I received an email from James Kirk or should I say Willam Shatner. (His twitter account shows Kirk.)
"Cal, I've just been informed there is another song that is of interest to you on the net. As always the Enterprise is open for a visit from the famous RockinRobotReporter, if you'd like to step aboard and check out our midi files, please feel welcome......
True, the files of that era are still on 8 track but we still have the machinery to listen to them."
"As you know, the crew of the Enterprise has visited the future a time or two and I believe that very song is available. If memory serves me right, when we acquired some of the music from the future, we had to have them recorded, not only on 8 track but a disk, we call a record.
Cal, you're old enough you do remember the record, don't you. That particular song is on a 78 record I believe. I will have DATA find it for you."
I jumped on the opportunity of speaking with Willaim Shatner. This may be the opportunity I've been looking for. The email had his personal cell and I tweeted him right then and there.
"Hello William, Cal here, I got your tweet and thanks for your quick response. Oh BTW, Bill, DATA isn't from the same show as you. He is from the newer Star Trek."
"Ahhhhhhh, Cal you could be right. McCoy, I need to have my memory bank tested. I seem to have gained a new member to an old cast."
Shatner then reiterated to me that I am welcome to visit the cast of the original Enterprise, I accepted immediately and we set up the appointment.
Zoom in to next scene.
"Scottie, please beam Cal up, she is here to view some of our archived music. Have Dr. McCoy show her to the cabinet where the midis are stored.
"Cal, please stop by the Holodeck before you leave, I am watching the newest Star Trek on a big screen television. Scott Bakula is very good as Captain of the Enterprise.
"We can walk over to the bridge on your way out and I'll show you the improvements we've made in the last 30 years. I think you'll be impressed."
"Cal, I understand the robots may be looking for something to do these days?"
"Well, Bill, that may have been the case a while back, but now with all this new understanding about 2012, it seems they (or should I say we) have gotten really booked up. That's why I wanted to come directly to you for the music I'm seeking. I heard you were probably the quickest route."
"We are planning a worldwide concert event and I expect we'll be pretty busy for the next couple of years."
"Bill, are you familiar at all with the 2012 phenomenen?"
The 2012 NWO Agenda 9/11
here
here
1071 days 7 hours 34 minutes 20 seconds left until December 21, 2012
"I know a little about it, Cal. I saw the Jesse Ventura series a couple of times on the tube and that was one of the subjects."
"You're correct, Bill. It's a pretty damn scary topic, if you ask me."
"What do you suppose the elites are up to with all these underground villages? ..... and what about this damn vaccination scare? I've even heard that there is an ingredient; squalane, in the vaccines that will make children sterile? Do you know anything about that?"
here
"I don't know much at this time, Bill, just what I heard on 'Conspiracy Theories'.
I am however putting 2012 at the top of my research list."
"I get the feeling that the Iraqi/Afghanistan war and all the things going on in Gaza right now have everything to do with depopulation and these underground villages and what will be after December 21, 2012."
BOB DEAN at the Project Camelot Awake and Aware Conference, Los Angeles, 19 September 2009. This is another wonderful, heartfelt presentation by the best loved lecturer on the UFO circuit… and again Bob presents and comments on some of the suppressed NASA slides of Apollo 13, Mars, and Saturn which he has acquired. Enjoy
here
"I'd like to think the concerts are on top of my priority but right now, my new interest is the 2012 date and what I can find out about what's really going on."
"Oh yeah, Bill, I just happened to be watching a bit of the boob tube the other night and Miss Congeniality was on.......... you were great and I really enjoy Sandra Bullock these days. She seems to be on quite a few of the talk shows and I see that she produces George Lopez."
"That George Lopez is quite the guy, isn't he? He has that new talk show and it seems to be doing rather nicely. Last night, Sir Charles Barkley was on and I simply adore him. The two of them together make up quite a team and they talked a bit about the Tiger Woods scandal and also mention was made about Mark McGuire and his new found problems."
"I really like the part of George's show that has DNA results for his guests. Maybe, if one has the right DNA and enough money, he/she can get into these underground bunkers that are being built for 2012? What do you think?"
"Bill, tonight Snoop Dogg is going to be on George's show and George is going to have Snoop's DNA test for available to share. hmmmmmm, I wonder if George requires a pee test first?
here
"On that note, Cal, I have a luncheon date with James Spader. It's strange because I hadn't seen him since the wrap of Boston Legal and the other night out of the blue I saw him when I was dining out. Since then, he's tweeted me and today was the only opportunity we both had to meet for lunch. I even asked Bullock to join us but she was too busy with her many activities and had to decline."
"Thank you so much Bill for taking time out of your schedule to see me and to help me find the music. I hope we can meet up again some time and maybe discuss space travel for the ones 'LEFT BEHIND' when 2012 occurs."
Left Behind trailer
here
"Damn Cal, if that should be on my calendar, then 'Make it so, number one.' and we'll talk. Since the topic is so important, maybe we can get some other people involved and get this thing addressed. There isn't much time for a project this large and we need to do it asap."
"You've got a deal Bill, I'll have my people call your people and we'll get it set up. Tell your folks that we'll be in touch in the next few days."
"Gotta goooooooooooooooooooo nooooooooow Bill......... wow, being beamed up is quiiiiiiiiiiiitee a light experience........
Yoooooooooour Rooooooooookiiiiinnnnnn Rooobbbbbbot Repppppppppppporter ~ fading!
C........a....................l
here
How is RFID used inside a living body?
RFID devices that are intended to be implanted inside a living body (like an animal or human being) have special requirements. They need to be encased in a special kind of casing that will not irritate or react with the living tissues that they are inserted into. The casing must also be transparent to the scanning radio-frequency beam that activates the chip. Some RFID vendors have created biocompatible glass for use in these applications.
One potential problem with being placed within a living organism is that the tiny RFID device may move around under the skin. This can be avoided by using special materials that actually let the surrounding tissue grow up to the casing and bond with it.
Because the radio-frequency waves that activate the microchip containing the identification number are only useful within a few feet (or less), the RFID chip is typically inserted very close to the surface of the skin.
The placement of the device is usually done with a hyperdermic-type needle. This method of insertion also dictates the shape and size of the device; implantable RFID devices are typically the size and diameter of a grain of rice. For dogs, the device is usually implanted between the shoulder blades.
RFID tags have been placed inside cows; some discussion of having all cows implanted with RFID devices has resulted from the recent scare with mad cow disease. Dog owners have used RFID tags to identify their pets rather than tattoos (the more traditional method).
RFID tags, like the VeriChip tag, can also be implanted inside human beings. See VeriChip RFID Tag Patient Implant Badges Now FDA Approved for more information.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Robbie, When Robots Are Programmed by Angels......... liby
libybot arrived at the blue castle. She was on the scooter and she
was ready for action. She pulled herself together as best she could
and re-checked her digital connectors. She was good to go.
She had been racing around the internet in quite a tizzy. It wasn't
often that she had her thoughts together, the others were usually
just beneath the surface. In today's world liby was very much in
tuned to the betrayal environment. She had to keep her wits about
her at all costs and the others helped her in her endeavors to do
just that.
Liby often times had Robert redo her programs so as to stay one step
ahead of the NeoCons. It was easy for Robert as he had grown to
love liby as he had all the robots he and Cal had created. He often
times had to do the same for Cal although unbeknownst to her. She
was quite the high strung woman and Rob was only too happy to do his
comforting from a distance.
Rob had known long ago that Cal was much too fragile for a `real'
relationship and he had accepted that about her and continued with
his life. It wasn't hard as he was a high maintenance man himself
and as such he had taken the perfect opportunity to move forward
with his own journey when he'd realized he would be hard put to rely
on a cyber relationship. Robert was comfortable knowing that his
support consisted of merely checking in now and again and going
about his own business.
liby headed to the kitchen as she had been told by Olivia on the
phone that the nurses often times took their breaks there. The
twins were lounging by the window when liby turned up. She greeted
them and introduced herself.
Grace and Chloe were happy to make her acquaintance. It was high
time liby came round. Grace remembered the first time she had heard
of liby, it must have been two years ago.
liby asked to see the head robot and just about the time the words
were out of her mouth Robbie turned the corner and walked into the
kitchen. liby smiled politely when she saw him and muttered hello.
Robbie in turn smiled and put his hand out to greet her.
liby was embarrassed as she had only three good digits to shake
with. Robbie laughed as he remembered MoBot turning up missing
digits quite frequently. He wondered if it was a family tradition
as liby and Mo were distant cousins.
liby had been a product of a trip to Canada that Cal had made a
little over three years ago. It was her first time meeting Edward
and Robert wanted to give her a gift that would always remind her of
the joy of that first meeting.
Edward had been Cal's mentor for a long time before the meeting and
Robert knew of Cal's sentimentality regarding special occasions. It
had been quite the trip as Cat had been Cal's constant companion the
whole visit and Cal had derived much pleasure from the attention
given her by her two dear friends.
MYTOWN was indeed the place to be. Often times when Cal was
agitated and frightened she longed for the safety she felt in
Canada. It was not often she felt secure and she was hard pressed
to explain it to her friends. They didn't know of her others. She
knew that Edward suspected but he didn't expand on it when liby
answered curtly that there weren't really any others, just different
moods. Edward was much too respectful to inquire of Cal the truth.
He knew that she knew but he also knew not to press her as she was
much too fragile to discuss it at length until she decided.
Edward knew that Cal teetered on the brink many a day and his best
support was just to acknowledge her others as they appeared.
Edward knew of Cal's love for Robert and he accepted it. He knew
that although it wasn't all that Cal wanted it to be, it was all
that she could handle. She would either move past it or she would
move with it.
Robert had eagerly embraced it when Cal's computer had gone
haywire. It was the perfect opportunity for the two of them to
disengage. It had to be done at some time and the time presented
itself and it had been a gentle parting of the ways.
Cal knew that they would always be connected as did Robert. It was
just a new way of life for them and they had separated naturally.
It had been faith as was the whole of their relationship. They
weren't meant to be together except in their special setting. It
was indeed a meeting of the minds and as such it was also accepting
and deciding to go their own ways.
After all, how could a California girl and an Easterner ever unite
in the REAL. He loved his snowboarding and she her sunshine. It
was never meant to be anything other than a PERFECT union and that
it was. It was always just what it was and that was unconditional
love connecting in the heavens and reuniting in the suburbs. It was
all and it was more and it was indeed a love affair for all times.
liby was anxious to meet the residents of the blue castle but that
would have to wait. It was nearing 2:00 AM and it was time to
recharge batteries.
liby wheeled around the corner and ran smack dab into Robert in the
hallway. Cal watched as Robert hit the floor. She was concerned
but she saw him bounce back immediately. She asked if he was
alright and swished right past him before he could answer.
liby looked horrified but regained her composure when she realized
Robert was not hurt. She apologized and continued down the hall to
the room with the recharger.
Robert was a bit stunned but didn't want to appear disoriented until
the girls were out of site. Robert hit the floor the second time
and was out cold till Chloe showed up and wiped his forehead with a
wash cloth. He had quite a knot on his head. Chloe insisted the
doctor come down and attend to Robert before he returned to
Phoenix.
The doctor assured Chloe that Robert had a slight concussion and
would spend the night at the castle. He would check on him again
in the morning before Robert would be allowed to drive into town.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Brad Will and the Solidarity song
Brad Will a wonderful soulmate that went before
Anarchist Superstar: The Revolutionary Who Filmed His Own Murder
Submitted by worker on Sat, 2008-01-26 05:21.
Tags: Anarchist PeopleHistory
From Rolling Stone - By Jeff Sharlet
HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH
The Martyrdom of Brad Will
Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.
He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning against the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for the Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad laugh. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst: the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the smart guy you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts. In the 1990s, he’d helped hand New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the city’s community gardens. In the new decade, he became a star of Indymedia’s anti-star system, an interconnected anti-corporate press that lets activists communicate—directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.
Brad seemed to be everywhere: One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding a bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame shaking with happy rebel laughter later while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.
Now, Brad has become most famous for the final minutes of his last day alive, October 27th, 2006, in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He’d gone to document a massive strike blowing up into revolt against the government. His video camera peers through broken glass at a smashed computer; holds steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawls under a truck to spy on a group of… well, most people who watch Brad’s video on YouTube don’t know who they are. Cops, probably, though they wear no uniforms. Brad feints and charges toward them along with a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, improbably chasing men toting .38s and AR-15s.
With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows men with guns may be hiding. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara, mátalo!” government supporters ranted on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca. “If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke—muzzle flash beneath a gray sun—and his own knees rising up towards the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing toward him: “No esten tomando fotos!” (“Stop taking pictures!”) Brad didn’t hear.
He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.
-
During the three weeks he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as “Qeubrado” (”Broken”). He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s – a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team— he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” remembers his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half-warrior, half-poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode— “sweet escalation,” he called it, protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.
By the time he got to Oaxaca, in the fall of 2006, he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a Brazilian filmmaker who has produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” In the end there was just a picture, his last shot, the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.
“Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared. “I went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—I have this feeling like I will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot— the body all sewed up and naked— you see it in the papers every day—I am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.”
Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. Oaxaca was bigger, more exciting, more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s 70,000 teachers had exploded after the governor attacked the teachers with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example. In Oaxaca, every kind of leftist organization—indigenous groups, unions, students, farmers, anarcho-punks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The national government declared the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”
Brad knew what to do: Film it all. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist bookstores. Revolution is real, he’d say, here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked rebels stuffing rags into bottles full of gasoline, farmers with machetes; free kitchens, free medical clinics, free buses, commandeered by farmers and fishermen. At a street funeral, old women sing a radical anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son. “La muerte as gobierno malo!” shout the mourners. (”Death to the government!”) “Viva Alejandro!” Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by a group of soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home, “And now Alejandro waits in the zocalo“—the city plaza—”he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song…one more martyr in a dirty war…one more bullet cracks the night.”
-
Kenilworth, Illinois, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away close to the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place in which the wrong side of the suburb means houses cost only a couple of million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, says Stephanie Rogers, a family friend, they kept quiet. “If Kenilworth wasn’t the absolute height of preppiness,” she says, “it was only because we were Midwestern. Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”
Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were achievers, and leaders,” says Rogers. For Brad’s three older siblings, that meant good grades, sports and student government, Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” says his sister Christy, a graphic designer who lives in San Diego. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He preferred science fiction and fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his all-American dad: Hardy, an engineer who owned a small factory, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures, write modules for role-playing games. It wasn’t the monsters that enthralled him, it was the struggles between good and evil.
One of his favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat-gorgeous geek–a dungeon master!—who was friends with jocks, preps, even Kenilworth’s tiny clique of stoners. With his feathered hair, his rugby-shirt collar standing proud and a broad smile sprawling beneath dreamy eyes, Brad looked like an extra in a John Hughes movie.
But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.”
The Will children were expected to be athletes (Brad was a runner) and stick with an instrument. But one day Brad announced he was quitting trumpet to play guitar. Instead of joining clubs, he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. “But he wasn’t a loaf.”
The one unbendable rule for Will children was college. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps College. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C, but after he aced his entrance exams he squeaked into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First! That ethos of direct action and theatrical gestures drew Brad west when he graduated in 1992. He followed the hippie highway to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or T.A.Z., a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life of Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Wilson writes, “they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”
Wilson wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou“—crazy love—”neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels…” Brad was becoming one of Wilson’s wolfangels. “Very high-energy, extremely bright, not so well-controlled,” Wilson remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”
“Brad liked being in a hotbed of ideas,” says his mother, happy, at least, that her son had a job. She didn’t know that he stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” that suited Brad—cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Wilson’s manifesto.
His first attempt came one summer when 50,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called “The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual.” Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Wilson to perform the ceremony and a poet named Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was the bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Wilson. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed the bride, a long smooch that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to find out whether he was really seeing two men making out. Brad declared the stunt a victory when the fundamentalist decided to stick around, apparently convinced that poets throw better parties than Promise Keepers.
That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the same time: a party and performance. But Brad didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become an “intentional community”—a commune—called Dreamtime Village. Dreamtime was like a surreal version of the town Brad had grown up in: There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses and almost no rules. Then, in the summer of 1995, Brad became interested in the stories he heard from a group of New York squatters on a road trip. When they headed back east, Brad hitched a ride.
“I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” he wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim Eighties and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent-free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East 5th Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher who befriended Brad. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired an electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared it with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors home—their response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city. This was the life Brad had been looking for.
-
Anarchist isn’t so much a singular ideology as a set of overlapping philosophies, and Brad wanted to explore them all. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought, borrowed or even dumpster-dived, his long, bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. he read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who gave to anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology. In theory, anyway. In practice, the anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. he was tight with anarcho-primitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user-friendly.”
He had a sharp side, too. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the 5th Street Squat, he’d “talk really loud” about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave Giuliani an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden…When it was all over: a rubble heap.”
“I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told The Village Voice. Afterward, Brad undertook a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire, his hands were shaking.”
“He had a certain innocence,” says Stephan Said, a squatter and folk singer Brad admired. “What led him to his death was at the same time what made him so endearing.”
In 1998, Brad went out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ‘cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who’d become one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”
A city girl, Reddy–in Oregon she took the name Warcry, a not-so-subtle response to “hippie-ish” tree-sitters like Julia Butterfly—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”
Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, 200 feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No; a love poem.
The woods were noisy with the music of the tree-sitters. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass and Conflict blasted full volume. The most popular song seemed to be “White Rabbit.” After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “Why are you people playing White Rabbit over and over again?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” White Rabbit meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree-sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.
Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. She brought a video camera. One day loggers brought down a giant within fifty yards of Brad’s and Warcry’s video, but you can hear his raw scream: “Fuuuck!” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his treehouse, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.
-
What set Brad apart from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the WTO Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. When he made it there, he didn’t tell them what had really gone down. “He didn’t want to burden us,” says his mother.
That’s how Brad kept his truce with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that Neary—who goes by Glass—could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South America coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop-spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine question?” It wasn’t meant as a question.
“Later, I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.
The two had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, tall and skinny with big curves and big eyes and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to grief to warmongering. “What the fuck happened to my city?” she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.
There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a French woman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later, she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged. Brad flew over to visit.
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked. “We can raise the child together.”
“I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”
When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.
“He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs–Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil, they worked with the Movimiento Sin Terra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than 20 million acres of farmland. In Buenos Aires, they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia, they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake.
Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his best medium. In 2004, he scraped together $300 for a used Canon ZR 40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.
In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of 12,000 landless peasants called Sonho Real (”Real Dream”), Brad filmed a police attack that resulted in two dead and twenty “missing.” Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair and beat him to a pulp. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon, it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.
But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. “I feel like I am haunted,” he wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “I keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—I can’t escape it.”
-
The Mexico to which Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, the Bush clone who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry bully obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2nd, Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call, and the next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. In exchange for the PRI’s support, he promised that his party would bail out the PRI’s cash cow: Oaxaca.
Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in a poor nation. In 2004, the PRI installed as governor a rising star with a reputation for electoral fraud named Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at milking the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was keeping a lid on the discontent that has been rippling across Mexico since the Zapatistas marched out of the jungle in 2004.
“If they want to kill our teachers,” Oaxaqueños declared after Ruiz’s police killed several striking teachers on June 14th, 2006, “they should kill us all now.” From that day on, Oaxaca City was in open revolt. “Con Ulises’pelotas, yo haré los huevos fritos,” women chanted in the streets. (”With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!”). It was as if Louisiana’s poor converged on New Orleans, shoved aside the political hacks and ran the city themselves for months, even as National Guardsmen drove around shooting into houses.
And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad. Friends tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—”doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of a report on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”
“I think I will go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.
“You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”
John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca City’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life savings into it—that made him look like a professional. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?” He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.”
He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned from Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly, the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist rag back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.” Mexican authorities evidently agreed—they were preparing to make an example out of Oaxaca.
-
Brad’s footage on October 27th begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big mamas with frying pans. They begin to shout. “the people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens onto a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns of his camera.
When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver drop kicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. (”Look!”) From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you OK, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.
Then the final footage played around the globe half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche wey que no este tomando fotos!” somebody shouts. (”Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!”) Brad keeps shooting. He steps up onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.
“I watch this, and I say, Brad, stop! Don’t do this!” says Miguel, the Brazilian filmmaker. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”
Bang–a bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.
“Ayúdeme!” he screams. (“Help me!”)
“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. (“Take it easy, take it easy.”) A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital don’t understand English, and Quebrado has forgotten how to speak his mind.
-
His old girlfriend Glass was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed like he missed her too. She’d been in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca, and they’d gone on a pub crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm. The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” Most of all she wanted to sing his favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear Brad’s voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/To believe in this living is a hard way to go.
“I have to e-mail Brad,” she thought. “This is so great!” Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”
“What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “I’m not calling his mother until I know what happened,” Glass said. The stranger gave Glass another number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end, another stranger.
“What’s been confirmed?”
“Oh, he’s dead.”
All Glass remembers after that is screaming.
-
In Oaxaca, the APPOs combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with 4,000 federal police. The U.S. ambassador, a Bush crony from Texas, blamed the violence on schoolteachers and said that Brad’s death “underscores the need for a return to law and order.” In the coming months, the APPO would be crushed; Calderón would slam through a Mexican version of the Patriot Act, allowing police to tap phones and make arrests without warrants or charges; and, this past fall, the Bush administration proposed a $1.4 billion military aid package for Calderón’s regime, ostensibly to fight drugs and “terrorism.”
And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs in plain clothes charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events, Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November, a judge set the suspects free.
Last March, Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” notes Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”
The Wills are not, by nature, speculative people. At age sixty-eight, Hardy is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour each way every day to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged at the great oak dining table, like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics and ballistics.
It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. If the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the cops Brad filmed. But a re-examination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says. But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may start the wheels of justice turning. I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by his friend Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst appears, expands, drifts like smoke, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pizels—very possible the bullet that’s about to hit Brad.
“Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly, “this is what we need.”
He’s excited, his face flushed. It’s 11:30 at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting for the Wills’ response. Hardy wants to see a still she’s isolated of a man who appears to be holding a sniper rifle, more potential evidence for a long-distance kill shot. “This could really change everything!” Hardy says. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room filled with hunting trophies and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle and turns around, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.
“It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”
The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by such a clumsy old weapon. Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.
Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, bullets in Brazil. Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s gaining a worldly wisdom, grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of red, white, and blue stones on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, the lies they told her to her face.
“It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now. In spades.”
One of the most common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents, activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t what Brad Will was doing. Had he come through that fire-fight on October 27th, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d tell her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d say that the lake was flattening in the cold, that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His footage likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded. Yet the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.
“The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that turned Brad Will on to those possibilities, “an invisible golden cord that connects us.”
Brad Will a wonderful soulmate that went before
Anarchist Superstar: The Revolutionary Who Filmed His Own Murder
Submitted by worker on Sat, 2008-01-26 05:21.
Tags: Anarchist PeopleHistory
From Rolling Stone - By Jeff Sharlet
HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH
The Martyrdom of Brad Will
Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.
He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning against the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for the Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad laugh. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst: the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the smart guy you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts. In the 1990s, he’d helped hand New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the city’s community gardens. In the new decade, he became a star of Indymedia’s anti-star system, an interconnected anti-corporate press that lets activists communicate—directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.
Brad seemed to be everywhere: One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding a bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame shaking with happy rebel laughter later while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.
Now, Brad has become most famous for the final minutes of his last day alive, October 27th, 2006, in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He’d gone to document a massive strike blowing up into revolt against the government. His video camera peers through broken glass at a smashed computer; holds steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawls under a truck to spy on a group of… well, most people who watch Brad’s video on YouTube don’t know who they are. Cops, probably, though they wear no uniforms. Brad feints and charges toward them along with a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, improbably chasing men toting .38s and AR-15s.
With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows men with guns may be hiding. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara, mátalo!” government supporters ranted on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca. “If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke—muzzle flash beneath a gray sun—and his own knees rising up towards the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing toward him: “No esten tomando fotos!” (“Stop taking pictures!”) Brad didn’t hear.
He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.
-
During the three weeks he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as “Qeubrado” (”Broken”). He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s – a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team— he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” remembers his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half-warrior, half-poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode— “sweet escalation,” he called it, protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.
By the time he got to Oaxaca, in the fall of 2006, he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a Brazilian filmmaker who has produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” In the end there was just a picture, his last shot, the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.
“Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared. “I went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—I have this feeling like I will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot— the body all sewed up and naked— you see it in the papers every day—I am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.”
Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. Oaxaca was bigger, more exciting, more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s 70,000 teachers had exploded after the governor attacked the teachers with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example. In Oaxaca, every kind of leftist organization—indigenous groups, unions, students, farmers, anarcho-punks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The national government declared the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”
Brad knew what to do: Film it all. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist bookstores. Revolution is real, he’d say, here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked rebels stuffing rags into bottles full of gasoline, farmers with machetes; free kitchens, free medical clinics, free buses, commandeered by farmers and fishermen. At a street funeral, old women sing a radical anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son. “La muerte as gobierno malo!” shout the mourners. (”Death to the government!”) “Viva Alejandro!” Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by a group of soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home, “And now Alejandro waits in the zocalo“—the city plaza—”he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song…one more martyr in a dirty war…one more bullet cracks the night.”
-
Kenilworth, Illinois, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away close to the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place in which the wrong side of the suburb means houses cost only a couple of million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, says Stephanie Rogers, a family friend, they kept quiet. “If Kenilworth wasn’t the absolute height of preppiness,” she says, “it was only because we were Midwestern. Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”
Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were achievers, and leaders,” says Rogers. For Brad’s three older siblings, that meant good grades, sports and student government, Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” says his sister Christy, a graphic designer who lives in San Diego. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He preferred science fiction and fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his all-American dad: Hardy, an engineer who owned a small factory, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures, write modules for role-playing games. It wasn’t the monsters that enthralled him, it was the struggles between good and evil.
One of his favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat-gorgeous geek–a dungeon master!—who was friends with jocks, preps, even Kenilworth’s tiny clique of stoners. With his feathered hair, his rugby-shirt collar standing proud and a broad smile sprawling beneath dreamy eyes, Brad looked like an extra in a John Hughes movie.
But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.”
The Will children were expected to be athletes (Brad was a runner) and stick with an instrument. But one day Brad announced he was quitting trumpet to play guitar. Instead of joining clubs, he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. “But he wasn’t a loaf.”
The one unbendable rule for Will children was college. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps College. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C, but after he aced his entrance exams he squeaked into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First! That ethos of direct action and theatrical gestures drew Brad west when he graduated in 1992. He followed the hippie highway to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or T.A.Z., a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life of Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Wilson writes, “they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”
Wilson wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou“—crazy love—”neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels…” Brad was becoming one of Wilson’s wolfangels. “Very high-energy, extremely bright, not so well-controlled,” Wilson remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”
“Brad liked being in a hotbed of ideas,” says his mother, happy, at least, that her son had a job. She didn’t know that he stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” that suited Brad—cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Wilson’s manifesto.
His first attempt came one summer when 50,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called “The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual.” Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Wilson to perform the ceremony and a poet named Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was the bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Wilson. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed the bride, a long smooch that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to find out whether he was really seeing two men making out. Brad declared the stunt a victory when the fundamentalist decided to stick around, apparently convinced that poets throw better parties than Promise Keepers.
That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the same time: a party and performance. But Brad didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become an “intentional community”—a commune—called Dreamtime Village. Dreamtime was like a surreal version of the town Brad had grown up in: There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses and almost no rules. Then, in the summer of 1995, Brad became interested in the stories he heard from a group of New York squatters on a road trip. When they headed back east, Brad hitched a ride.
“I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” he wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim Eighties and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent-free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East 5th Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher who befriended Brad. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired an electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared it with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors home—their response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city. This was the life Brad had been looking for.
-
Anarchist isn’t so much a singular ideology as a set of overlapping philosophies, and Brad wanted to explore them all. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought, borrowed or even dumpster-dived, his long, bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. he read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who gave to anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology. In theory, anyway. In practice, the anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. he was tight with anarcho-primitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user-friendly.”
He had a sharp side, too. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the 5th Street Squat, he’d “talk really loud” about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave Giuliani an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden…When it was all over: a rubble heap.”
“I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told The Village Voice. Afterward, Brad undertook a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire, his hands were shaking.”
“He had a certain innocence,” says Stephan Said, a squatter and folk singer Brad admired. “What led him to his death was at the same time what made him so endearing.”
In 1998, Brad went out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ‘cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who’d become one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”
A city girl, Reddy–in Oregon she took the name Warcry, a not-so-subtle response to “hippie-ish” tree-sitters like Julia Butterfly—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”
Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, 200 feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No; a love poem.
The woods were noisy with the music of the tree-sitters. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass and Conflict blasted full volume. The most popular song seemed to be “White Rabbit.” After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “Why are you people playing White Rabbit over and over again?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” White Rabbit meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree-sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.
Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. She brought a video camera. One day loggers brought down a giant within fifty yards of Brad’s and Warcry’s video, but you can hear his raw scream: “Fuuuck!” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his treehouse, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.
-
What set Brad apart from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the WTO Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. When he made it there, he didn’t tell them what had really gone down. “He didn’t want to burden us,” says his mother.
That’s how Brad kept his truce with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that Neary—who goes by Glass—could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South America coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop-spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine question?” It wasn’t meant as a question.
“Later, I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.
The two had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, tall and skinny with big curves and big eyes and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to grief to warmongering. “What the fuck happened to my city?” she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.
There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a French woman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later, she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged. Brad flew over to visit.
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked. “We can raise the child together.”
“I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”
When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.
“He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs–Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil, they worked with the Movimiento Sin Terra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than 20 million acres of farmland. In Buenos Aires, they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia, they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake.
Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his best medium. In 2004, he scraped together $300 for a used Canon ZR 40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.
In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of 12,000 landless peasants called Sonho Real (”Real Dream”), Brad filmed a police attack that resulted in two dead and twenty “missing.” Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair and beat him to a pulp. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon, it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.
But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. “I feel like I am haunted,” he wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “I keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—I can’t escape it.”
-
The Mexico to which Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, the Bush clone who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry bully obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2nd, Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call, and the next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. In exchange for the PRI’s support, he promised that his party would bail out the PRI’s cash cow: Oaxaca.
Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in a poor nation. In 2004, the PRI installed as governor a rising star with a reputation for electoral fraud named Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at milking the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was keeping a lid on the discontent that has been rippling across Mexico since the Zapatistas marched out of the jungle in 2004.
“If they want to kill our teachers,” Oaxaqueños declared after Ruiz’s police killed several striking teachers on June 14th, 2006, “they should kill us all now.” From that day on, Oaxaca City was in open revolt. “Con Ulises’pelotas, yo haré los huevos fritos,” women chanted in the streets. (”With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!”). It was as if Louisiana’s poor converged on New Orleans, shoved aside the political hacks and ran the city themselves for months, even as National Guardsmen drove around shooting into houses.
And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad. Friends tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—”doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of a report on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”
“I think I will go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.
“You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”
John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca City’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life savings into it—that made him look like a professional. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?” He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.”
He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned from Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly, the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist rag back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.” Mexican authorities evidently agreed—they were preparing to make an example out of Oaxaca.
-
Brad’s footage on October 27th begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big mamas with frying pans. They begin to shout. “the people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens onto a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns of his camera.
When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver drop kicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. (”Look!”) From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you OK, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.
Then the final footage played around the globe half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche wey que no este tomando fotos!” somebody shouts. (”Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!”) Brad keeps shooting. He steps up onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.
“I watch this, and I say, Brad, stop! Don’t do this!” says Miguel, the Brazilian filmmaker. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”
Bang–a bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.
“Ayúdeme!” he screams. (“Help me!”)
“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. (“Take it easy, take it easy.”) A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital don’t understand English, and Quebrado has forgotten how to speak his mind.
-
His old girlfriend Glass was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed like he missed her too. She’d been in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca, and they’d gone on a pub crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm. The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” Most of all she wanted to sing his favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear Brad’s voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/To believe in this living is a hard way to go.
“I have to e-mail Brad,” she thought. “This is so great!” Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”
“What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “I’m not calling his mother until I know what happened,” Glass said. The stranger gave Glass another number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end, another stranger.
“What’s been confirmed?”
“Oh, he’s dead.”
All Glass remembers after that is screaming.
-
In Oaxaca, the APPOs combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with 4,000 federal police. The U.S. ambassador, a Bush crony from Texas, blamed the violence on schoolteachers and said that Brad’s death “underscores the need for a return to law and order.” In the coming months, the APPO would be crushed; Calderón would slam through a Mexican version of the Patriot Act, allowing police to tap phones and make arrests without warrants or charges; and, this past fall, the Bush administration proposed a $1.4 billion military aid package for Calderón’s regime, ostensibly to fight drugs and “terrorism.”
And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs in plain clothes charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events, Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November, a judge set the suspects free.
Last March, Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” notes Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”
The Wills are not, by nature, speculative people. At age sixty-eight, Hardy is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour each way every day to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged at the great oak dining table, like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics and ballistics.
It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. If the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the cops Brad filmed. But a re-examination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says. But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may start the wheels of justice turning. I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by his friend Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst appears, expands, drifts like smoke, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pizels—very possible the bullet that’s about to hit Brad.
“Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly, “this is what we need.”
He’s excited, his face flushed. It’s 11:30 at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting for the Wills’ response. Hardy wants to see a still she’s isolated of a man who appears to be holding a sniper rifle, more potential evidence for a long-distance kill shot. “This could really change everything!” Hardy says. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room filled with hunting trophies and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle and turns around, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.
“It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”
The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by such a clumsy old weapon. Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.
Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, bullets in Brazil. Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s gaining a worldly wisdom, grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of red, white, and blue stones on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, the lies they told her to her face.
“It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now. In spades.”
One of the most common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents, activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t what Brad Will was doing. Had he come through that fire-fight on October 27th, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d tell her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d say that the lake was flattening in the cold, that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His footage likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded. Yet the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.
“The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that turned Brad Will on to those possibilities, “an invisible golden cord that connects us.”
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Brad Will a wonderful soulmate that went before
Kathy Change
"CALL ME A FLAMING RADICAL BURNING FOR ATTENTION, BUT MY REAL INTENTION IS TO SPARK A DISCUSSION OF HOW WE CAN PEACEFULLY TRANSFORM OUR WORLD. AMERICA, I OFFER MYSELF TO YOU AS AN ALARM AGAINST ARMAGEDDON AND A TORCH FOR LIBERTY. "
Kathy Change/October 1996
Brad Will's Spirit Lives in this song
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
Brad sings “The Solidarity Song” also known as the Teargas song - was the defiant anthem of the resistance to the World Trade Organization that took place in Seattle in 1999. Originally written by Desert Rat, a comrade, Brad added a verse or two of his own, about forests and preserving ecological integrity of this planet; something Brad was dedicated to while he was alive. Brad sang this song in a squat in Amsterdam in 2000. We were in Amsterdam because of the United Nations talks on Climate Change. We were involved with the protests intended to pressure nations and politicians to take real meaningful measures to address the threat of global warming, mass extinction, pollution, etc., (Still waiting for that…!) Brad's songs and his way of singing touched us deep and inspired thousands. He sang from his heart and gave it everything he had. That's also how he lived his life until he was killed at the tender age of 36. Brad’s singing fills my soul with joy though the loss of him still cuts most deeply…
Lyrics to the song Brad Will is singing above
Brad and Malachi and Cathy, and others , will be missed because they made choices according to their dreams. And that looks to me like the most pragmatic and realistic thing you can do.
I’ve seen the land beyond these borders where the corporations rule
And they spin their lies and they globalize and the working man’s their tool
And the streams are so polluted that their banks are bleak and bare
And the babies all are born deformed and the smog is everywhere
And the workers’ wages dropped thirty percent in just one year
Now the greedy bastards want to bring that situation here
And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I’ve heard the tales from conquered islands where the sweatshop barons rule
Recruiting girls from the Asian slums to be the rich man’s tool
And they’re promised lives of luxury in the golden U.S.A.
And then they’re stranded on these islands with their passports stripped away
And their aging fingers toil and bleed year after grueling year
Now the greedy bastard want to bring those same conditions here
And you called upon me sister and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear sister, when I spoke these words to you:
“I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I’ve walked the tall and misty forests, pulsing vein from ancient time
And they’ll cut the heart out of a mountain to kill the oldest thing alive
Now the rainforest dwellers smell a burning, and the ‘dozers are close behind
Replaced with plantations and cattle, plowing under whatever they find
With the rain comes a raging mudslide, where the land was stripped and cleared
Now those greedy bastards want to bring those same conditions here
I’ve watched the oceans rolling, schools of fish running under the tide
Working fishermen grounding their bodies, starving on a hook and line
While industrial fishers haul in their nets, scoring the deep ocean floor
Dolphin and sea turtle snagged in those nets will ride those waves no more
They rip the heart out of the deep blue sea, their boats increase every year
Now the greedy bastards want to push their bloody products here
And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
- By Desert Rat and Brad
Braceros in latin-american studies
The Dallas Morning News
January 27, 2002
Braceros want an old promise met
Mexicans who worked in U.S. in '40s seek to recoup hundreds of millions in unpaid wages
By ALFREDO CORCHADO and RICARDO SANDOVAL / The Dallas Morning News
HERMOSILLO, Mexico – Every day it gets harder for Zenaido Ramírez Bernal to compete with the drone from the oversized air
conditioner that keeps the torrid heat out of his tidy home in this desert city.
While Mr. Ramírez has a sturdy body, strong hands and a prominent set of bright brown eyes, his reedy voice is fading. But if the
94-year-old is slowly giving way to time, his recollections of his prime are not.
In the summer of 1942, Mr. Ramírez was the first Mexican laborer to sign up for work in the United States during World War II as part of
a guest-worker program. He and thousands of other Mexicans came to help the United States fight the war.
The men, called braceros – Spanish for strong arms – were needed to tend farms, work on the nation's railroads and otherwise provide the muscle to keep
America's economic engine churning and its people fed.
"I was the first. I was proud of that because it meant helping our neighbor when he needed it," Mr. Ramírez said, fumbling with a
yellowed work card stamped No. 1 by the Mexican Labor Ministry. "In California, the bosses and the other workers would forget
my name and just called me 'Uno.'
"The other men seemed to look up to me because of that. But it never earned me anything special."
The bracero experience in the United States has largely gone untold, but that may change. A group of aging braceros has filed a
lawsuit seeking to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid wages they say are owed them by the Mexican and American
governments.
The money had been withheld from their pay between 1942 and 1948 and was supposed to go into saving accounts that the two
governments had set up as incentives for the guest workers to return home. It was to be the braceros' nest eggs.
About 300,000 braceros worked in the United States between 1942 and 1948. By 1964, an estimated 3 million braceros had held
jobs in America.
The U.S. government maintains the lawsuit belongs in Mexican courts. The Mexican government insists it is immune from suits filed
in foreign courts and says it has no documentation to support the braceros' claim.
But documents examined by The Dallas Morning News show that in the 1940s, both governments kept ample records of what
each bracero was owed, and both governments recorded scores of complaints about missing savings.
The money apparently was mismanaged by Mexican officials in the 1940s or lost in the complex bracero bureaucracy, according to
the documents.
"This is a classic human-rights issue where we're talking about the interest of individuals who were wronged," said Bill Lee, one of a
team of lawyers who have taken up the guest workers' cause.
"This is also about a greater social issue. This is important to the Hispanic community because this is about the community's soldiers
in the field who are now seeking justice," said Mr. Lee, a top civil rights prosecutor in the Clinton administration and now a partner
in the San Francisco-based law firm Lieff, Cabraser, Heinmann and Bernstein.
Lawyers representing the U.S. and Mexican governments in the case refused to comment, as did U.S. Justice Department officials
in Washington, and Interior and Foreign Ministry officials in Mexico City.
Privately, however, some officials suggested that if it's proved that braceros' savings were never repaid, some kind of settlement is
likely. Both governments might contribute to a fund for payment to the few hundred surviving braceros, the officials said.
Some migration activists say the ex-braceros' lawsuits are a vital test case for the two countries now engaged in talks over another
guest-worker deal.
"Before we do another program of this nature, we must take care of the old braceros," said Eliseo Medina, a Mexican immigrant
who is AFL-CIO executive vice president and a member of a binational advisory group on migration. "It would be too easy to
repeat the mistakes of the past, so we have to address those mistakes before we can move on."
Documents in the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Mexican National Archives indicate the bracero
program leaked money everywhere and that money that did reside in various government-run banks was badly managed.
For example, bracero complaints prompted a 1947 internal audit of the now-defunct Banco Agrícola of Mexico. It found that
bracero savings accounts totaling at least 12 million pesos – about $4 million – had not been distributed.
Banco Agrícola was the primary holder of wartime bracero savings accounts. In the document, bank officials say the money was
instead used to fund day-to-day branch operations.
Other documents, apparently from the Mexican president's office, show that government regulators scolded bank officials for
diverting bracero money to cover day-to-day bank operations. But there is no evidence that the savings accounts were ever
replenished.
In fact, another internal audit reports that Banco Agrícola was still millions of pesos in the red before it was merged with Banrural,
Mexico's present-day rural development bank.
Official silence
Behind the scenes, Mexican officials have quietly attended meetings with former braceros. Mexican Interior Minister Santiago Creel
also has met with a Mexican congressional committee investigating the scandal, promising cooperation with the probe.
But publicly, American lawyers hired by the Mexican government support an expected bid by the U.S. Justice Department to have
judges throw out the braceros' lawsuits, filed in January 2001 in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
If judges go along, analysts said, the case probably will die a quick death in Mexico's cumbersome civil courts.
Bracero lawyers allege that both governments broke their promises to make savings funds available. They have not yet disclosed a
dollar amount that they seek.
The same lawyers discount the government moves. They point out that while U.S. officials contend it's a Mexican matter, American
courts have a history of weighing human rights cases from around the world.
These include the Holocaust survivors who were robbed of assets and Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese
military in World War II.
"Besides, some of these braceros are actually now American citizens," Mr. Lee said. "And these men worked in the United States
under contracts co-signed by the United States."
The U.S. State Department reviewed the bracero program in 1943. Officials reported that "the War Manpower Commission shall
send directly to [Mexico] a list containing the names of the beneficiaries and the amount corresponding to each of them for the
above-mentioned fund."
'Established a system'
In 1944, Mexican Labor Ministry officials responded in a letter to the U.S. War Manpower Commission about how to get back
pay and savings fund withholdings to braceros already back in Mexico.
"The institution is technically and practically apt to return the total amount of savings funds to Mexican [workers] ... we have
established a system of bookkeeping ... which allows us to have the individual accounts up-to-date," the officials replied.
Those passages have former braceros fuming.
"How could there be documents then, that are now in its own archives, while the government now says it can find nothing proving
individuals were owed money?" asked Ventura Gutiérrez.
Mr. Gutiérrez is a California farm labor activist whose inquiry into savings withholdings from his late grandfather's bracero
paychecks sparked the current legal fight.
Mexican officials have countered with evidence they say showed that their country's debt to braceros was largely paid off.
A report published last year in the Los Angeles Times described a 1946 Mexican report that detailed the payout of more than
three-quarters of the money in bracero savings accounts.
But elsewhere in the same document, Mexican officials acknowledge that record-keeping in the bracero savings program was a
mess. They called it "another motive for discontent and protest."
Bracero lawyers also insist the 1946 document is an unsubstantiated shell.
"There are no details, no supporting documentation on withdrawals by braceros, nothing but officials in Mexico City putting up
simple numbers to satisfy an inquiry by the United States at the time," said Jonathan Rothstein, a Chicago attorney representing the
braceros.
He said the Labor Ministry did not offer receipts that would prove that braceros actually collected the money.
$35 a week
Jesus Ibarra Roque says he was one of the thousands cheated out of earnings.
From March through October 1945, Mr. Ibarra pulled potatoes from wind-blown fields in Idaho. He was paid an average of $35 a
week.
The money wasn't much, but it was better than anything the 30-year-old had seen in his life of hard work on the family farm near the
village of Tepezala, 330 miles north of Mexico City.
But for all his work, he says he never received $90 owed him. That's what the U.S. government withheld from his pay for deposit
into a savings account for him. Mr. Ibarra also figures he's owed 56 years worth of interest and compensation for his inconvenience.
He said he vigorously pursued the money after his return to Tepezala, joining other braceros from his hometown in filing complaints
about missing money.
After a year, Banco Agrícola wrote to Mr. Ibarra, saying it had mailed him two money orders totaling 518 pesos – about $120 in
1946 currency.
"I never saw the money orders. I never saw my money. And the amount they quote in that correspondence doesn't even sound like
what I was owed," said Mr. Ibarra, who still wonders what happened to his money.
Mexican government officials counter that even if there is enough proof to sway a jury, the actual amount owed might be significantly
lower than $500 million, the amount a Mexican congressional committee estimated the workers were due.
The bracero deal, signed in 1942 by presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Manuel Ávila Camacho, stipulated that the 10 percent
withholding would not accumulate interest.
Bracero lawyers argue that it's always been illegal for a bank to hold someone's money without paying interest.
"Besides, they owe the interest because that's what's called for when a contract is broken," Mr. Rothstein said. "This contract was
broken."
No bank accounts
Before lawyers instructed Mexican officials not to discuss the bracero lawsuit, government officials said after an exhaustive search
that they found no records supporting the workers' claims.
Bracero advocates have rejected that assertion, insisting that the money traveled via a clear paper trail between American farms and
Mexican banks.
The process broke down from the start, it appears.
Archival documents in the United States and Mexico show that American diplomats monitoring the treaty in the 1940s warned
superiors in Washington that misconduct in Mexico was resulting in the cheating of braceros.
Former bracero Reyes Piñón complained in a 1948 letter to President Miguel Aleman that a member of Mexico's Secret Service
illegally withdrew all the money in his savings account. Even after filing a police report, the money was not returned, Mr. Piñón said.
Complicating the fate of the bracero savings fund were plans by the Mexican government to use the money to buy farm implements
and fund irrigation projects in rural communities, an apparent violation of the contract with braceros.
"Fifty years later, we have neither the money, irrigation projects nor the farm implements," said Mexican Congressman Sergio
Acosta, a member of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, who heads the Mexican congressional investigation into the
bracero issue. "The money could not have just gone up in smoke. There must be an explanation. We owe the braceros that much."
The money trail
The idea for the savings accounts apparently came from a desire to help braceros and to encourage their return to Mexico when the
work was done.
During Mr. Ibarra's Idaho stint, for example, 10 percent of his weekly pay was withheld by his employers. The money was sent to
regional offices of the federal government's wartime manpower agencies, which forwarded the cash to Washington. From there the
money went to Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, where the Mexican government maintained accounts.
Afterward, Mexico's central bank issued credits to Banco Agrícola and Banco Nacional del Ahorro – the national savings bank that
was supposed to redistribute the funds.
Most former braceros interviewed by The News either say they simply forgot about the money, thought it was some kind of
nonrecoverable tax or were put off by Mexican government red tape.
Mr. Ibarra has been on the family farm ever since he returned from his stint in the United States. Unlike many other braceros who
stayed in the United States, Mr. Ibarra said he sought only to help his northern neighbors win the war. "I would have picked up a
rifle and marched to the battlefield if they had asked."
Mr. Ibarra is 86 but belies his age with smooth skin and the sinewy arms of a working farmer. He feels physically fit enough for one
more fight, he says.
He agrees with other ex-braceros that they deserve official recognition for their wartime contributions and preference in obtaining
visas for visits to families in the United States. For now, though, he just wants an answer to the 50-year-old mystery of the money.
"At first, my bosses [in Idaho] told me I'd get the money when I left to come home," Mr. Ibarra recalled recently, sitting in the
sun-bathed plaza of Tepezala.
"I was then told the money would come to me in Mexico. They said to be patient and wait a bit. But it's been more than 50 years now,
and I wonder how much they owe me today."
Kathy Change
"CALL ME A FLAMING RADICAL BURNING FOR ATTENTION, BUT MY REAL INTENTION IS TO SPARK A DISCUSSION OF HOW WE CAN PEACEFULLY TRANSFORM OUR WORLD. AMERICA, I OFFER MYSELF TO YOU AS AN ALARM AGAINST ARMAGEDDON AND A TORCH FOR LIBERTY. "
Kathy Change/October 1996
Brad Will's Spirit Lives in this song
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
Brad sings “The Solidarity Song” also known as the Teargas song - was the defiant anthem of the resistance to the World Trade Organization that took place in Seattle in 1999. Originally written by Desert Rat, a comrade, Brad added a verse or two of his own, about forests and preserving ecological integrity of this planet; something Brad was dedicated to while he was alive. Brad sang this song in a squat in Amsterdam in 2000. We were in Amsterdam because of the United Nations talks on Climate Change. We were involved with the protests intended to pressure nations and politicians to take real meaningful measures to address the threat of global warming, mass extinction, pollution, etc., (Still waiting for that…!) Brad's songs and his way of singing touched us deep and inspired thousands. He sang from his heart and gave it everything he had. That's also how he lived his life until he was killed at the tender age of 36. Brad’s singing fills my soul with joy though the loss of him still cuts most deeply…
Lyrics to the song Brad Will is singing above
Brad and Malachi and Cathy, and others , will be missed because they made choices according to their dreams. And that looks to me like the most pragmatic and realistic thing you can do.
I’ve seen the land beyond these borders where the corporations rule
And they spin their lies and they globalize and the working man’s their tool
And the streams are so polluted that their banks are bleak and bare
And the babies all are born deformed and the smog is everywhere
And the workers’ wages dropped thirty percent in just one year
Now the greedy bastards want to bring that situation here
And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I’ve heard the tales from conquered islands where the sweatshop barons rule
Recruiting girls from the Asian slums to be the rich man’s tool
And they’re promised lives of luxury in the golden U.S.A.
And then they’re stranded on these islands with their passports stripped away
And their aging fingers toil and bleed year after grueling year
Now the greedy bastard want to bring those same conditions here
And you called upon me sister and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear sister, when I spoke these words to you:
“I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I’ve walked the tall and misty forests, pulsing vein from ancient time
And they’ll cut the heart out of a mountain to kill the oldest thing alive
Now the rainforest dwellers smell a burning, and the ‘dozers are close behind
Replaced with plantations and cattle, plowing under whatever they find
With the rain comes a raging mudslide, where the land was stripped and cleared
Now those greedy bastards want to bring those same conditions here
I’ve watched the oceans rolling, schools of fish running under the tide
Working fishermen grounding their bodies, starving on a hook and line
While industrial fishers haul in their nets, scoring the deep ocean floor
Dolphin and sea turtle snagged in those nets will ride those waves no more
They rip the heart out of the deep blue sea, their boats increase every year
Now the greedy bastards want to push their bloody products here
And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
- By Desert Rat and Brad
Braceros in latin-american studies
The Dallas Morning News
January 27, 2002
Braceros want an old promise met
Mexicans who worked in U.S. in '40s seek to recoup hundreds of millions in unpaid wages
By ALFREDO CORCHADO and RICARDO SANDOVAL / The Dallas Morning News
HERMOSILLO, Mexico – Every day it gets harder for Zenaido Ramírez Bernal to compete with the drone from the oversized air
conditioner that keeps the torrid heat out of his tidy home in this desert city.
While Mr. Ramírez has a sturdy body, strong hands and a prominent set of bright brown eyes, his reedy voice is fading. But if the
94-year-old is slowly giving way to time, his recollections of his prime are not.
In the summer of 1942, Mr. Ramírez was the first Mexican laborer to sign up for work in the United States during World War II as part of
a guest-worker program. He and thousands of other Mexicans came to help the United States fight the war.
The men, called braceros – Spanish for strong arms – were needed to tend farms, work on the nation's railroads and otherwise provide the muscle to keep
America's economic engine churning and its people fed.
"I was the first. I was proud of that because it meant helping our neighbor when he needed it," Mr. Ramírez said, fumbling with a
yellowed work card stamped No. 1 by the Mexican Labor Ministry. "In California, the bosses and the other workers would forget
my name and just called me 'Uno.'
"The other men seemed to look up to me because of that. But it never earned me anything special."
The bracero experience in the United States has largely gone untold, but that may change. A group of aging braceros has filed a
lawsuit seeking to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid wages they say are owed them by the Mexican and American
governments.
The money had been withheld from their pay between 1942 and 1948 and was supposed to go into saving accounts that the two
governments had set up as incentives for the guest workers to return home. It was to be the braceros' nest eggs.
About 300,000 braceros worked in the United States between 1942 and 1948. By 1964, an estimated 3 million braceros had held
jobs in America.
The U.S. government maintains the lawsuit belongs in Mexican courts. The Mexican government insists it is immune from suits filed
in foreign courts and says it has no documentation to support the braceros' claim.
But documents examined by The Dallas Morning News show that in the 1940s, both governments kept ample records of what
each bracero was owed, and both governments recorded scores of complaints about missing savings.
The money apparently was mismanaged by Mexican officials in the 1940s or lost in the complex bracero bureaucracy, according to
the documents.
"This is a classic human-rights issue where we're talking about the interest of individuals who were wronged," said Bill Lee, one of a
team of lawyers who have taken up the guest workers' cause.
"This is also about a greater social issue. This is important to the Hispanic community because this is about the community's soldiers
in the field who are now seeking justice," said Mr. Lee, a top civil rights prosecutor in the Clinton administration and now a partner
in the San Francisco-based law firm Lieff, Cabraser, Heinmann and Bernstein.
Lawyers representing the U.S. and Mexican governments in the case refused to comment, as did U.S. Justice Department officials
in Washington, and Interior and Foreign Ministry officials in Mexico City.
Privately, however, some officials suggested that if it's proved that braceros' savings were never repaid, some kind of settlement is
likely. Both governments might contribute to a fund for payment to the few hundred surviving braceros, the officials said.
Some migration activists say the ex-braceros' lawsuits are a vital test case for the two countries now engaged in talks over another
guest-worker deal.
"Before we do another program of this nature, we must take care of the old braceros," said Eliseo Medina, a Mexican immigrant
who is AFL-CIO executive vice president and a member of a binational advisory group on migration. "It would be too easy to
repeat the mistakes of the past, so we have to address those mistakes before we can move on."
Documents in the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Mexican National Archives indicate the bracero
program leaked money everywhere and that money that did reside in various government-run banks was badly managed.
For example, bracero complaints prompted a 1947 internal audit of the now-defunct Banco Agrícola of Mexico. It found that
bracero savings accounts totaling at least 12 million pesos – about $4 million – had not been distributed.
Banco Agrícola was the primary holder of wartime bracero savings accounts. In the document, bank officials say the money was
instead used to fund day-to-day branch operations.
Other documents, apparently from the Mexican president's office, show that government regulators scolded bank officials for
diverting bracero money to cover day-to-day bank operations. But there is no evidence that the savings accounts were ever
replenished.
In fact, another internal audit reports that Banco Agrícola was still millions of pesos in the red before it was merged with Banrural,
Mexico's present-day rural development bank.
Official silence
Behind the scenes, Mexican officials have quietly attended meetings with former braceros. Mexican Interior Minister Santiago Creel
also has met with a Mexican congressional committee investigating the scandal, promising cooperation with the probe.
But publicly, American lawyers hired by the Mexican government support an expected bid by the U.S. Justice Department to have
judges throw out the braceros' lawsuits, filed in January 2001 in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
If judges go along, analysts said, the case probably will die a quick death in Mexico's cumbersome civil courts.
Bracero lawyers allege that both governments broke their promises to make savings funds available. They have not yet disclosed a
dollar amount that they seek.
The same lawyers discount the government moves. They point out that while U.S. officials contend it's a Mexican matter, American
courts have a history of weighing human rights cases from around the world.
These include the Holocaust survivors who were robbed of assets and Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese
military in World War II.
"Besides, some of these braceros are actually now American citizens," Mr. Lee said. "And these men worked in the United States
under contracts co-signed by the United States."
The U.S. State Department reviewed the bracero program in 1943. Officials reported that "the War Manpower Commission shall
send directly to [Mexico] a list containing the names of the beneficiaries and the amount corresponding to each of them for the
above-mentioned fund."
'Established a system'
In 1944, Mexican Labor Ministry officials responded in a letter to the U.S. War Manpower Commission about how to get back
pay and savings fund withholdings to braceros already back in Mexico.
"The institution is technically and practically apt to return the total amount of savings funds to Mexican [workers] ... we have
established a system of bookkeeping ... which allows us to have the individual accounts up-to-date," the officials replied.
Those passages have former braceros fuming.
"How could there be documents then, that are now in its own archives, while the government now says it can find nothing proving
individuals were owed money?" asked Ventura Gutiérrez.
Mr. Gutiérrez is a California farm labor activist whose inquiry into savings withholdings from his late grandfather's bracero
paychecks sparked the current legal fight.
Mexican officials have countered with evidence they say showed that their country's debt to braceros was largely paid off.
A report published last year in the Los Angeles Times described a 1946 Mexican report that detailed the payout of more than
three-quarters of the money in bracero savings accounts.
But elsewhere in the same document, Mexican officials acknowledge that record-keeping in the bracero savings program was a
mess. They called it "another motive for discontent and protest."
Bracero lawyers also insist the 1946 document is an unsubstantiated shell.
"There are no details, no supporting documentation on withdrawals by braceros, nothing but officials in Mexico City putting up
simple numbers to satisfy an inquiry by the United States at the time," said Jonathan Rothstein, a Chicago attorney representing the
braceros.
He said the Labor Ministry did not offer receipts that would prove that braceros actually collected the money.
$35 a week
Jesus Ibarra Roque says he was one of the thousands cheated out of earnings.
From March through October 1945, Mr. Ibarra pulled potatoes from wind-blown fields in Idaho. He was paid an average of $35 a
week.
The money wasn't much, but it was better than anything the 30-year-old had seen in his life of hard work on the family farm near the
village of Tepezala, 330 miles north of Mexico City.
But for all his work, he says he never received $90 owed him. That's what the U.S. government withheld from his pay for deposit
into a savings account for him. Mr. Ibarra also figures he's owed 56 years worth of interest and compensation for his inconvenience.
He said he vigorously pursued the money after his return to Tepezala, joining other braceros from his hometown in filing complaints
about missing money.
After a year, Banco Agrícola wrote to Mr. Ibarra, saying it had mailed him two money orders totaling 518 pesos – about $120 in
1946 currency.
"I never saw the money orders. I never saw my money. And the amount they quote in that correspondence doesn't even sound like
what I was owed," said Mr. Ibarra, who still wonders what happened to his money.
Mexican government officials counter that even if there is enough proof to sway a jury, the actual amount owed might be significantly
lower than $500 million, the amount a Mexican congressional committee estimated the workers were due.
The bracero deal, signed in 1942 by presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Manuel Ávila Camacho, stipulated that the 10 percent
withholding would not accumulate interest.
Bracero lawyers argue that it's always been illegal for a bank to hold someone's money without paying interest.
"Besides, they owe the interest because that's what's called for when a contract is broken," Mr. Rothstein said. "This contract was
broken."
No bank accounts
Before lawyers instructed Mexican officials not to discuss the bracero lawsuit, government officials said after an exhaustive search
that they found no records supporting the workers' claims.
Bracero advocates have rejected that assertion, insisting that the money traveled via a clear paper trail between American farms and
Mexican banks.
The process broke down from the start, it appears.
Archival documents in the United States and Mexico show that American diplomats monitoring the treaty in the 1940s warned
superiors in Washington that misconduct in Mexico was resulting in the cheating of braceros.
Former bracero Reyes Piñón complained in a 1948 letter to President Miguel Aleman that a member of Mexico's Secret Service
illegally withdrew all the money in his savings account. Even after filing a police report, the money was not returned, Mr. Piñón said.
Complicating the fate of the bracero savings fund were plans by the Mexican government to use the money to buy farm implements
and fund irrigation projects in rural communities, an apparent violation of the contract with braceros.
"Fifty years later, we have neither the money, irrigation projects nor the farm implements," said Mexican Congressman Sergio
Acosta, a member of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, who heads the Mexican congressional investigation into the
bracero issue. "The money could not have just gone up in smoke. There must be an explanation. We owe the braceros that much."
The money trail
The idea for the savings accounts apparently came from a desire to help braceros and to encourage their return to Mexico when the
work was done.
During Mr. Ibarra's Idaho stint, for example, 10 percent of his weekly pay was withheld by his employers. The money was sent to
regional offices of the federal government's wartime manpower agencies, which forwarded the cash to Washington. From there the
money went to Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, where the Mexican government maintained accounts.
Afterward, Mexico's central bank issued credits to Banco Agrícola and Banco Nacional del Ahorro – the national savings bank that
was supposed to redistribute the funds.
Most former braceros interviewed by The News either say they simply forgot about the money, thought it was some kind of
nonrecoverable tax or were put off by Mexican government red tape.
Mr. Ibarra has been on the family farm ever since he returned from his stint in the United States. Unlike many other braceros who
stayed in the United States, Mr. Ibarra said he sought only to help his northern neighbors win the war. "I would have picked up a
rifle and marched to the battlefield if they had asked."
Mr. Ibarra is 86 but belies his age with smooth skin and the sinewy arms of a working farmer. He feels physically fit enough for one
more fight, he says.
He agrees with other ex-braceros that they deserve official recognition for their wartime contributions and preference in obtaining
visas for visits to families in the United States. For now, though, he just wants an answer to the 50-year-old mystery of the money.
"At first, my bosses [in Idaho] told me I'd get the money when I left to come home," Mr. Ibarra recalled recently, sitting in the
sun-bathed plaza of Tepezala.
"I was then told the money would come to me in Mexico. They said to be patient and wait a bit. But it's been more than 50 years now,
and I wonder how much they owe me today."
Insurgents attack NATO's southern Afghan base
Insurgents attack NATO's southern Afghan base
By HEIDI VOGT, Associated Press Writer Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer – 24 mins ago
KABUL, Afghanistan – Insurgents launched a rare ground assault against NATO's main military base in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, wounding several international service members in the second such attack on a major military installation this week, officials said.
A Canadian Press news agency report from the base said artillery and machine gun fire reverberated through the area, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Kabul, several hours after the attack began.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack — the third major assault on NATO forces in Afghanistan in six days — but the Kandahar area is a Taliban stronghold.
On Tuesday, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy in the capital, killing 18 people including six NATO service members including five Americans and a Canadian.
The next day, dozens of Taliban militants attacked the main U.S. military base — Bagram Air Field — killing an American contractor in fighting that lasted more than eight hours.
Rockets started hitting Kandahar Air Field about 8 p.m. local time (15:30 GMT), followed quickly by a ground assault, said Navy Commander Amanda Peperseim, a spokeswoman for NATO forces at the base. She said the attack was still ongoing and did not provide further details.
She said at least five rockets struck the base, wounding a number of service members, as militants tried unsuccessfully to breach the defense perimeter on the northern side. There were no reports of deaths and she did not have the precise number of wounded.
Peperseim did not know how many insurgents launched the attack but said they did not appear to be wearing suicide vests, as had many of those who stormed the Bagram Air Field north of Kabul on Wednesday. In addition to the U.S. contractor's death, 16 militants were killed and five attackers were captured in the Bagram assault.
Rocket attacks against the Kandahar base, located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Kandahar city, are not uncommon. But ground assaults against such large facilities as Kandahar and Bagram are rare, and two attacks in the same week show that the militants are capable of complex operations despite NATO military pressure.
The attacks came soon after the Taliban announced a spring offensive against NATO forces and Afghan government troops — their respone to a promise by the Obama administration to squeeze the Taliban out of their strongholds in southern Kandahar province.
Kandahar Air Field is the launching pad for thousands of additional U.S. forces pouring into the country for a summer surge against the Taliban.
Attacks in the south earlier Saturday killed three NATO service members — one American, one French and one Dutch — and an Afghan interpreter. That brought to 996 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the war began in October 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The Dutch death toll in Afghanistan now is 24 and the French toll is 42.
A loudspeaker announcement at the Kandahar base said the ground attack was coming from the north, said Maura Axelrod, a reporter with HDNet who was inside the base. She said she could hear heavy outgoing fire and that commanders had come into the bunker where she had taken cover to order all Marines with weapons to help in establishing a security perimeter.
An Afghan named Najibullah who works with a private security company on the base said that he heard rockets hitting for about half an hour. He only gave one name.
NATO's current push is aimed at winning over the population in Taliban-friendly areas by establishing security and bolstering the local government. However, each military strike has created potential for backlash amid arguments about who is truly an insurgent.
In the latest such incident, at least a dozen people were killed south of the capital Saturday after U.S. troops spotted two insurgents trying to plant bombs, an Afghan official said.
The two were shot dead in Paktia province, district chief Gulab Shah said. Troops saw comrades drag the two bodies away and called in a helicopter gunship which killed 10 more people, whom U.S. officials said were all militants, Shah said.
Shah said Afghan authorities will investigate to make sure the dead were all insurgents.
Civilian deaths are a flashpoint issue in Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has urged NATO to take all necessary measures to protect civilian lives.
More than eight years into the war in Afghanistan, international support is also weakening.
The defense minister of Britain's new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government met with Karzai in Kabul on Saturday and said he hopes to speed the withdrawal of British troops.
Defense Secretary Liam Fox is quoted in Saturday's edition of The Times newspaper he "would like the forces to come back as soon as possible," and wants to see if it is possible to speed the training of Afghan troops.
___
Associated Press Writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
By HEIDI VOGT, Associated Press Writer Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer – 24 mins ago
KABUL, Afghanistan – Insurgents launched a rare ground assault against NATO's main military base in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, wounding several international service members in the second such attack on a major military installation this week, officials said.
A Canadian Press news agency report from the base said artillery and machine gun fire reverberated through the area, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Kabul, several hours after the attack began.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack — the third major assault on NATO forces in Afghanistan in six days — but the Kandahar area is a Taliban stronghold.
On Tuesday, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy in the capital, killing 18 people including six NATO service members including five Americans and a Canadian.
The next day, dozens of Taliban militants attacked the main U.S. military base — Bagram Air Field — killing an American contractor in fighting that lasted more than eight hours.
Rockets started hitting Kandahar Air Field about 8 p.m. local time (15:30 GMT), followed quickly by a ground assault, said Navy Commander Amanda Peperseim, a spokeswoman for NATO forces at the base. She said the attack was still ongoing and did not provide further details.
She said at least five rockets struck the base, wounding a number of service members, as militants tried unsuccessfully to breach the defense perimeter on the northern side. There were no reports of deaths and she did not have the precise number of wounded.
Peperseim did not know how many insurgents launched the attack but said they did not appear to be wearing suicide vests, as had many of those who stormed the Bagram Air Field north of Kabul on Wednesday. In addition to the U.S. contractor's death, 16 militants were killed and five attackers were captured in the Bagram assault.
Rocket attacks against the Kandahar base, located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Kandahar city, are not uncommon. But ground assaults against such large facilities as Kandahar and Bagram are rare, and two attacks in the same week show that the militants are capable of complex operations despite NATO military pressure.
The attacks came soon after the Taliban announced a spring offensive against NATO forces and Afghan government troops — their respone to a promise by the Obama administration to squeeze the Taliban out of their strongholds in southern Kandahar province.
Kandahar Air Field is the launching pad for thousands of additional U.S. forces pouring into the country for a summer surge against the Taliban.
Attacks in the south earlier Saturday killed three NATO service members — one American, one French and one Dutch — and an Afghan interpreter. That brought to 996 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the war began in October 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The Dutch death toll in Afghanistan now is 24 and the French toll is 42.
A loudspeaker announcement at the Kandahar base said the ground attack was coming from the north, said Maura Axelrod, a reporter with HDNet who was inside the base. She said she could hear heavy outgoing fire and that commanders had come into the bunker where she had taken cover to order all Marines with weapons to help in establishing a security perimeter.
An Afghan named Najibullah who works with a private security company on the base said that he heard rockets hitting for about half an hour. He only gave one name.
NATO's current push is aimed at winning over the population in Taliban-friendly areas by establishing security and bolstering the local government. However, each military strike has created potential for backlash amid arguments about who is truly an insurgent.
In the latest such incident, at least a dozen people were killed south of the capital Saturday after U.S. troops spotted two insurgents trying to plant bombs, an Afghan official said.
The two were shot dead in Paktia province, district chief Gulab Shah said. Troops saw comrades drag the two bodies away and called in a helicopter gunship which killed 10 more people, whom U.S. officials said were all militants, Shah said.
Shah said Afghan authorities will investigate to make sure the dead were all insurgents.
Civilian deaths are a flashpoint issue in Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has urged NATO to take all necessary measures to protect civilian lives.
More than eight years into the war in Afghanistan, international support is also weakening.
The defense minister of Britain's new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government met with Karzai in Kabul on Saturday and said he hopes to speed the withdrawal of British troops.
Defense Secretary Liam Fox is quoted in Saturday's edition of The Times newspaper he "would like the forces to come back as soon as possible," and wants to see if it is possible to speed the training of Afghan troops.
___
Associated Press Writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Bill Clinton and Haiti........ Crying and lying
Scene moves Bill Clinton to Tears
Clinton is UN rep. to Haiti
17 Little Children
Clinton and the NWO
Video apologizes for Haiti Mea Culpa
Clinton apologizes for MK Ultra
Haiti Clinton's Apology
Clinton and Haiti's rice devastation apology
What Bill Clinton's Mea Culpa Should Mean
As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
Sadly, he's right. The rapid lowering of agricultural trade barriers in Haiti combined with misguided U.S. food aid policy allowed American agribusinesses to flood the country with cheap surplus rice and force tens of thousands of local farmers out of business. According to the Associated Press, six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't.
Prior to the era of so-called "free trade", Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19 percent of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80 percent of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25 percent.
It is especially fitting that President Clinton's mea culpa comes as the Jewish community worldwide prepares to observe Passover. The story of Passover is a stark reminder that communities cannot rely solely on others to provide for their needs. Until people are empowered to help themselves, in-kind assistance from the outside is useful only in the immediate aftermath of acute emergencies. Long-term needs must be met principally through a community-led approach. The lesson we take from Passover is that once the Israelites spoke out against slavery their prayers for freedom were finally answered.
Today, the people of Haiti are speaking as loud as they can. They desperately want a voice and central role in the reconstruction of their country, including the ability to meet the country's nutritional needs with food produced by Haitians in Haiti. In fact, President Rene Preval, himself a rice grower, has asked for international food aid to be replaced by financial support for farmers and the re-development of the agricultural sector. Preval knows that sustained success in rebuilding depends on food sovereignty, or the ability for Haitian farmers to grow their own crops and feed their own communities.
Is the international community getting the message? It's hard to say. The AP also reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided nearly four times as much in-kind food aid since January as it invests each year in Haitian agriculture. There is of course a need in grave circumstances for actual shipments of food - but for decades we've used in-kind food as a tool for destroying local agricultural markets on an ongoing basis, not as a last resort measure to be used in emergencies after all possibilities for local purchase have been exhausted. Until our government abandons a system that dumps surplus from American agribusiness on the developing world, its efforts at ending hunger will remain counterproductive. Then again, if you are the D.C. lobbyist for Big Ag, maybe that's the point. Maintaining the developing world's cycle of dependence is profitable business.
The time has come for us to pay attention, to heed the wishes of the Haitian people to be empowered. We must demand that the purpose of our work in Haiti is not to merely rebuild an export market for our surpluses, but rather to support a Haitian-led effort to create a country that can stand on its own, build a sustainable economy and feed its people. Over the next couple of months, Congress will be discussing how to allocate more than $1.6 billion in supplemental funding for Haiti. I urge you to contact your elected representatives and let them know that this money must be used to empower communities, not corporations.
Each year, during Passover, we say "let all who are hungry, come and eat." Then, ironically, we proceed to enjoy a wonderful meal with our families and friends while our front doors remain closed. If you will be celebrating Passover this year, I ask that you open your doors -- at least metaphorically -- and hear those calls from a country just a few hundred miles off our shore. Recognize that the people of Haiti may not need our food. Rather, they need us to listen as they tell us how we can really help.
Children of the World
EXCERPT from MYSTUFFS that reminds me of the Clinton ways.
Jill had moved out of mainstream America because of the dishonesty. The lack of humanity in the world was down right ugly.
Robert, on the other hand, had taken stock of his life and decided to live it in virtual reality. It was much better than trying to survive the greed and hypocricy of the ”real world”. At least on the internet, you didn’t come face to face with the enemy daily. They took on many identities and in doing so became the masses of the unknown. Somehow it took the human factor out of the picture. Hell, if you didn’t want to talk to them, you could ignore them, if you wanted to become young, you lied about your age, if you wanted to become beautiful you put someone else’s picture in your profile.
You could become anything you liked on the net. It was an open forum and anybody could join. It drew people from all walks of life. Similar to the environment of the real corporate world, business became even more sleezy but NOT quite so real.
If you couldn’t put a face to the people, how could you feel any kind of connection? How could you feel any responsibility? It reminded you of the eras of the past. People ran helter skelter and didn’t live by any rules.
The net provided many things to many people and the amount of knowledge you could find was infinitesimal. Decency didn’t matter in virtual reality. You could switch off the PC and become the person you pretended to be in real time.
You might be the biggest rogue on the internet but the best dad in the world at home. You could be a CEO’s assistant from nine to five and a porn star at http://pornforhire.net, in the twilight hours.
Amazing as it seems, even the angels of the earth became someone different when the opportunity presents itself. Virtual reality became home of the paranoid, the abusers, the stalkers, the users and the wannabes. It wasn’t a pretty picture but somehow because of the anonimity it drew people in by the droves. =================
Clinton is UN rep. to Haiti
17 Little Children
Clinton and the NWO
Video apologizes for Haiti Mea Culpa
Clinton apologizes for MK Ultra
Haiti Clinton's Apology
Clinton and Haiti's rice devastation apology
What Bill Clinton's Mea Culpa Should Mean
As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
Sadly, he's right. The rapid lowering of agricultural trade barriers in Haiti combined with misguided U.S. food aid policy allowed American agribusinesses to flood the country with cheap surplus rice and force tens of thousands of local farmers out of business. According to the Associated Press, six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't.
Prior to the era of so-called "free trade", Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19 percent of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80 percent of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25 percent.
It is especially fitting that President Clinton's mea culpa comes as the Jewish community worldwide prepares to observe Passover. The story of Passover is a stark reminder that communities cannot rely solely on others to provide for their needs. Until people are empowered to help themselves, in-kind assistance from the outside is useful only in the immediate aftermath of acute emergencies. Long-term needs must be met principally through a community-led approach. The lesson we take from Passover is that once the Israelites spoke out against slavery their prayers for freedom were finally answered.
Today, the people of Haiti are speaking as loud as they can. They desperately want a voice and central role in the reconstruction of their country, including the ability to meet the country's nutritional needs with food produced by Haitians in Haiti. In fact, President Rene Preval, himself a rice grower, has asked for international food aid to be replaced by financial support for farmers and the re-development of the agricultural sector. Preval knows that sustained success in rebuilding depends on food sovereignty, or the ability for Haitian farmers to grow their own crops and feed their own communities.
Is the international community getting the message? It's hard to say. The AP also reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided nearly four times as much in-kind food aid since January as it invests each year in Haitian agriculture. There is of course a need in grave circumstances for actual shipments of food - but for decades we've used in-kind food as a tool for destroying local agricultural markets on an ongoing basis, not as a last resort measure to be used in emergencies after all possibilities for local purchase have been exhausted. Until our government abandons a system that dumps surplus from American agribusiness on the developing world, its efforts at ending hunger will remain counterproductive. Then again, if you are the D.C. lobbyist for Big Ag, maybe that's the point. Maintaining the developing world's cycle of dependence is profitable business.
The time has come for us to pay attention, to heed the wishes of the Haitian people to be empowered. We must demand that the purpose of our work in Haiti is not to merely rebuild an export market for our surpluses, but rather to support a Haitian-led effort to create a country that can stand on its own, build a sustainable economy and feed its people. Over the next couple of months, Congress will be discussing how to allocate more than $1.6 billion in supplemental funding for Haiti. I urge you to contact your elected representatives and let them know that this money must be used to empower communities, not corporations.
Each year, during Passover, we say "let all who are hungry, come and eat." Then, ironically, we proceed to enjoy a wonderful meal with our families and friends while our front doors remain closed. If you will be celebrating Passover this year, I ask that you open your doors -- at least metaphorically -- and hear those calls from a country just a few hundred miles off our shore. Recognize that the people of Haiti may not need our food. Rather, they need us to listen as they tell us how we can really help.
Children of the World
EXCERPT from MYSTUFFS that reminds me of the Clinton ways.
Jill had moved out of mainstream America because of the dishonesty. The lack of humanity in the world was down right ugly.
Robert, on the other hand, had taken stock of his life and decided to live it in virtual reality. It was much better than trying to survive the greed and hypocricy of the ”real world”. At least on the internet, you didn’t come face to face with the enemy daily. They took on many identities and in doing so became the masses of the unknown. Somehow it took the human factor out of the picture. Hell, if you didn’t want to talk to them, you could ignore them, if you wanted to become young, you lied about your age, if you wanted to become beautiful you put someone else’s picture in your profile.
You could become anything you liked on the net. It was an open forum and anybody could join. It drew people from all walks of life. Similar to the environment of the real corporate world, business became even more sleezy but NOT quite so real.
If you couldn’t put a face to the people, how could you feel any kind of connection? How could you feel any responsibility? It reminded you of the eras of the past. People ran helter skelter and didn’t live by any rules.
The net provided many things to many people and the amount of knowledge you could find was infinitesimal. Decency didn’t matter in virtual reality. You could switch off the PC and become the person you pretended to be in real time.
You might be the biggest rogue on the internet but the best dad in the world at home. You could be a CEO’s assistant from nine to five and a porn star at http://pornforhire.net, in the twilight hours.
Amazing as it seems, even the angels of the earth became someone different when the opportunity presents itself. Virtual reality became home of the paranoid, the abusers, the stalkers, the users and the wannabes. It wasn’t a pretty picture but somehow because of the anonimity it drew people in by the droves. =================
Clinton's Tears in Haiti
Scene moves Bill Clinton to Tears
Clinton is UN rep. to Haiti
17 Little Children
Clinton and the NWO
Video apologizes for Haiti Mea Culpa
Clinton apologizes for MK Ultra
Haiti Clinton's Apology
Clinton and Haiti's rice devastation apology
What Bill Clinton's Mea Culpa Should Mean
As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
Sadly, he's right. The rapid lowering of agricultural trade barriers in Haiti combined with misguided U.S. food aid policy allowed American agribusinesses to flood the country with cheap surplus rice and force tens of thousands of local farmers out of business. According to the Associated Press, six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't.
Prior to the era of so-called "free trade", Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19 percent of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80 percent of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25 percent.
It is especially fitting that President Clinton's mea culpa comes as the Jewish community worldwide prepares to observe Passover. The story of Passover is a stark reminder that communities cannot rely solely on others to provide for their needs. Until people are empowered to help themselves, in-kind assistance from the outside is useful only in the immediate aftermath of acute emergencies. Long-term needs must be met principally through a community-led approach. The lesson we take from Passover is that once the Israelites spoke out against slavery their prayers for freedom were finally answered.
Today, the people of Haiti are speaking as loud as they can. They desperately want a voice and central role in the reconstruction of their country, including the ability to meet the country's nutritional needs with food produced by Haitians in Haiti. In fact, President Rene Preval, himself a rice grower, has asked for international food aid to be replaced by financial support for farmers and the re-development of the agricultural sector. Preval knows that sustained success in rebuilding depends on food sovereignty, or the ability for Haitian farmers to grow their own crops and feed their own communities.
Is the international community getting the message? It's hard to say. The AP also reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided nearly four times as much in-kind food aid since January as it invests each year in Haitian agriculture. There is of course a need in grave circumstances for actual shipments of food - but for decades we've used in-kind food as a tool for destroying local agricultural markets on an ongoing basis, not as a last resort measure to be used in emergencies after all possibilities for local purchase have been exhausted. Until our government abandons a system that dumps surplus from American agribusiness on the developing world, its efforts at ending hunger will remain counterproductive. Then again, if you are the D.C. lobbyist for Big Ag, maybe that's the point. Maintaining the developing world's cycle of dependence is profitable business.
The time has come for us to pay attention, to heed the wishes of the Haitian people to be empowered. We must demand that the purpose of our work in Haiti is not to merely rebuild an export market for our surpluses, but rather to support a Haitian-led effort to create a country that can stand on its own, build a sustainable economy and feed its people. Over the next couple of months, Congress will be discussing how to allocate more than $1.6 billion in supplemental funding for Haiti. I urge you to contact your elected representatives and let them know that this money must be used to empower communities, not corporations.
Each year, during Passover, we say "let all who are hungry, come and eat." Then, ironically, we proceed to enjoy a wonderful meal with our families and friends while our front doors remain closed. If you will be celebrating Passover this year, I ask that you open your doors -- at least metaphorically -- and hear those calls from a country just a few hundred miles off our shore. Recognize that the people of Haiti may not need our food. Rather, they need us to listen as they tell us how we can really help.
Clinton is UN rep. to Haiti
17 Little Children
Clinton and the NWO
Video apologizes for Haiti Mea Culpa
Clinton apologizes for MK Ultra
Haiti Clinton's Apology
Clinton and Haiti's rice devastation apology
What Bill Clinton's Mea Culpa Should Mean
As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
Sadly, he's right. The rapid lowering of agricultural trade barriers in Haiti combined with misguided U.S. food aid policy allowed American agribusinesses to flood the country with cheap surplus rice and force tens of thousands of local farmers out of business. According to the Associated Press, six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't.
Prior to the era of so-called "free trade", Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19 percent of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80 percent of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25 percent.
It is especially fitting that President Clinton's mea culpa comes as the Jewish community worldwide prepares to observe Passover. The story of Passover is a stark reminder that communities cannot rely solely on others to provide for their needs. Until people are empowered to help themselves, in-kind assistance from the outside is useful only in the immediate aftermath of acute emergencies. Long-term needs must be met principally through a community-led approach. The lesson we take from Passover is that once the Israelites spoke out against slavery their prayers for freedom were finally answered.
Today, the people of Haiti are speaking as loud as they can. They desperately want a voice and central role in the reconstruction of their country, including the ability to meet the country's nutritional needs with food produced by Haitians in Haiti. In fact, President Rene Preval, himself a rice grower, has asked for international food aid to be replaced by financial support for farmers and the re-development of the agricultural sector. Preval knows that sustained success in rebuilding depends on food sovereignty, or the ability for Haitian farmers to grow their own crops and feed their own communities.
Is the international community getting the message? It's hard to say. The AP also reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided nearly four times as much in-kind food aid since January as it invests each year in Haitian agriculture. There is of course a need in grave circumstances for actual shipments of food - but for decades we've used in-kind food as a tool for destroying local agricultural markets on an ongoing basis, not as a last resort measure to be used in emergencies after all possibilities for local purchase have been exhausted. Until our government abandons a system that dumps surplus from American agribusiness on the developing world, its efforts at ending hunger will remain counterproductive. Then again, if you are the D.C. lobbyist for Big Ag, maybe that's the point. Maintaining the developing world's cycle of dependence is profitable business.
The time has come for us to pay attention, to heed the wishes of the Haitian people to be empowered. We must demand that the purpose of our work in Haiti is not to merely rebuild an export market for our surpluses, but rather to support a Haitian-led effort to create a country that can stand on its own, build a sustainable economy and feed its people. Over the next couple of months, Congress will be discussing how to allocate more than $1.6 billion in supplemental funding for Haiti. I urge you to contact your elected representatives and let them know that this money must be used to empower communities, not corporations.
Each year, during Passover, we say "let all who are hungry, come and eat." Then, ironically, we proceed to enjoy a wonderful meal with our families and friends while our front doors remain closed. If you will be celebrating Passover this year, I ask that you open your doors -- at least metaphorically -- and hear those calls from a country just a few hundred miles off our shore. Recognize that the people of Haiti may not need our food. Rather, they need us to listen as they tell us how we can really help.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
