Candle for Sheila

Sheila O'Donnell, Private Investigator, passed away a year ago. I just found out.

In the 1990s, Sheila helped us fight the Christian Patriots here in Washington State.

Sheila became a quiet celebrity when she brought down the FBI and Oakland Police in federal court for framing redwoods activist Judi Bari after a bomb went off in her car, leaving her paralyzed. The FBI and Oakland PD, working on behalf of a hedge fund that wanted to liquidate the old growth redwood forest in Northern California, accused Bari of building the bomb to commit ecoterrorism.

Bipartisan Fascism

Fascism is not new to America. Bipartisan fascism in the 1960s and 1970s used the FBI to attack the Anti-War, Civil Rights, Free Speech and American Indian movements.  In the 1980s and 1990s, Republican fascism attacked the Environmental and Union movements. 

Everything since has consisted of bipartisan support for the looting of the United States Treasury by Wall Street for the bank bailouts and oil wars. This systematic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich to pay for war profiteering and bank fraud while simultaneously wasting our natural resources is unmistakably fascism.

Blaming the poor and enabling the predatory credit cartel is bipartisan; blaming queers, immigrants, and people of color is Republican.

Paine's Pains

Observing the madness of America, I am reminded of our country's origins, inspired by British author Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense. Paine's books The Age of Reason and Rights of Man made him an internationally respected philosopher whose ideas reflected ideals of human rights. 

Paine became disenchanted by the hypocrisy of some of his fellow American revolutionary leaders--especially George Washington--who were more interested in making money by dispossessing the Indigenous population and enslaving Africans. John Adams opposed Paine for advocating the right to vote for citizens who did not own property.

In 1797, Paine introduced the idea of a guaranteed minimum income funded by an inheritance tax. His opposition to war profiteers (twenty years earlier) in the Continental Congress made these Revolutionary War heroes uncomfortable. Paine's pamphlet Public Good argued successfully that large tracts of land west of the 13 colonies--where Revolutionary War leaders Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were land speculators--should be government owned. 

Land Back

Eureka's change of heart toward the Wiyot Indian Tribe--hundreds of whom were ax-murdered by white settlers during colonization--was precipitated by tribal members and local volunteers cleaning up the industrial waste left behind on the Wiyot sacred ceremonial island in the middle of Humboldt Bay.

What?

Alaska Airlines-owned Horizon Air had a flight from Everett WA to SFO diverted to Portland OR where it was met by FBI agents sent to arrest an off-duty pilot riding in the cockpit jump seat who attempted to shut off the engines midflight. 

MAD

 

MAD magazine and I were born the same year, 1952. As a children’s magazine, MAD instilled in us a healthy disrespect for authority, laying the philosophical groundwork for the hippie revolution which was based on opposition to militarism, racism, and sexism.

MAD’s editor Al Feldstein, along with American poet laureate Robert Frost, deserves credit for inspiring the Woodstock generation to heed John F. Kennedy’s admonition to “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Ps--A little known fact is that Robert Frost and Jay Ward, creator of Rocky & Bullwinkle, were both born in San Francisco, home to the Summer of Love in 1967.

Revitalizing Downtown

Pop-up commerce, even for a while, is better than nothing.