement circles’ as a restricted
clique of privileged intelligence is also interesting.)
Please post all further evidence and documents to TC
Indymedia which might be relevant to building a further
understanding of how the police policy was carried out,
and what the federal role in all this was.
To see the full FBI document go to: www.ratical.org/
ratville/CAH/linkscopy/FBIbulletin89.pdf

Convergence Center Being Raided by Denver Police
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1042
*Happening right now*
The Convergence Center for activist coordination and
planning, etc. is about to be raided by the Denver Police
Department. Two people have been arrested, another is
being detained, reports from the inside say that the police
are attempting to get a warrant to raid the entire location
and carry out more arrests.
Show your support: 4301 Brighton Blvd. Denver. It’s at
38th & Brighton.
Police Fail to Obtain Warrant for Convergence
Center Search
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1054
Channel 9 News has quoted an activist who states that
police tried, and failed, to obtain a warrant to search the
Convergence Center.
[excerpt] “Matt Kellegrew, an activist who says he
watched police arrive at the building, says officers tried to
get a warrant, citing wooden poles and bricks found outside
as weapons. Kellegrew says officers grew angry when
a phone call seeking that warrant was fruitless.”
Police Block Veterans’ Access to DNC in Largest
Protest to Date
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1073
DENVER, Colo.—A little more than an hour before Sen.
Barack Obama made a surprise appearance at Pepsi Center
to conclude the evening at the Democratic National Convention,
his campaign had an exchange with Iraq Veterans
Against the War (IVAW).
Approximately 100 IVAW members were determined
to push Obama on his stance on troop withdrawal. Leading
a grueling three-hour-plus long march of an estimated
7,000 demonstrators towards the Pepsi Center late in the
afternoon, IVAW hoped to deliver a folded flag and a letter
calling on Obama to endorse the three main goals of unity:
immediate withdrawal of American troops, full veterans
benefits, and reparations for the Iraqi people.
The march was met with a line of more than 100 Denver
Police Department officers clad in riot gear and armed with
batons and pepper ball guns at the intersection of Market
and 17th Streets. The police refused to let IVAW or the thousands
of antiwar demonstrators closer to the convention.
After long moments of contention between the demonstration
and the police, finally one IVAW representative, former
U.S. Marine Liam Madden, was allowed to cross police lines
to meet with representatives of the Obama campaign.
As Madden left on his mission, it seemed as if more
than 50 IVAW members were prepared to engage in nonviolent
civil disobedience and likely arrest. Less than 10
minutes later, at approximately 7:40pm (CT), an
announcement was made by IVAW to the crowd, indicating
that Obama had endorsed their three points of unity,
causing the crowd to uproar in applause. […]
Breif Report Back of 8/25 Anti-Capitalista March
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1052
The anti-capitalista march gathered Monday evening
around 1800 at civic center park, and by 1830 they were
organized and marched out of civic center Park onto
Banock street. There they advanced a half block before
encountering a line of riot police. The strom troopers were
well armed, with CO spray tanks (it looks like a red fire
extinguisher), four foot clubs, bean bag guns (which looked
like gernade launchers), tear gas, pepper ballguns (remember
that girl that was murdered by the police at the 2004
Red Sox victory? That same type of gun), and full riot gear.
With the bloc advancing, the first two rows linked arms
and shouted “who’s streets!” “Our streets!” and “No justice!
No Peace!”. There was good morale and momentum,
which broke when the bloc got within five feet of the
police. The storm troopers then sprayed clouds of CO
spray into the anti-capitialists who had no weapons or
armor of any sort. The police also attacked reporters on
the scene, targeting their cameras and bulbs.
The protestors recoiled, causing an accordian effect
where the bloc was pushed foward into the attacking
police, before breaking into a falling back towards the middle
of the park. there were a few who were running, but a
few well minded affinity groups rallied the bloc with shouts
of “Walk! Don’t run!” and “Slow down! Face them!”. The
bloc regrouped quickly, but not very organized. There was
a discussion of forming a wedge, which gave way quickly
to the typical arm linked formation in rows. […]
Post Columnist Notes Accusation Against
Protesters Unfounded
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1154
The innuendo and slander against protesters have been piled
deep as the trash left by the Dems at Invesco. To date, few of
the lies have been publicly challenged. There are a few exceptions,
however; Denver Post Columnist Susan Greene has
attempted to set the record straight concerning one false
accusation. She also comments about the police state impression
left on a youngster visiting Denver during the DNC.
[excerpt]13[Denver Police spokesman Sonny] Jackson
—the man paid to provide accurate information—told me
Tuesday that officers were getting ‘spit on’ by protesters.
Three days later he acknowledged he ‘couldn’t verify’ any
spit ‘for certain.’
“‘It may have been just a rumor,’ he admits.”
National Lawyers Guild, DNC People’s Law
Project Criticizes DNC Court Procedures
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1093
Denver—The National Lawyers Guild DNC People’s Law
Project (PLP) criticizes the procedures that created a high
risk of accused persons waiving their rights without access
to lawyers or an adequate understanding of their cases.
ABC News Staffer Pushed Into Traffic,
Jailed By Police
colorado.indymedia.org/node/1091
[excerpt] DENVER (AP)—An ABC News producer covering
the Democratic convention was pushed into traffic by a
sheriff’s deputy on Wednesday and then arrested, the network
said.
Asa Eslocker was arrested on charges of interference,
trespass and failure to obey a lawful order.
Authorities said Eslocker repeatedly had been told to
stop blocking a sidewalk and an entrance to Denver’s
Brown Palace Hotel. He wasn’t arrested until three hours
after the first warning, police said.
ABC said Eslocker and a film crew were trying to photograph
senators and donors for a story on the role of corporate
lobbyists and wealthy donors at the convention.
The network said video of the incident shows a deputy
telling Eslocker that the sidewalk is owned by the hotel,
then pushing him into traffic.
”We expect to see that kind of thing in Myanmar, not
on the streets of Denver,” ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider
said in a written statement.

FOR THE LAST DECADE, we have been witnessing
a promise of resurgence in political
activity, from small youth walk-outs
to protests against the global giants—the
World Trade Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. Renewed anti-war and
peace efforts and massive immigration
demonstrations have sent thousands to the streets to
protest infringement of their rights.
But the street demonstrations at the Republic National
Convention showed signs that a new wave of protest and
civil disobedience has finally taken root in the U.S. The
arrests of over 800 people, including dozens of independent
journalists, illustrate the extent activists are now willing
to take to struggle for change. Yet, none of this should
be seen as an aberration. Instead, it bears witness to the
unwillingness of people across the country to support
business as usual, given the state of democratic disability
we currently face.
In the U.S. today, the negative consequences of neoliberal
economic policies are devastating. The concentration
of wealth and power is staggering. The Bush administration
has spent over $650 billion on the war in Iraq, without
an end in sight. We face unparalleled pollution of our
waters and fields. There is unprecedented surveillance of
the population and an alarming consolidation of the mainstream
media. The U.S. incarceration rate is the highest of
any industrialized nation. Poor racialized populations
across the country are experiencing the resegregation of
their communities. Federal economic safety nets for the
poor are all but extinguished. Forty-five million are without
health insurance. The disappearance of jobs in the last
decade has left millions unemployed, with current unemployment
rates hitting recession. Meanwhile, corporate
welfare is on the increase, with an unbelievable $700 billion
federal proposal to bailout the wealthiest financial
institutions in the nation.
These issues signal the need for fundamental political
change. But change in today’s world seems especially
difficult given the manner in which corporations, as well
as both public and private institutions, remain
entrenched in political processes of narcissistic proportions
that obstructs democratic life. It is this pathology
of power that, with its elitism, arrogance, and privilege,
justifies and rationalizes foreign and domestic policies of
domination and exploitation in the name of democracy
and national security. And as such, it arbitrates aggression
as a worthy and legitimate strategy in the preservation
of the status quo. The result is the perpetuation of
conditions that reproduce human suffering and wholesale
disregard of those who pay the greatest price for the
excesses of capital.
POLITICAL ORGANIZING IN THE 60’S
One of the most important lessons of the 60’s comes from
the overwhelming political activity that was generated
across class, race, and gender lines. The 1968 Democratic
National Convention erupted in violence when activists
protesting the Vietnam War were brutally attacked by
Chicago police. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People’s
Campaign March on Washington. Cesar Chavez and
the farm workers union led protests against the exploitation
of the growers. The Black Power demonstration of
African American athletes who raised their black-gloved
fists as a symbol of “Black Power” at the Olympics was
televised around the world.
That same year, Chicano students and activists, shouting
Chicano Power! protested educational inequalities in
East Los Angeles. The American Indian Movement was
founded in protest of federal treaty violations. The Young
Lords took over buildings in Chicago and installed food
programs and other services. The Third Liberation Front, a
coalition of Asian American, Latino, Black, and Native
Americans, mounted the longest university strike in U.S
history. Women activists protested the Miss America
pageant, tossing bras, girdles, nylons and other articles of
constricting clothing in a trash can.
What loosely united the protests of these very distinct
communities was their explicit call for a change in the way
power and wealth were distributed and a call for self-determination.
It constituted an unprecedented coming together
of people from across the country. But not all supported
these efforts. For the Establishment, the civic involvement
and dissent of millions was viewed as dangerous—and a
phenomenon to be stopped by any means necessary.
It is not surprising, then, that when King was assassinated
in April—a few days prior to the Poor People’s
national march on Washington—civil rights activists saw
this as a ploy to quell dissent. Two months later, when
Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy
(thought by many to be committed to the poor) was assassinated,
it was felt as a blow to those who still embraced
electoral hope for change. And in August of the next year,
the murder of journalist Ruben Salazar was seen as a plot
to extinguish an important voice for the Chicano Movement.
Nevertheless, these efforts persisted, as movement
organizations continued to demand change.
DRAWING ON A FORGOTTEN LEGACY
Today, we live with many of the forgotten legacies of the 60s.
With a close eye on the era’s unprecedented civil unrest, we
can’t help but to wonder about the manner in which FBI surveillance
and counterintelligence worked to stifle democratic
participation and wither the trust of people in one another.
Similarly, we are left to contend with the long-term effects of
social and economic injustices upon poor communities of
color and other working class people. The distortions created
by these conditions have left many unsure of our capacity
as a people to, once again, speak truth to power.
The current political chaos also makes it evident that a
government wishing to transcend its historical crimes
against humanity must stop its denial. Official government
denial of wrongs has played a key role in preserving
inequalities of all stripes. What also cannot be overlooked
here is that it is always in the interest of the powerful to
conceal the ruthless machinations of power that produce
its advantage. By the same token, it is in the interest of the
oppressed to expose the inequalities of power and social
injustices that impact their lives and communities.
Hence, to counter the daily acts of disrespect and humiliation
engendered by racism, power, and privilege requires
that the powerful suspend their denial. If we as a nation are
to undergo a process of political reconciliation, the illegitimacy
of governmental and corporate excesses must be confronted.
Such a process is especially necessary to a society
built on the genocide, slavery, and exploitation of
oppressed populations. Breaking out of the fog of historical
denial is the only path to creating honest and sincere political
communion. Anything short of this simply functions to
preserve the pain and grief of historical injustice.
MAKING POWER
For those who organize and struggle tirelessly to confront
the denial of the powerful, the power we must seek cannot
be given to us, but rather it is power that we must make
together through our labor. The legacy of activism in the 60s
confirms that we can only make political power through our
collective development and participation in organizations,
within and across the communities we wish to transform. In
concert, our work for social justice requires that we return
to the collective labor and serious solidarity of past social
movements. To move toward a change that redistributes
wealth in society also requires that we refuse to adhere to
power that speaks apologetically in public, while privately
preserves the oppressive structures of privilege and hierarchy
that reinscribe human suffering.
If we are determined to build a democratic society for a
new era, we do well to learn from the past and to harness
the passion of our histories of struggle. As such, we must
choose to govern through an ethics of human dignity and
a firm commitment to challenge the dominion of any
group over another. By so doing, we come to embrace all
life as, indeed, precious and worthy of love and respect.
EPILOGUE
My evolving political understanding of the events of 1960s
began as youth, contending with the civil rights movement,
the assassination of John Kennedy, the burning of Watts, and
the death of Malcolm X. When I started community college,
I began to connect my own personal history with the conditions
that produced the events of 1968—the entrenched and
unrelenting economic inequalities and racism of the U.S. The
events of the 60s were my initiation into political consciousness.
As a young single mother living on welfare in the 70’s,
the events of the 60s served as a catalyst and foundation for
the development of my politics, my art, and scholarship.
Their underlying message of self-determination and collective
action has remained central to my conception of political
work, my scholarship, and my solidarity.

In a small claims case local black activist Patrick
Thompson filed pro se against his former attorney, Harvey
Welch, a judge decided that legal malpractice had
been committed and ruled in Thompson’s favor.
Thompson says he is donating the $3,000 in attorney
fees that Welch must pay back, to Champaign Urbana
Citizens for Peace and Justices who helped raise funds
for his legal defense.
In a 2006 trial, the second of three trials, Welch had
called only one witness and Thompson was found guilty
on charges of home invasion and sexual abuse. The conviction
was overturned due to “ineffective assistance of
counsel” and in a trial that took place in May 2008,
Thompson was found not guilty of the charges.
As the judge in the small claims suit said, this case
was “a rather unusual situation.”

IN NEGOTIATIONS THIS SUMMER, Patrick
Thompson and Martel Miller arrived at a
settlement in a civil suit against local
authorities claiming their civil rights had
been violated when eavesdropping
charges were leveled against them in
2004 for videotaping the police.
In June 2005, Thompson and Miller filed a federal lawsuit
in the U.S. District Court against Champaign, Urbana,
and Champaign County. The complaint contained three
major components: 1) Patrick Thompson had been racially
profiled by Champaign police in three traffic stops in
late 2003. 2) Martel Miller had his Fourth Amendment
rights violated when Champaign police illegally seized his
videotape and equipment. 3) Assistant State’s Attorney
Elizabeth Dobson had maliciously prosecuted Miller and
Thompson on charges of felony eavesdropping.
Those named in the original suit included Champaign
City Manager Steve Carter, Champaign Police Chief R.T.
Finney, Deputy Chiefs John Murphy and Troy Daniels, Sgt.
David Griffet, Officer Justus Clinton, State’s Attorney John
Piland, and Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Dobson.
In a series of events that led up to the eavesdropping
charges, there were several questionable traffic stops.
Thompson was stopped by Champaign Police in October
2003 for an alleged seat belt violation. In December 2003,
Thompson was sitting in his car in a parking lot waiting to
merge into traffic when Champaign Sgt. David Griffet
approached him and asked what was in the cup he was
drinking from, apparently suspecting it was alcohol. Thompson
answered that he was drinking tea. Although he was
allowed to go, Thompson says he was followed by several
police cars and later stopped by one of them. He was given a
warning ticket for having a license plate light out, an illegitimate
claim according to Thompson. He entered a formal
complaint for what he said was a case of racial profiling.
In January 9, 2004, a meeting took place between City
Manager Steve Carter, several members of the Champaign
police command staff, Patrick Thompson, and John Lee
Johnson, then still alive. Despite Johnson’s support of
Thompson, the complaint was dismissed. In a letter dated
February 5, 2004, Steve Carter wrote:
”After reviewing the information from our meeting and the
police reports, and after conferring with the City Attorney with
regard to the legal arguments made by Mr. Johnson, it is my
decision to uphold the decisions of the Chief. As to whether the
stops were racially motivated, I do not feel that there were facts
presented to support this allegation […] Finally, neither the fact
that you were not ticketed for the alleged seat belt violation nor
that you were issued a warning ticket for the equipment violation
seems to indicate racial bias.”
Exhausting the complaint process, Thompson took
direction action, teaming up with long-time friend Martel
Miller to videotape police encounters with African Americans.
After notifying authorities of their intentions in a letter
dated March 26, 2004, Thompson and Miller hit the streets
collecting video footage. As early as June 2004, Champaign
police moved to shut them down. Indeed, Thompson captured
video images of Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth
Dobson watching him with her own video camera.
On August 7, 2004, Champaign police seized Martel
Miller’s camera and tape without arresting him and without
a warrant. On August 10, the State’s Attorney filed
charges against Miller, but Judge Heidi Ladd refused to
agree to a warrant and instead issued a summons for him
to appear in court. On August 23, Miller was formally
indicted on two counts of felony eavesdropping, an dated
law that was never enforced—that is, not until two black
activists started videotaping police. The following day,
August 24, Thompson was arrested on charges of home
invasion and sexual abuse, and held on an exorbitant
$250,000 bond. On September 2, 2004, Thompson was
charged for the first time with eavesdropping and Miller
was hit with a third charge.
State’s Attorney John Piland told the News-Gazette
(Oct. 17, 2004) that the eavesdropping charges were filed
at the request of the Champaign Police Department’s command
staff. The police, he said, wanted the charges kept
against Thompson and Miller to bring them to the table
for a conversation.
City Manager Steve Carter refuted Piland, saying “R.T.
was consistent from early on that we were interested in
having the charges dropped.” Chief Finney stuck to this
script, telling me in 2007 that he knew nothing about plot
to charge Thompson and Miller, and that if he had known
he would have put a stop to it.
An affidavit from Elizabeth Dobson refutes Finney’s
claim. According to Dobson, on August 9, 2004, she met
with command staff at the Champaign Police Station to
discuss charges against Thompson and Miller. Dobson
states that Chief Finney’s concern was that Champaign
“not be the first or only police agency alleged as the victim
of the Eavesdropping offense.” Chief Finney, Dobson
claims, wanted the University of Illinois Police Department
to go along with the charges. After UIPD refused to
participate, the prosecution still went forward.
In the following weeks there were several public
screenings of Citizen’s Watch, the video produced from
Thompson and Miller’s footage, and editorials in the
News-Gazette criticizing Piland’s handling of the case. The
phony eavesdropping charges turned out to be a great
embarrassment for local authorities. Piland eventually
dropped the charges against Miller, and after a new State’s
Attorney was elected in November 2004, eavesdropping
charges against Thompson were also dismissed.
The federal suit filed by Thompson and Miller managed
to withstand challenges by an army of city, county, and private
attorneys. Yet despite the egregiousness of their
actions, legal immunity still protected many of the public
officials. The suit originally asked for more than a million
dollars in compensation, but in the end the settlement was
far below that figure. Although there was not a confidentiality
agreement, Thompson and Miller asked that the
dollar amount not be made public.
A settlement in this case indicates that local authorities
were unwilling to take the stand to defend their actions in
2004. The full extent of their conspiracy to send Patrick
Thompson and Martel Miller to prison will remain unknown.

It was a beautiful day for the fifth annual Unity March
on Saturday, October 4, 2008, an event organized by
Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice. This
year’s march was dedicated to passage of the coming
Township referendum on the ballot this election day, a
measure that would raise funds to help the poorest of
the poor in Champaign. A diverse crowd of approximately
150 people marched to stamp out poverty.
The march kicked off at the Township office in
Champaign. T-shirts were passed out that read on the
back, “Freedom From Extreme Poverty is a Human
Right.” They were made to promote The Faces of Poverty,
a documentary video made about the Champaign
Township showing on television this month.
Several members of the Champaign Township
Board were present, including Mayor Jerry
Schweighart, Michael La Due, Karen Foster, Tom
Bruno, and Gina Jackson.
A long procession of marchers walked up Randolph,
went through downtown Champaign, and met for a
rally in Douglass Park. As the crowd assembled on a hill
in the park, they chanted, “Whose park? The people’s
park.” En route, marchers passed by the Catholic Worker’s
House and the Times Center, two other places where
the poor receive assistance but which remain largely
hidden in our community.
Aaron Ammons led the crowd in chants such as,
“We’ve got money for war, but can’t feed the poor” and
“Get up! Get down! Anti-racists in this town.”
After the march, free food was provided in the park
annex. A check-in list at the front door was signed by
130 people who stayed around to eat pizza, fried fish,
and cupcakes.
Thanks to all the sponsors of Unity March V:
AWARE, Radio Liberacion!, Prarie Green Party, Central
Illinois Jobs With Justice, School for Designing a Society,
Urbana-Champaign Friends Meeting, Central Illinois
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Channing-
Murray Foundation, University Coalition of Trades and
Labor Unions. Additional thanks goes to the iHelp student
volunteers from the University of Illinois.
The Face of Poverty will be aired by City Government
Television. CGTV is carried on Insight Communications’
cable channel 5.

A SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL COMPUTING (SAIC)
corporate spokesperson said in the journal, Business 2.0,
“We are a stealth company. We’re everywhere, but almost
never seen.” Indeed, they were there when pardoned felon
Admiral Poindexter began the Total Information Awareness
(TIA) project and SAIC received some of those early development
contracts. TIA has been nominally ended but the
data mining techniques, fundamental to NSA and other
government surveillance largely contracted to SAIC, go on
full speed ahead. Retroactive immunity for the “telecoms”
just passed by Congress is extremely important for SAIC
and its kindred corporations who deal with the flood of
data from the illegal links to the many networks involved.
Tim Shorrock’s recent book, Spies for Hire: The Secret
World of Intelligence Outsourcing, points out that SAIC is
almost fully a creature of the government: 90% of its revenue
comes from federal contracts. Further, he asserts “the
agency (NSA) is the company’s largest single customer and
SAIC is NSA’s single contractor.” Shorrock closely examines
SAIC and a variety of entities that compete and cooperate
on activities once solely governmental functions. He
estimates that 70% of the current intelligence budget goes
to contractors and argues persuasively that, even more
than ordinary corporate influence over government, intelligence
functions in the private sector to undermine democratic
control of foreign policy, covert and overt.
One of the places where SAIC isn’t seen, of course, is at
Congressional hearings. Yet, SAIC’s board has always had
many CIA/NSA/DIA alumni, among its past directors: ex-
US Secretaries of Defense William Perry and Melvin Laird;
ex-directors of the CIA John Deutsch, Robert Gates; Admiral
Bobby Ray Inman (ex-director of the National Security
Agency); other retired military staff including Wayne
Downing (former commander in chief of US Special
Forces) and Jasper Welch (ex-coordinator of the National
Security Council). Duane Andrews, longtime SAIC executive,
till he joined QnetiQ, (UK’s privatized DARPA equivalent,
think James Bond’s Q) was then Sec’y of Defense
Cheney’s director for strategic defense policy. Andrews
remains close to Vice President Dick Cheney, his former
boss at the Pentagon. In a 2002 interview with Government
Computer News, he listed Cheney as his hero.
SAIC was an early arrival to Iraq, joining the corporate
bonanza. The corporation received multiple contracts,
including one for $15 million to work on an independent
media network. After six months, $82 million was spent,
with nothing to show for the loot. Donald L. Barlett and
James B. Steele, veteran investigative journalists, point out
in their Vanity Fair (March 2007) expose on SAIC, “Washington’s
$8 Billion Shadow,” the high irony of handing over
this task to a corporation hired the previous year by Rumsfeld’s
Office of Strategic Influence to be “involved in a Pentagon
program designed to feed disinformation to the foreign
press”. In concert, SAIC received a five-year “information”
contract for $300 million in 2005 from Special Operations
Command “ to promote its message overseas.” It is
interesting to note that the forged letter purportedly from
Habbush to Hussein confirming al-Qaeda-Iraq connections,
which Ron Suskind discusses in his new book, The
Way of the World, would have been fabricated right around
the same time period.
SAIC has some disastrous failures in what one might
think should be their forte: systems integration of computer
systems. Operation Trailblazer designed to provide integrated
access to info and more, apparently for the whole Intelligence
Community (IC), was scrapped after more than $240
million was spent over two years. They were, nevertheless,
awarded a contract for the follow-up system, called ExecuteLocus,
for more than a third of a billion dollars.
On a smaller scale, a contract for the FBI ‘s software Virtual
Case File was ended after five years, with no effective
product. The network technical aspects were contracted to
DynCorp in 2005. It’s perhaps the case that the bureau is
still using widely INSLAW Corp’s program called PROMIS,
said to have been illegally appropriated by Reagan’s Justice
Dept. Another peculiar snafu for SAIC was their loss of
more than $120 million dollars for not being able to fulfill
their contract for a security system at the Athens
Olympics. One can help but wonder about the real reason
for the abrogation of the contract.
Despite their well-connected BOD and various federal
“rainmakers,” SAIC drops a lot of lobbying largesse around
DC. In the second quarter of this year, they spent over
$800,000 on this activity. Some of this expense could have
been related to the “telecom” immunity part of the FISA
“reform.” Several years ago a tax deductible outlay was to
spend $30,000 to sponsor a golf tourney at one of the several
trade associations SAIC is party to. (It’s not certain
wether Tom Delay got an invite or not.)
Pernicious to democracy, incompetent in some ways,
one can apparently add corruption to the list of SAIC
flaws. In the last few months SAIC has been in the business
news headlines. FEMA has had to suspend their procurement
for Project TopOff, a national disaster drill study,
because of allegations of improprieties in the contracting
process. In a False Claims Act trial, SAIC was found guilty
of 77 false statements and conflicts of interest regarding
their more than ten year old contract with the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The corporation was fined $6
million. As last year SAIC posted a return on revenue of
11.9 percent on at least $8 billion, the fine (less than 1/2%
of net profits) can be hardly a slap on the wrist.
In the ten percent of activities that are not governmental,
SAIC has decided to compete with oil industry heavy
weights Haliburton and Bechtel, in the realm of oil production,
pipeline and refinery control mechanisms. If you
read the American business press, you might find that
SAIC is the aggrieved party vis-a-vis PdVSA, Venezuela’s
Oil Company, in having some of its systems nationalized.
In the Latin American press, there were allegations that
SAIC participated in the managerial strike against PdVSA
(rank and file workers were locked out), designed to
destabilize the populist anti-corporate government. This
was the year prior to the coup against Chavez, applauded
by the Bush gang and the New York Times before it failed.
The story, in English, of the accusation of internet industrial
sabotage can be found by searching for Hector Mondragon,
Colombian activist and his translator Justin Pordur.
Given its covertness, it is extremely difficult to establish
the nature and full extent of this gambit.
So what is this fiscally and politically corrupt corporation
doing on south First St. at the UI’s Research Park? In
just what way is this enterprise related to the mission of a
land grant public university? We know that SAIC has
recently signed an agreement with Adaptix to work on
Deep Green, a project to assemble a state-of-the-art battlefield
control system. Is Deep Green intended to run on
BlueWater, IBM’s new water-cooled supercomputer that’s
being built on UI campus? Are there “experiments” in local
corporate offices that involve remote control of Predator
drones firing Hellfire missiles?
The several individuals I have spoken with who have
worked at the local SAIC unit have been bound from
speaking of their work by confidentiality agreements, as are
a large percent of SAIC employees. There has been a long
standing rumor that Operation Stockpile, computer simulation
of nuclear explosions, might be one of the projects
that SAIC is conducting on this campus. These virtual
nuclear tests undermine the spirit of the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), as the Bush gang skirts the letter of
the treaty. Of real concern here is the manner in which
SAIC activities could be pernicious to our safety and that of
millions of lives, as well as a threat to the spirit of democracy
and academic integrity within this community.

THIS YEAR’S 4TH OF JULY PARADE was not what I expected. I
remember that in the past the parade was for kids. It was
mostly about marching bands, community groups, guys
in the little cars throwing out candy and stuff like that.
This year’s parade seemed more like a recruitment tool for
the military. There were at least 200 or 300 soldiers
marching in uniform. Most of the floats were promoting
war in some way, and the crowd helped make the parade
even more militaristic by standing and cheering each time
a soldier came by.
My dad and I were the only people on the Michigan to
Pennsylvania block that stood up when the Iraq Veterans
Against the War came by, and a lot of people gave us mean
looks when we did. At least there was an anti-war float,
even if it was the only one. However, t there were at least
20 pro-war floats. Many of the kids were age 6 or younger,
and at that age they are very impressionable. So, the message
the parade was giving them is that ‘war was good.’ In
12 years these kids will be old enough to make decisions,
and if they are surrounded by the message that ‘war is
good’ then they will promote war too, when they are older.
Many of the floats were really ridiculous, and scary.
There was an anti-abortion float. It compared how many
American babies weren’t born because of abortions to the
casualties of every war from World War II to the current
Gulf War. They left out the Central American wars of the
80s, and they also left out how many foreign people died
in each war. For example, in the Vietnam War, they said
that around 80,000 people died. In reality, more than a
million people died, if you include the Vietnamese.
When the “Guns Save Lives” float came by with the
Statue of Liberty holding an illegal assault rifle, I was really
mad. The Statue of Liberty is a welcoming symbol of
freedom, and normally people don’t welcome each other
with a deadly weapon. In front of it was a mounted
machine gun on an army Jeep™ that they shot blanks off
of over and over again.
This year’s parade was mostly celebrating the military,
war, guns, and nationalism. It seemed to me like
the military was showing off its stupid gun collection,
and trying to impress and brainwash young children
like Adolph Hitler did. I’m not saying the army is using
Hitler’s plan, but it had that same feeling. They also
shot off every other gun like crazy. Overall, it seems like
the army went to an all time low by showing off their
guns to little kids, and basically trying to start recruiting
them now, to get them to join up when they turn
18. This “parade” wasn’t like a celebration, it was more
like propaganda.

IT IS OFTEN SAID that Urbana Middle School,
as well as Urbana High School, are both
quite similar to what some people would
call “prison,” because of the tight security
measures enforced upon the students. For
example, facilitators walk through the halls
with large walkie-talkies, various “security
stations” are placed in each hallway to
check roaming students for passes, and in
the middle school, a new addition has
been added this year: surveillance cameras.
Students are taking opposing views on the
matter. “I believe security cameras are
essential in schools, and, possibly, we don’t
have them in enough locations,” says Rita
Haber, a sophomore at Urbana High
School. “For example, I’ve noticed that the
second floor hallway at Urbana High
School is the hallway with the most fighting
and bullying, as well as where the
highest level of public display of affection
(PDA) occurs. It doesn’t have security cameras
or hall monitors so much of this goes
by unnoticed.” Another student, Katie
Heinricher, says, “I don’t think that cameras
in school do that much. No one who
really wants to skip school is going to stop
and look for a camera before leaving. Also,
when fights break out, no one is watching
for a camera. It is usually pretty obvious
how fights start and camera footage seems
unnecessary. With other things such as
PDA, what’s the point? The staff isn’t going
to go up to a girl and say, ‘We saw you kissing
in the hallway on our security camera.’
Cameras are good in theory, but in reality,
they don’t help that much.” We must ask
ourselves: Do these cameras actually influence
a student’s decision, or are they simply
a waste of money for the school?

HIGH-SCHOOLS OFTEN ARE TEEMING with
young people who, when done with
high-school, want to “achieve something
big in their lives.” To many, that means
joining the armed services. But when
should the line be drawn for recruiters who enter our public
educational facilities? Reports of recruiters targeting
people as young as 14 and 15 years-old at Urbana High
School have raised speculation if the military is targeting
younger people because they are facing record lows in
signups. Military recruiters being given blatant and unrestricted
access to students, without notification to parents
and without counter-recruitment material available to students,
has become the norm at UHS. In the guidance office
at UHS, booklets proclaiming the benefits of joining the
armed services are seen throughout the office, yet the
guidance office still lacks basic counter-recruitment literature,
something that should be necessary to create a balanced
opinion at the school.
One must ask the question if Urbana High School is
deliberately ignoring counter recruitment material offered
by anti-war groups, such as the Anti-War Anti-Racism
Effort (AWARE), or is the administration simply lacking
the basic principle of giving students the adequate
resources to make their own decisions? This past school
year, students eating in the lunchrooms at UHS were
exposed to recruiters giving out free prizes and other
incentives to interest freshman and sophomores. Glynn
Davis remembers last year when they were in the lunchroom:
“The way the men went about engaging the students
was to host push-up contests. The winner receiving
a prize of cups and gift cards.”
When I was a freshman myself, the recruiters had tried
the controversial tactics on my friends and myself. After
seeing this, I notified local activist and former school
administrator Durl Kruse about the predicament occurrng
in the lunchroom. Kruse then talked with Dr. Laura Taylor,
principal of UHS, about the issue. Dr. Taylor told him that
she had no idea it was ever occurring and would put an
end to it. But, stories by students of aggressive recruiting
further lay out the issue of accountability. The school
board has failed to recognize the questionable misconduct
that has taken place at UHS.
It is becoming increasingly known that military
recruiters use outlandish statements to entice students into
joining. Using a free ride through college as leverage to get
young people to join, and the promise of getting a job
thereafter, are the biggest talking points used by recruiters.
But the growing homeless rate of veterans has only contradicted
that promise. The legality of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan also brings up the issue of whether recruiters
are forthcoming about the premise of going to war in the
first place. Another major issue is stop-loss, which has
recently become widely known as the “backdoor draft.”
Stop-loss allows the military to involuntary keep a soldier
in service longer than they originally signed up for. Along
with the threat of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder),
and other mental problems that have become common as
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq progress, the military
fails to let young and often innocent students know about
these significant issues. Due to the No Child Left Behind
Act, the government, and subsequently the military, are
given contact information for every student attending
public high school.
The premise of the public educational system is to provide
an unbiased haven where young people can go to
learn techers and from each other. The presence of military
recruiters only debunks that idea. As a 16-year-old, I not
only find it appalling, but saddening that the military is
resorting to targeting young minors, who, like me, often
lack the judgment and the experience to make life changing
and, to be frank, extremely dangerous decisions. Students
should be allowed to find their path on their own
terms while in school, to find where their passions lie, and
not be preyed upon by United States Military.

This summer was special because I was given the opportunity
to travel to China. I went with my martial arts school,
Huang Lin Bao Jian precious sword martial arts Academy,
to visit the famous Shaolin Temple. Demetri Daniels, the
owner and teacher of the school, takes an annual trip to
China and this year he allowed me and one other student
to go with him.
I left on June 3rd from Chicago O’Hare and flew to
Canada. We spent a couple of hours in the airport before
we boarded our plane to China. We got on the plane very
happy and charged up! Although the flight was 17 hours
long with bad food and crowded seats there were a couple
of good things about it. During the flight we pulled back
the shade once and saw the ice caps of Greenland and
another time we saw a sea of clouds that reminded me of a
giant fluffy bed. When we got off the plane in Shanghai I
was really happy to see Chinese people and the baggage
claim because I realized that we had made it. As we headed
to the Maglev train, which happens to be the fastest
train in the world (431 km per hour), Demtri and Owen
(the other student) were doing handstands on the moving
walk way. Once we were settled into our hotel we headed
to a famous restaurant called Hai Di Lao Hou Gou (pronounced
“hi di laow hwa gwa”). It was really good but
extremely spicy.
The next day we went to the Shanghai Bay. There we
were met by people trying to sell us things because they
knew we were tourists. The peddlers were extremely persistent.
They followed us and even began calling my name
after they heard one of my friends tell me to keep moving
with the group. After escaping the mob of peddlers we
went down the street and I was given the chance to try
Chinese McDonald’s, which did not taste much different
than America’s McDonald’s. In the historic part of Shanghai,
buildings looked more like the ones you would see on
TV. As we walked, we decided to enter a tea shop where we
talked to the owners Jack and Jackie, who were so nice that
they gave me 300 Chinese Yuan worth of rock tea (tea
known for its healing properties) as a gift. Soon after, we
went out for dinner at a restaurant that President Bill Clinton
and Hilary Clinton ate at.
Xi’an, the original capital of China, was our next destination.
The following day we went to the Muslim street
where we were able to shop and eat. The Muslim street
had many shops and vendors where I was able to buy hand
made scrolls for a great price. The food there was really
good and very flavorful. The people that lived in the Muslim
community had the Quran translated into Chinese for
their religious sermons. After eating and shopping it started
to rain so we headed home to sleep.
The next and last day in Xi’an, we went to see the Terra
Cotta warriors. If you do not know about the Terra Cotta
warriors, they were warriors for the Emperor. An artist
later created statues to represent the warriors and they
were put under the ground for over 2,000 years. I think
the Terra Cotta warriors were fascinating because they are
hand-made human size
statues that were made over
2,000 years ago and remain
intact after all of those
years.
When we left the Terra
Cotta warriors we went to
the station for our train to
Zhang Zhou. The train ride
was eight hours long. When
we got off, we got a ride to
Deng Feng. Deng Feng
(pronounced “dung fung”)
is the home of the Shaolin
Temple. Jet Li made a
movie entitled, Shaolin
Temple, that made it very famous. When we reached Deng
Feng we were taken to the school where we would be staying
and train. The name of the school is Song Shan Shaolin
Shi de Cheng Guan (pronounced “song sh-an shaow-lin
shi de ch-eng gwan”). It is owned by Shi De Cheng who is
a 31st generation shaolin monk. I lived and trained in
Deng Feng for a week. On the 8th day of my trip I woke
up around 7:00 am to get ready for our eight o’clock class.
Unlike my training here at home I had to run for 15 minutes
before each class. Before we went running I would
look up and stare at the mountain in front of the school
which was the Song Shan Mountains. At the school we
trained two times a day. It was difficult at the beginning,
but just as it became easier, we had to train with the skilled
Chinese students. They were really good! Right after training
we ate and then were able to visit other places in the
city. We would sometimes go see a monk, a famous place,
or go to a Shaolin martial arts store where I bought a martial
arts outfit and gifts for other people. Then we would go
back to the school for our next class and do the same thing
again.
The following day after our 8:00 o’clock class we went
to the Shaolin Temple. There we saw Ta gou’s school that
has over 10,000 students. Ta gou is a martial artist who has
2 schools: one by the Shaolin temple and one more in
Deng Feng. He is a very famous martial artist and has one
of the largest schools in the world. At the Shaolin Temple
we saw a performance by some of the monks. They did
Shaolin forms and iron body. Iron body is a combination of
techniques that makes there
muscles and bones
stronger and skin tougher,
to the point that the monks
can break bricks with one
hand or even his head
without it hurting extremely
bad.
The rest of my trip was full
of fun, fights and long
flights. My trip to China
helped me accept who I
am. I had a good time
being myself and not what
people wanted me to be.
This experience opened my
eyes to a different way of life and a different way of looking
at things. I am glad this trip helped me be a better me.
I really want to thank every one who has been in my life
that helped me get to China. Thank you to my family and
friends that also helped me make this journey. I really had
a good time and would like to study Shaolin more in
China in the near future. This trip to me is like children
who enjoy going to Six Flags and want to go back year
after year.

IMAGINE IF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS sponsored a frank
and contentious discussion about race, education, war,
and the responsibility of globally-minded activists toward
injustices in their own backyard. Imagine if among the
participants were local citizens, and not only academic
workers or students. Now imagine such an event broadcast
on national television, during prime time, for ninety
minutes. This all happened, forty years ago.
On February 18, 1968, a short-lived experimental television
program called the Public Broadcasting Laboratory
came to Urbana-Champaign. The producers chose the
South Lounge of the Illini Union to host a nationally
broadcasted discussion about “campus unrest.” The event
came on the heels of a controversial campus recruiting
tour by the Dow Corporation, producers of Napalm. At
the University of Wisconsin, protests against Dow led to
bloodshed. At Illinois, a peaceful student sit-in blocked
access for job-seeking students, sparking controversy and
eventually several disciplinary suspensions.
Perhaps it was Illinois’ comparatively peaceful record of
protest that led PBL to choose this campus as a site to
assemble a panel of experts from around the nation. Gathered
in the South Lounge that night were the presidents of
Antioch College and San Francisco State University, student
leaders from Berkeley and Tougaloo State, some Illinois
administrators, at least 70 students from campus and
a scattering of Illinois faculty.
Significantly, also in attendance was community activist
John Lee Johnson. Thanks to him, the event didn’t go quite
as planned. As a result the nation witnessed an audience
wrestle with some very tough questions. The young Johnson,
just 27 at the time, waited about ten minutes through
initial discussions about Vietnam, student activism, and
education, then shouted his first question, “What about all
the psychological napalm whites drop on blacks every day?”
The show’s transcript then reveals a lively and confusing
attempt to deal with the University’s dependence on
a race divide in order to function as a space, and as an
economy. Project 500, the school’s first attempt at integration,
wouldn’t happen for several months, yet one
was likely to only find faces of color in service positions
across the campus.
For even the most active anti-war protesters on campus,
involvement in a climate of racism, even dependence
on racism, was unavoidable — if invisible, until Johnson
turned on the light. Without Johnson’s intervention, the
evening’s conversation might have stuck to traditional
arguments about the effectiveness of certain protest tactics,
or about whether the rights of potential Dow employees
were violated by the sit-in. Such arguments quickly
resolve into clear sides for debate, positions easily identified,
credited, discredited. Universities and television networks
easily incorporate such conversations into programming.
Each side simply gets their ten minutes, and then
the topic is considered covered.
But the conversation that night in the Union reads
instead as refreshingly confused. Positions slide and
morph, people argue and miss each other, emotions ran
high. After an hour or more, even Johnson and the small
group of black students rose and left, Johnson parting with
the explanation, “We can’t make any sense of this.”
National television viewers witnessed the complexity of
a community grappling to understand its own racism, not
as a taint to be identified and removed through corrected
speech, not as a guilt to be absolved, but as an inextricable
part of everyday reality: something to be worked against
on multiple levels, alone and in groups, informally and
formally, as teachers and students and administrators.
Racism so deep that it takes time to even see, and longer
than a lifetime to change.
Rare as such an event is even off-camera, for it to happen
in front of cameras is still unheard of. Since I wasn’t even
born in 1968, let alone present for the changes taking place
in this city, I can hardly speculate as to the broad impact of
that evening’s conversation. I find it instructive, however, to
look at the subsequent paths of those in attendance.
John Lee Johnson, hopefully known already to this
paper’s readers, went on to a lifetime of service to Champaign-
Urbana. As Champaign’s first black Councilman, he
fought for better public housing and more equitable elementary
education. He worked through government,
media, churches, whatever platform he needed. Johnson
seemed to never stop working to improve the lives of people
of color in Champaign-Urbana in palpable ways. That night
in the Union probably registered barely a blip for Johnson
over a lifetime of encounters with sympathetic allies in the
University who were oblivious to their own racism.
One of the few professors in attendance that night was a
relatively new researcher: an Austrian named Heinz von
Foerster. After Johnson made his exit, von Foerster found the
microphone and analyzed the evening’s fraught conversation
in terms of his own area of expertise — cognition, consciousness,
and information. Von Foerster was a leader in the new
field of Cybernetics, a way of looking at the world in terms of
systems, information flow, and feedback loops. For von Foerster,
the failure to see or understand racism would almost certainly
be understood as a problem in information flow. Heinz
kept extensive notes on that evening’s discussion. He saved
every newspaper article on it he could find, and sent copies to
the leaders involved. He corresponded with the show’s producers,
thanking them for the event.
Later that spring, Heinz began to plan the first of many
experimental courses in “Heuristics,” or the science of
identifying and solving problems. These free form and
largely student-run classes grew to be a popular and controversial
staple of campus counterculture. As shelters for
debate and discussion of the most pressing political concerns,
von Foerster’s courses remained admittedly safe
within the walls of academic speculation. But they catalyzed
the campus through the publication of hand-made
zines and catalogs, the organization of disinformation
campaigns within official campus administrative routines,
and sponsorship of radicalized visiting speakers.
Though there’s no record of such curricular experimentation
for Heinz before that spring, we can’t say for certain that
Johnson’s intervention directly sparked such a path. But
when disparate worlds touch as they did that night on Public
Broadcasting Laboratory, opposite Bonanza on channel 15
and Smothers Brothers on channel 3, we would do well to
examine how different forms of political action reflect not
only differing ways of looking at a problem, but distinct
positions of privilege, different audiences, opportunities, and
access points. When does one act from where one IS, and
when does one strive to act from somewhere else, from
another person’s location and information? Which tasks
demand which actions from which persons within a particular
knot of institutionalized racism and inequality?
I have a proposition, a project in mind. New York’s
WNET still holds a recording of that night’s conversation
in the Union, locked away under expired broadcasting
rights. What if we found a way to rebroadcast that program,
forty years later, then held a broadcast conversation
in response? How different would the world today look
from that evening’s picture? If you’re interested, let me
know—maybe you were even there? Let’s get complicated
again, confront the messy facts of our complicities in racist
spaces. Let’s find a conversation that’s hard for any newspaper
to sum up.

THE IMAGES ARE FAMILIAR: election-workers
slowly, methodically, holding ballot
papers up to the light, squinting,
announcing their considered judgment —
this one “Bush”, that one “Gore” — with
party lawyers sitting by ready to debate
‘pregnant’ chads, while the world looked
on, somewhat bemused that the election
to the United States’ highest office, one
with access to almost unlimited technological
resources, should come to this.
The spectacle was presumed to represent
a failure of American democracy: in previous
(presumed successful) elections, the
various television networks had been able
to ‘call’ the election some time late in the
evening, making the actual counting of
votes, as far as many were concerned,
merely a side issue, a matter of crossing
the t’s and dotting the i’s. Yet here were
votes on which the fate of the entire
nation hung, and the intent of many voters
was both unclear, and taking an
(unacceptably) long length of time to
determine.
In the end the Supreme Court stepped
in, stopping the recounts. The public
began to accept the ‘compassionate conservative’
from Texas as the 43rd President.
And Congress passed the ‘Help America
Vote Act’ (HAVA), which promised funding
to election officials for the purchase of new
equipment, as well as creating national
election standards in a number of areas.
There were other problems with the
voting system that could have been targeted:
the partisan processes that govern Congressional
districting, or the electoral college
itself, which muzzles and distorts the
popular vote. It was the spectacle of the
slow, tedious, recount in Florida, however,
which drew most attention from politicians,
stung by the barbs of late-night
comedians.
Many Americans still don’t know that a
full recount in 2001 – paid for and overseen
by a consortium of major media outlets,
such as the New York Times – disclosed
that Al Gore would have won Florida,
and consequently the electoral college,
had the count been allowed to continue.
An increasing number, however, are awakening
to the fact that the electronic systems
that many districts have since introduced
would prevent such an independent audit
from being performed today. And many
now realize that the tedious process far
from being a sign of failure is an example
of the core elements of democracy in
action: a bureaucracy, open to inspection
by all, attempting to implement the will of
the people.
It is this – transparent implementation
of the public will – that ensures the legitimacy
of democratic institutions. Electronic
voting systems – in which voters enter
their choices directly into electronic computers,
through keypads, screens, or other
interfaces – are resistant to independent
public oversight for a number of reasons:
auditing of the code used to control computer
activity is a difficult and specialized
task; intellectual property law is often used
to stifle and prevent any independent oversight
of systems; and some jurisdictions
place legal barriers on audits or recounts.
This last is particularly insidious – the fear,
sometimes stated explicitly – is that an
audit will show flaws or stolen elections,
which authorities fear would damage faith
in the electoral system. Worse, perhaps, is
that whole-scale election theft can be much
simpler, and more difficult to detect, than
in analogue systems.
There are some advantages to electronic
systems. They can provide improved access
for certain voters, such as the blind,
through alternative interfaces. User interfaces
can provide on-the-fly checks for
under- and over-voting. There are, however,
other ways to provide these benefits, and
increased usability is of little benefit if it is
accompanied by a decline in confidence
that one’s voting intentions are reflected in
the vote that is eventually counted. It is
now widely accepted by activists that the
only way to provide trustworthy electronic
voting is through regular recounts and
Voter Verified Physical Audit Trails
(VVPAT), where the electronic record is
supplemented by a paper copy, produced
by the machine and approved by the voter,
with the paper copy trumping the electronic
record in any subsequent recount.
For many people, one of the most disturbing
aspects of electronic voting has
been the close links between voting
machine manufacturers and the Republican
party. Among the most prominent
examples are ES&S and Ohio-based
Diebold. Senator Chuck Hegal (R, NE) was
chairman and CEO of ES&S (a fact he
repeatedly omitted from FEC disclosure
forms) until shortly before his unexpected
election in 1996 – an election conducted
mainly on machines provided by ES&S. In
2003 the Ohio-based CEO of Diebold, one
of the leading providers of electronic voting
machines, circulated a letter to potential
Republican donors, promising that he
was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year.”
Ohio subsequently became a key state in
Bush’s 2004 victory.
Several groups have published guides
on actions individuals can take to ensure a
fairer election this year:
2008 Pocket Guide to Election Protection
by Bev Harris, available online:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.pdf”
Count my Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to
Voting by Steven Rosenfeld, from Alternet
Books.

IS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE (EC) democratic?
Yes, insofar as it is a means by
which the declared preferences of the
voting public are translated into selection
of an elected representative. If the
crux of democracy is that policies or
representatives who make policies are
chosen by a broad electorate in free
elections, the EC clears the bar.
The E.C. is nonetheless a target of much criticism, and
there are at least four prongs to the attack that it is insufficiently
democratic. First, the public’s role is indirect: we,
the people, do not actually choose presidents, but only
slates of anonymous ciphers to whom the actual job of
choosing a president falls. Second, the complex design
wherein the presidency is won in a vote by 538 electors,
themselves chosen in 51 elections (in 50 states plus DC)
confers unequal voting power on American citizens.
Third, the EC system is not guaranteed to be decisive, and
tie-breaking procedures are even more indirect, taking
place in the US House (for President) and US Senate (for
Vice President). Fourth, the 2000 election reminded us
that our current system allows a candidate who won fewer
votes than a rival to secure the presidency.
The first point is true, but its importance is unclear.
People almost universally talk as though they are voting
directly for presidential candidates. Only pedants say, “I’m
voting for the slate of electors pledge to choose Obama
(McCain).” Commentators, pollsters, pundits, academics,
and probably even electors talk about candidates winning
vote and states. Shouldn’t we be bothered, nonetheless, by
these anachronistic middlemen? The gravest danger, from
the democrat’s point of view, is “faithless” electors, individuals
pledged to back a given candidate who surprise the
nation by voting otherwise. There have been 158 faithless
electors, but only 9 (out of 8,048) in the last 60 years. In
the hyper-close 2000 race, Bush beat Gore by 5, rather
than 4, electoral votes because a Democrat from DC
abstained, a symbolic protest she would surely have foregone
had the electoral vote been tied or had Gore won by
one. In 2004, one Democratic Minnesota elector voted for
John Edwards for president, apparently by mistake.
Optimists note that those chosen to be electors are generally
party loyalists, and that the very rare divergences
from pledged votes have not mattered in modern contests.
No one seriously argues that today’s electors should be
accorded discretion to vote as they like, without regard to
their state’s popular vote tallies. Pessimists fume that
cabals and bungles are possible as long as electors are
human, and that the very existence of the electors is an
affront. On balance, though, they seem more a curiosity
than a threat. Some states constrain them to vote as directed
with legislation, and a more radical reform would be to
automate the College so that electors are tabulation
devices, not humans (such a change probably could not
pass constitutional muster absent an amendment).
On the second point, the appeal for votes to “count
equally” is mostly illusory. True, there are substantial discrepancies
in number-of voters-per-elector across states: in
2004, values ranged from about 75,000 in DC to nearly
300,000 in Wisconsin. Such variation arises from multiple
sources, including: large turnout differences; a bias favoring
small states in the EC, due to every state being apportioned
one elector per Senator; apportionment of House
seats (and, thus, electors) never matching population
shares exactly, since the House is fixed at 435 members
whose districts cannot cross states lines; and the fact that
apportionments are adjusted only once per decade, even
though populations shift constantly. But electoral rules that
accommodate some malapportionment of this sort are
common elsewhere, and were typical in the US before
Reynolds v. Sims and related cases of the mid-1960s. Moreover,
computing “power” for individual voters is more
complicated still. Realistically, it depends on the size of the
state voting electorate, the closeness of the state contest,
and tricky permutations involved in constructing all possible
winning coalitions (combinations of states). DC is the
most over-represented presidential-election unit in the simple
count above, but it is also lopsidedly Democratic, and
DC voters are the least powerful by some calculations.
In any case, in large-scale elections, all votes are exceedingly
unlikely to matter, in the sense of making or breaking
a tie. A rational cost-benefit-oriented voter expecting
even a few thousand others to turnout would never bother
to cast a ballot. Voting is largely an expressive activity: we
vote from a sense of duty, because we were asked to do so
and would feel guilty about not following through, or
because we enjoy the sensation of being part of a movement.
A voter who thinks her ballot will be decisive is kidding
herself, even if she lives in a small, evenly split state
like New Mexico or New Hampshire.
The third complaint is more worrisome. It has been
184 years since the House chose a president, but foes of
the EC like to highlight the near-misses, elections in which
the EC could have failed to pick a winner had a few thousand
voters chosen differently. There is little doubt that
most Americans would be aghast to see a presidential election
resolved by the US House; but it is hard to know just
how alarming are these counterfactual histories.
The elite-level tie-breaking procedure of the EC is unattractive,
but non-resolution is possible even in a national
plurality election. An exact tie in popular vote is not necessary
for deadlock: if a result is close enough for a recount, a
battle distinct from the initial contest ensues, over how to
deal with the inherent messiness in large-scale elections that
is usually safely out-of-sight. Democrats will recall Florida
in 2000 with rage, and the US Supreme Court’s role in the
resolution. But recounts almost always turn up messes. In
2004, for example, Republicans in Washington saw a series
of recounts marred by irregularities (e.g. the late appearance
of new ballots, somehow overlooked in earlier tabulations)
turn a win by their gubernatorial candidate into a loss.
It is thus well to remember that the Electoral College is
not uniquely prone to chaos. In a national direct election,
if the margin were sufficiently close, there would be no
limit to the domain of the conflict: we could see Floridastyle
recounts and court fights in 50 states (3,000 counties).
Granted, we’ve had few presidential elections with
extremely close national vote totals, and simple mathematics
ensures that very, very close totals are much more likely
in individual states than in the national sums. Still, the
“recounts everywhere” scenario, though quite unlikely, is a
serious worry on par with those counterfactuals wherein
the House might have had to choose the winner if a few
states had voted differently.
“But Gore won more votes!” It is arbitrary, rather than
non-democratic, to employ an electoral system that does
not necessarily select the candidate who won the most
votes. When both candidates know in advance how the
election will be determined, there is nothing undemocratic
about not being majoritarian. Gore wasn’t even the only
modern VP to be foiled by the EC: Nixon outpolled
Kennedy in popular votes while losing the presidency in
1960 (a point obscured by most textbooks, which assign
to Kennedy votes cast for electors who openly opposed
him and cast their ballots for Harry Flood Byrd).
Ultimately, there is no such thing as a perfect, error-free
electoral system. Specialists have proven complicated theorems
establishing that all voting rules are prone to some
manner of manipulation. The Electoral College is quirky,
creaky, and can fail. But that’s also true of democracy, alas.

IN SPRING 2007, A GROUP OF URBANA CITIZENS decided to
examine the vitality of our local electoral system. The health
of a democracy can be measured by the number of candidates
who run for office, the number of candidates who
challenge incumbent office holders, the number of parties
that run candidates in elections, the diversity of perspectives
on issues expressed during campaigns, and the extent of
voter participation in elections. On all of these fronts
Urbana has experienced significant declines during the last
four election cycles 1993- 2005. During this period only
18% of primary races and 55.5 % of general election races
were contested; no third party candidates ran for office;
20.7 % of register voters turned out for the 2005 mayoral
primary race; and voter participation in general city elections
steadily declined from 34.4% (1993) to 21.4% (1997)
to 18.8% (2001) to 12.5% in 2005.
The group learned that instant runoff voting (IRV) has
invigorated local democracy in Takoma Park, Md; Henderson,
NC; and Burlington, Vt. Exit polls showed that a very
high percentage of first time IRV election participants understood
the system “well or very well” and preferred IRV to the
city’s prior system. IRV also tended to encourage more candidates
to run for office, reduced the number of uncontested
races, resulted in more parties submitting candidates for
election, broadened the number of perspectives expressed
on campaign issues, and increased voter participation in the
electoral process. “This is just what Urbana needs,” they concluded,
and formed a grassroots organization called Urbana
Citizens for Instant Runoff Voting.
UC-IRV created a brochure and web site (www.IRVforUrbana.
net). Delegates met with the Mayor and City Council
individually to express concerns about the single plurality
voting system used in Urbana municipal elections and the
desire to replace it with IRV. They did not ask the civic body
to initiate this change but instead opted to circulate a community-
wide petition calling for a “binding” referendum on
IRV to be placed on Urbana’s upcoming general election ballot.
The group would have an opportunity to educate citizens
about IRV as they circulated petitions.
Members of UC-IRV met with Champaign County Clerk
Mark Sheldon who provided them with petitioning process
guidelines. He conveyed that the IRV system is easy to
understand and use and that his office could prepare the ballot-
counting software at no expense to the city. Unfortunately,
Sheldon misinterpreted the state election code and underestimated
the number of signatures required to place a binding
referendum on the ballot. He told UI-IRV that 766 signatures
were required when the true number was just over
2000. 766 was the number of signatures required for a nonbinding
or advisory referendum.
Over the following three months IRV advocates representing
a variety of local political parties collected signatures
door-to-door and at a variety of community venues.
They obtained over 1,000 signatures and filed the petitions
in the City Clerk’s office as was required.
One day before the petition “challenge period” ended,
Al Klein, Vice-President of the local Democratic Party,
challenged the petitions on three separate grounds: an
inadequate number of signatures were collected; the language
of the petition was vague and confusing; and a fundamental
change in the election system could not be made
through a citizen petitioning process. An Electoral Board
was constituted to review these challenges; its members
were the Mayor (chair), the City Clerk, and a City Council
member—all Democrats. The Board ruled in favor of Klein
solely on the basis that inadequate signatures had been
collected. Refusing to rule on the other challenges, the
Board left it unclear whether future petitions could be
challenged on one or both of those grounds. Later the
same day, Klein told a representative from UC-IRV that he
would use “every legal means available” to block such a
referendum in the future, raising the specter of expensive
legal battles if UC-IRV persisted.
At this point, UC-IRV proposed that the Mayor and/or
City Council appoint a task force of key city and county
officials as well as citizens to identify the legal and technical
requirements necessary to place a binding IRV referendum
before the voters. This proposal was rejected by the
Mayor and several City Council members. They argued
that all the work should be done by UC-IRV itself. UC-IRV
worried that without participation by key city and county
officials, a petition would be vulnerable once again to legal
and/or technical challenges.
It was only after the above initiatives had been rebuffed
that UC-IRV decided to use the Annual Township meeting to
place an “advisory” referendum before the voters. The decision
was based, in part, on the success that other local grassroots
groups had experienced with this process during the
past two years. This included local anti-war activists placing
advisory referenda before the voters in 2006 that resulted in
strong votes to “bring the troops home from Iraq immediately”
and to “impeach Bush and Cheney.” Publicity given the
referenda in the press helped generate the community’s
response. While a binding referendum was preferable, UCIRV
reasoned that an advisory referendum would at least get
IRV and the broader issue of electoral reform into the spotlight
for community review and discussion.
Learning of these plans, local Democrats rounded up a
group of party loyalists to attend the Annual Township
meeting and block any advisory referenda from being
placed on the ballot by controlling the meeting’s agenda.
Not expecting opposition to a “non-binding” referendum,
UC-IRV had not made a similar effort to gather supporters
and was narrowly defeated at the meeting.
Frustrated but not dissuaded, UC-IRV discovered that
any group of citizens can call a Special Township Meeting
to deal with an issue of concern to citizens of the Township.
Furthermore, the agenda for such a meeting can not
be altered once the meeting is scheduled. The request for
the meeting was filed appropriately and a meeting to consider
placing an advisory IRV referendum on the fall ballot
was scheduled for June 30, 2008.
This action by UC-IRV led the Mayor to undertake retaliatory
action. Knowing that no more than three advisory referenda
could be placed on the upcoming fall ballot, she convened
a meeting of the Township Board on June 16 and proposed
three advisory referenda of her own. Uncomfortable
with placing three referenda on the ballot that evening and
thereby denying UC-IRV the opportunity to make its case at
the upcoming Special Township Meeting, members of the
Town Board approved placing only one referendum on the
ballot leaving space for two more.
After the Mayor’s failed attempt to sabotage the Special
Township Meeting ahead of time, local Democrats, spearheaded
by the Mayor herself, once again cranked up their
political machine and rounded up approximately 100
party loyalists and other sympathizers to attend the meeting.
At the meeting, they voted, first, to limit debate, and
second, to defeat the placing of an IRV advisory referendum
before Urbana voters at large.
This action by a small but organized group of party followers
disenfranchised Urbana citizens as a whole by denying
them an opportunity to vote on electoral reform in the
fall. By preventing the referendum from being on the ballot,
the action also undermined the efforts of UC-IRV to generate
wide community discussion of electoral reform before the
election some four months away. Finally, it denied the City
Council an opportunity to get a reading on how the community
at large feels about the need for electoral reform.
These last points cannot be emphasized too strongly. By
bringing issues affecting the welfare of the public to the
forefront of community attention, referenda, binding or
advisory, provide a strong spur to public education. Voters
become motivated to learn more about the issues because
they will have a chance to vote on them. Without an
opportunity to vote, they have less incentive to invest the
time and energy required to develop positions on the
issues. Unfortunately, the press, too, typically has less
incentive to cover the issues. This makes the job of raising
public consciousness more difficult for advocates of
change. Those in positions of power who resist change
know this and thus often oppose referenda where the people
themselves have an opportunity to express their will
directly. Is it because local Democrats worry that IRV or
some other electoral reform will threaten their influence
and power that they have opposed public referenda on
IRV? This is something the reader should consider.
In an editorial published in the News Gazette on July 4,
the editors stated that “it’s time to bring the curtain down on
special meetings of Cunningham Township” and “packing
audiences to produce desired results…” Later, the editors
suggested that if advocates of IRV are serious about this idea,
“they’ll start a petition drive and drop this game-playing with
township law.” It is clear that the editors did not know the
full history of UC-IRV’s efforts to achieve a referendum. UCIRV
had already conducted a petition drive, had the initiative
blocked, and been threatened with expensive legal challenges
if they tried to do the same again!
The last step, to date, in this saga occurred on July 7
when the Mayor of Urbana initiated action to formally
eliminate any chance for a citizen’s group to introduce
advisory referenda on the general election ballot in
November. She did this by again calling a meeting of the
Township Board and recommending that two advisory referenda
be placed in the remaining slots on the ballot. One
dealt with national health care policy and the other with
the system of elections used in Cunningham Township
(i.e., Urbana). The latter asks voters, “Do you support
keeping the current system for local elections so that each
voter casts one vote for the candidate they prefer and the
candidate who gets the most votes wins?”
When presented with the mayor’s recommendation,
Township Board members did not insist on communitywide
discussion and debate of the issues addressed before
placing the referenda on the ballot as they had with UCIRV;
neither did they make any provision for scheduling
such discussions and debates to educate the public after
the referenda were placed on the ballot—during the
upcoming 2-3 months. Instead, they simply voted unanimously
to support her request, and the referenda were
placed on the ballot.
UC-IRV plans to continue its efforts to encourage the
public to learn more about the current electoral system
and how local democracy might be enhanced by replacing
this system with instant runoff voting. Readers who are
interested in becoming involved should contact the committee
at voteIRV@comcast.com. To learn more about IRV
itself see www.fairvote.org . Please consider joining UCIRV
or attending events it sponsors in the coming months.