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World Can't Wait November 2nd

On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country including high schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime launches the first national movement in American history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office.
www.worldcantwait.org

On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country including high schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime launches the first national movement in American history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office. Our call is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a national series of events, demonstrations, direct action, to begin a mass movement that will have, as its eventual goal, to drive Bush out of power and out of out lives.

Don't stand on the sidelines; don't stay in school. Join this movement, the stronger we are on the 2nd, the stronger the movement will be after the 2nd. Send this email to your friends, your lists, and everyone you know that wants to change the direction this country is being led. The future of the planet depends on our action now. Check out the web site at www.worldcantwait.org">www.worldcantwait.org.

CHICAGO: chicago (at) worldcantwait.org, 773-412-8318

Feeder marches from all over the city to Federal Plaza (Adams and Dearborn).

12 PM - The rally begins at Federal Plaza, Dearborn and Adams, with a greeting from Studs Terkel. Columbia College students march in from their 11:00 AM rally at Grant Park, right across the college on Michigan Ave, bringing students from other schools with them. Groups will be meeting up at Metra and El stops in neighborhoods and suburbs around the Chicagoland area, all heading to the Loop and Federal Plaza. Send in your meet-up to chicago (at) worldcantwait.org Speakers and participants include: Juan Torres, Gold Star father; Standish E.Willis, National Conference of Black Lawyers; Sterling Plumpp, poet; Karen Fiore,pro-choice activist; Samantha Hamlin, Columbia College World Can't Wait; scenes from"Words of Choice," a play on emergency tour of the Red states; Mars, that revolutionary sister, poet; and more. Rumor has it that Billionaires for Bush will be raising their objections to our movement. By 1:30 PM, we will step off to march through the Loop, calling on others to JOINUS. Leave work, leave school, make history. The world can't wait - Drive out theBush regime! We will return, bigger than ever, to the Federal Plaza for a concluding rally where youth will take over the stage, with reports from students who walked out to tell the world they want a different future and spoken word poets of the new generation.

Columbia College- Chicago

11:00 A.M in Grant Park, along Michigan Ave, directly across from the Columbia College Library building.

University of Illinois at Chicago:
10:00 AM Walkout and Rally at the Quad behind Student Center East. March to Federal Plaza.

Roberto Clemente High School:

10:56 AM Walkout (after third period) assemble on the Northeast corner of Western and Divison, march down Western to the Blue Line.

Hyde Park: People going to the World Can't Wait rally in the Loop from Hyde Park can
meet at 11:00 a.m. at 55th and Lake Park to take the #6 bus downtown. All should bring their banners, posters, and friends and relatives with them.

Evanston: Many of us will be gathering at Fountain Square at Davis and Sherman at
10:30am - 11:00 am to assemble for walking one block west to the Davis Street Purple
Line Station and getting on the train to make it downtown by NOON - WEDNESDAY,
November 2nd for the massive World Can't Wait Rally at Federal Plaza.

Batavia, IL:

s14.invisionfree.com/Batavia_Resistance/

7:40 AM Walkout and March on Dennis Hastert's offices downtown

OAK PARK: oakparkil (at) worldcantwait.org

10:00AM meet across from OPRF High School in Ridgeland Commons, Lake St. and Scoville Ave. to go down on the Green Line train to Federal Plaza to 12PM convergence.

5 PM, rally at Scoville Park (Lake St. and Oak Park Ave.)
Weekly Meetings: Wednesday from 7-9PM at the Buzz Cafe (905 S. Lombard St., Oak Park, IL).

NAPERVILLE: Naperville North High School- Walk out at 11am-11:30AM and meet in the small cafe then keep walking down major streets and passed businesses. Contact: hardcastlechick (at) hotmail.com, (630) 689-3094

DEKALB: Northern Illinois University - Rally at 12:00 noon in the Martin Luther King Commons- Free Speech Zone Northern Illinois University. Speakers to be announced.

PEORIA: 4PM-6PM Rally, Intersection of University and War Memorial(park in lots just south of BP station). Bring your signs and bullhorns! We'll also hand out flyers to cars at the lights! peoria (at) worldcantwait.org

Why don’t we simply wait for the election of 2008 or campaign for Democrats in 2006 and then push them to issue articles of impeachment? Let’s look at what’s fallen down the memory hole since November of 2000.

On November 7th of 2000, Albert Gore Jr. won the election for President of the United States.

A recount in Florida which would have put him over the top was stopped by a riot of Republican congressional staffers, none of whom were ever so much even charged with a crime. How many people remember this? What would have happened to them had they been anti-war protesters trying to disrupt the Republican Convention? Or “Critical Mass” activists trying to organize a bike ride at Union Square? And why didn’t the press cover it?

By the time the case came up before the Supreme Court, it was a moot issue since we had already seen that neither the Gore campaign nor the Democrats would fight the stolen election. Most likely they knew just what an extremist and incompetent president Bush would be and were hoping for the “pendulum to swing”. They were sitting around doing nothing, waiting for Bush to self-destruct, to sweep the Congressional elections in 2002 and to retake the White House in 2004.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

The only problem is that Bush and his campaign staff decided not to self-destruct. Once in the White House on January of 2001, they already had a fully developed plan to remake the US government in their image. All they needed was the right excuse. At lunchtime on September 11th, 2001, while the rest of us were still in shock from the worst terrorist attack in American history, the infrastructure put into place all through the first half of 2001 swung into action. The Bush Regime rammed though the Patriot Act. They dusted off their Power Point presentations (the ones with the boxes titled “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” and “freedom for the Iraqi people”) and turned them into hard fact. They steamrolled the Democratic Congress in October of 2002 into authorizing them to invade Iraq. They opened up the federal coffers to “faith based” Christian extremists to allow them to build permanent institutions that would carry over even if the Republicans lost in 2004. They unleashed Arial Sharon in the West Bank. The rolled back environmental protections and started taking a sledgehammer to the Wall of church/state separation.

If this all seems familiar, remember, none of this is in dispute and none of it is coming from “left wing extremists”. I’m only repeating what has been well-documented in the “mainstream media” and now by the Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If you think the rhetoric coming from the “World Can’t Wait” organizers is “unrealistic” or “shrill” or “extreme”, then remember. It’s essentially the same rhetoric that is coming out of mainstream elite liberals like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman, the progressive wing of the Democratic Pary, and traditional conservative Republicans like Tom Wilkerson, Brent Scowcroft, Paul O’Neil, Richard Clarke, and Larry Johnson. None of it, not the stolen election in 2000, not the highly suspicious vote in Ohio in 2004, not the marriage of an extremist Evangelical Christian agenda to the federal government, not the manipulation of the press or public opinion, not the cocked up war in Iraq, not the restrictions of civil liberties or the extraordinary decision to ignore long established international regulations on rules of war and treatment of prisoners, none of this is in dispute.

You think I’m exaggerating?

Here’s a quote from the World Can’t Wait’s call:

“People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.”

And here’s a quote from the Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”

Senator Durbin, of course, was bullied into recanting his statement by the Republican “guided” media, the pro-Israeli lobbying infrastructure in Washington, by Chicago democratic boss Richard Daley, and by his own reluctance to lose the power and status
that getting along by going along will give you. Slipping up and telling the truth in Washington isn’t tolerated kindly. And he learned that lesson the hard way.

Durbin apologized and went back to the accepted role of the Democratic Party, which is basically to “sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs”.

Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and Bill Frist and his fellow evangelical Christian extremists raised the specter of the “nuclear option” to intimidate congress and ram though extremist judges.

Durbin joined the rest of his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and voting 97-0 last month to continue funding the war in Iraq (a war which he himself had brought up the image of Fascism and Communist totalitarianism to describe).

Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and approving John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and setting in place the machinery that’s eventually going to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Griswold. Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and the Bush regime continued to torture prisoners at Gitmo.

While Durbin and his fellow Democrats are sitting around doing nothing waiting for Bush to self-destruct, American citizens like Jose Padilla are still being held in jail without being charged with a crime.

And while Senator Durbin and his fellow Democrats sat around and did nothing while they waited for Bush to self-destruct, 2000 American soldiers and anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have died.

I was about to make some snide remark about Senator Durbin, make a joke about him going back to his limo after swallowing his pride, but then I realized that if I don’t take concrete actions to remove Bush from office, I’m much worst then Senator Durbin. At least he dangled the truth in front of us before being smacked down. What have I done?

On my IBM ThinkPad, I have a screensaver. If you’re French, or British, or Canadian, you’ve seen it. If you’re an American, you haven’t. It’s a photo of an Iraqi girl (she’s about 5 or so) covered in blood after watching her parents get slaughtered by American troops in front of her eyes. She’s covered in her parents’ blood. It serves as a reminder. What we’re afraid of in the United States is already hard fact in the rest of the world. What I’m worried about in my little suburb in New Jersey is already hard fact in New Orleans. Every time I think about my worst, most paranoid fears something like police kicking in my door, it’s already a mundane fact of life in Baghdad. That photo is there to remind me. I can’t afford to sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs.

And yet, if I’m not subject to the same amount of terror that poor people in the rest of the world are, I can also learn from them.

I can learn from the Ukrainian people, who took to the streets to protest the stolen election in their country. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the people who stole the election self-destructed.

I can learn from the Indonesian people, who removed Suharto from power in 1998.They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the dictatorship self-destructed.

I can learn from the workers in Poland in the 1980s who overthrow Communist totalitarianism. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the Stalinist bureaucrats self-destructed.

I can learn from black American in the early 1960s who overthrew the one party totalitarian state in the south, not by voting for Kennedy or the Democrats, but by an extended campaign of putting their lives at risk, breaking unjust laws, and, finally, marching on Washington. Jim Crow didn’t self-destruct while people sat on their asses and did nothing.

Don’t sit around and do nothing. They won’t self-destruct.
 
 

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