Revolution #281, September 23, 2012


Scenes from BA Everywhere

Week of September 17

This is a regular feature that gives an ongoing picture of the multifaceted campaign BA Everywhere, and the variety of ways that funds are being raised and the whole BA vision and framework brought into all corners of society. Revolution newspaper is at the hub of this effort, publishing reports from the campaign, and playing a pivotal role in building an organized network of people across the country coming together to make BA a household word. We urge our readers to send in timely correspondence and photos on what you are doing as part of this campaign to revolution.reports@yahoo.com and baeverywhere@gmail.com.

Report from the DNC in Charlotte

A contingent of revolutionaries went to the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, to put revolution and Bob Avakian on the map in the midst of a very politicized atmosphere. March on Wall Street South, a coalition of activist groups, organized a rally and march through downtown Charlotte on Sunday, September 2, a few days before the official start of the convention. Charlotte is the finance capital of the South with the international headquarters of Bank of America and the East Coast headquarters of Wells Fargo, two of the four largest banks in the country. According to march organizers, these banks have some of the highest foreclosure rates as well.

Duke Energy, also headquartered in Charlotte, was another focus of the protest. Duke Energy is the largest utility company in the country, and one of the most damaging to the environment, with dozens of coal-fired power plants, most of which burn coal produced by the devastating method called mountaintop removal mining. Duke also has many nuclear power plants.

Downtown Charlotte looked like a police state. Police barricades lined both sides of the entire march route. There were more police than protesters. Police were on foot and on bicycles. The bicycle cops had their bikes lined up end-to-end, forming a second continuous barricade on both sides of the march, inside the metal barricades. Convention delegates and onlookers were lined up watching the march go by from behind the barricades.

The march through downtown was very vibrant, with lots of signs and banners. Chants rang out from different parts of the march that stretched for several city blocks. One of the largest and most colorful contingents in the march were the immigrants. They wore butterfly wings with the words "Migration is a Human Right" written across the wings. The "Undocubus," a bus that had traveled across the country for six weeks starting from Arizona, brought dozens of undocumented people to the DNC with "No Papers, No Fear" painted on the side of the bus. They were joined by many other immigrants from around the region and country. World Can't Wait brought a model of a drone that really stood out and got a lot of attention, and the Stop Patriarchy contingent had quite an impact, particularly with their stickers which a number of the spectators along the route were wearing, "Abortion on Demand and Without Apology" and "If you can't imagine sex without porn...You're fucked."

The BA Everywhere contingent was small but noticeable. We all wore the T-shirt that says "I am part of the thousands working on the revolution," and we carried oversized enlargements of the front page of Revolution newspaper, "Obama Has No Future for the People...The Revolution Does," the front cover of BAsics, the image of BA, and September's quote from BAsics 1:3, "The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism." We were able to get out a thousand palm cards of BAsics 1:3 and promoted the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) to the people watching the march, reaching out to them over the police barricades.

On Monday, September 3, a music and street festival called Carolina Fest was held on closed-off downtown streets. A free annual festival, this year it was billed as part of the DNC festivities, and it attracted thousands of people to downtown, including delegates, Democratic Party activists, and a cross-section of Charlotte area residents. And the Revolution was part of the festival too. We set up on the street with the large images that we had carried in the march the previous day, and we put a plastic milk crate upside down on the ground in front. One person got on the milk crate and did some loud agitation, while we got out thousands of the palm cards and sold copies of Revolution newspaper, BAsics and the Constitution.

The agitation started with "The Republicans are no damn good, but the Democrats are no damn good either. Humanity and the planet need Revolution!" and then ran down what the Obama administration has "accomplished" while in office: accelerated mass incarceration, police murder of the people, disregard for the environment, attacks on fundamental rights as well as abortion and birth control, deporter-in-chief of immigrants, expansion of the wars/drones, foreclosures and unemployment, etc.

It definitely stirred things up! A lot of people turned their heads or stopped in their tracks to listen. Some people didn't believe what we were saying but were willing to check out the facts in Revolution newspaper. Others agreed with our exposure of Obama but were caught up in the "lesser of two evils" trap and focused on how horrible Romney would be. Some hardcore Obama supporters only wanted to talk about healthcare, or actually spoke favorably about what the U.S. is doing around the world. There were right-wingers appalled that we were promoting revolution and communism. And there were some people who were very surprised but refreshed to come across a group that was out there in the middle of the DNC exposing the Democrats and posing a radical alternative, who engaged around BA's vision of communism, checked out BAsics and the Constitution, made small donations and took palm cards to distribute themselves.

At one point, there was an intense exchange between two friends, two young Black women who had stopped to listen. One woman wouldn't have any of it—didn't want to hear anything against Obama, and was pulling on her friend to keep walking. The other woman started arguing and said that she had spent a year in the military in Iraq as a medic, and everything we were saying about the wars and the drones was true. She told her friend to go on without her, and yelled "don't call me on my cellphone either!" This was no everyday scene. People stopped to take pictures. Reporters asked for interviews. We engaged with all viewpoints, sold a lot of newspapers as well as some copies of BAsics and the Constitution.

Over the two days, we got interviewed by over 10 media outlets including the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte TV news, New York Times, London Times, Al Jazeera, Havana Times, Australian Financial Times, National Post from Toronto, and a Florida A&M student media project.

Throughout the rest of the week, there was an un-permitted anti-war march, an Occupy encampment in a local park, and a civil disobedience action where several of the undocumented immigrants bravely got arrested in front of the arena where the convention was being held. Revolutionaries were invited to go to several college campuses in the area during the week, which was a great opportunity to get out hundreds more of the palm cards as well as newspapers, and deeply engage with students on these campuses.

The most striking observation throughout our time in Charlotte was how thick and pervasive ugly American chauvinism was. Not only was it being unleashed from Obama and the top representatives of the Democratic Party at the podium inside the convention, but it was also taken up unquestioningly by the ordinary person in the street, and the "America first" mentality even defined the framework of many of the oppositional groups protesting outside the convention, with concerns narrowly focused on how the issues affect Americans. The one palm card that we wish we had brought in addition to the other materials was the one with BAsics 5:7 and 5:8—"American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives," and "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First."

BA: A Contended Question at the DNC Protests

The short orientation piece in Revolution #278, "BA—A Contended Question," was very helpful in preparing to take the BA Everywhere campaign into the mix at the DNC protests in Charlotte. A very noticeable development was that BA was much more known among a variety of people we encountered from a number of different cities—an indication that the BA Everywhere campaign is having an impact. Here are some examples of the range of viewpoints on BA that we encountered:

In Saginaw, Michigan After Police Killing of Milton Hall

A letter from two paper sellers on a BAsics Mini-Tour in Detroit:

After reading about the police killing of a Black homeless man in Saginaw, Michigan, in the September 13 Call for Nationwide Resistance to Racial Profiling, Police Brutality and Murder and the Pipeline Leading to Mass Incarceration, we drove there as part of the mini-tour in Detroit. We drove into the city of 51,000 and made it over to the small shopping plaza where Milton Hall, 49 years old, was killed. We saw two wooden crosses and a note from a friend of Hall's and some memorial items.

As we were standing there by the memorial, a Black woman, Jackie, walked up and said she was with her granddaughter and saw the whole horrible killing of Milton Hall, someone she had known for decades. She said he was not violent, "wouldn't kill a fly," he would ask for a cigarette and that was it. It all began when Hall stopped at a gas station, allegedly had a hassle with the clerk about a cup of coffee. The clerk called the police. Meanwhile, Hall walked across the street to River View Plaza shopping center, which he often frequented.

The police came to the plaza, the EMS came too, as though the pigs were planning to do harm to Hall, or worse. The police lined up, guns drawn, and the video someone took (which was later broadcast on CNN) shows they yelled at him to drop some kind of knife he had. Then as Hall was walking away towards a shuttered Chinese restaurant, the 46 shots rang out and Milton Hall lay motionless on the blacktop. The cops claimed that he was threatening because he would not drop the knife. According to eyewitnesses, it is unclear if he followed that order or not. The police threatened to let their police dog on him. They didn't do that; they unloaded their guns on Hall.

Of course, the pigs will always say their victim was threatening them and they were only killing in self-defense. NO! NO! and NO! The lawyer for Milton Hall's family said, "They [the police] controlled the location and the space between themselves and Milton. There was absolutely no indication of imminent threat." "It appeared to be a firing squad dressed in police uniforms," Jewel Hall, Milton's mother, told CNN from her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. "They did not have to kill him. He had not done anything. He was not violent. He was not a murderer. He was not a criminal." Jewel Hall said her son had once trained as a civil rights activist, been an avid reader and played football. He had lived in Saginaw for 35 years and received Social Security disability payments for a mental illness, but "he knew his rights." "Everybody knew him. The police knew him well," she said. "So that's another question: they knew him, so why? Why did they kill him?"

After telling us about the trauma her granddaughter goes through if she merely sees a cop car or a cop and the widespread horror people feel about it, Jackie told us to go over to a high-rise she stays at where lots of people will want to talk to us. So we did and met many people who knew Milton and were outraged at what happened. One man knew him from living in a homeless shelter together, others knew him from his walking around the area, maybe asking for a cigarette. People said he did not communicate much with people, stayed to himself but was as some said, "a kind and gentle soul." Almost everyone asked the same question: "Why did they kill him? He never bothered nobody." So we got into the question of why and that there is an alternative to this system of horrors, the capitalist-imperialist system whose enforcers shot Milton 46 times. We read BAsics 1:24 and 2:16 where Bob Avakian lays out the role of the police under this capitalist-imperialist system. People nodded their heads in agreement and many went back to talking about what happened to Milton. Clearly they couldn't get over the pain and hurt and the simmering outrage that was being expressed as they told how police killing in Saginaw is not new. In the past year or so the police killed Bobby Merrill Jr., 38, by shooting him several times with a Taser; Andre Jones, 18; and Keontae Amerson, 24, killed after a traffic stop.

To give people a sense of fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution and the importance of resisting such outrages, we talked about how they can right now be part of building a movement for revolution and gave them "12 Ways That YOU Can Be Part of Building the Movement for Revolution—Right NOW" cards. We read from BAsics and showed the video of the BAsics Bus Tour and clips from Bob Avakian speaking in '69,'79, and 2003.

One woman, Tisha, called from her window, "I want to see the tape." As she listened intently to BA, when he says, "What kind of system is this?... I say no more," she said, "I was thinking of young people, I was thinking that we lack prayer and we have to fight together, if not it won't end. The police brutality and murder to white, Black and Latino, it is happening everywhere, I am so sick of it. We are fighting back." There were times where people read out loud from BAsics. There was a feeling that BA and his re-envisioned revolution and communism had brought hope to people, but not a sense that we could get to a state power through revolution where pigs killing Black people would be a thing of the past. In a beginning way, people now know that Bob Avakian is a leader for the people seeking to be free of this oppression, now know that we all need to build the movement for revolution and that it can be done. People there took hundreds of BAsics 3:22 palm cards to get out in the two high-rise buildings.

The killing of Milton Hall had brought lots of hurt and lots of outrage at the pigs. As we left, there was word of plans to protest the killing.

 

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