Local resistance news round-up

The Quad-City Times has a pretty decent article on Minneapolis resident Carrie Feldman and her refusal to testify before a Davenport, Iowa grand jury. The focus on the raid itself, rather than the undemocratic nature of grand juries (to put it mildly), is sort of unfortunate, but actually not that unfair, in my opinion.

 

Will Potter on Iowa grand jury resistance

Supportive and worth a read:

As you can see in Feldman’s grand jury subpoena, the government provides few details about what is actually being investigated. That’s no accident: grand juries, by design, are secretive and conducted outside of public scrutiny in a legal void where basic Fifth and First Amendment rights do not apply. [Here is a handy booklet on grand juries with much more information.] If activists refuse to participate in the political witch-hunt, they can face serious jail time. Jordan Halliday has done exactly that with a Utah Grand Jury, and he is facing federal criminal contempt charges.

This is an Orwellian, Kafka-esque, insert-relevant-paranoid-literary-figure-here arrangement that needs to be done away with in its entirety. Cheers to Carrie and all others who resist.

 

Green Scare update: “Stay safe, stay strong, and fuck grand juries.”

I just got back from scenic Davenport, IA, having traveled with friends to support a member of our community targeted by a grand jury. (Fun fact: The feds at the courthouse rooted suspiciously through my granola and, at one point, held up a bag and asked, “Raisins?” I actually responded, “Yes, officer. Those are raisins.”)

Anyways, our friend’s initial statement on the issue is below, and background on the travesty that is the grand jury can be found here.

Expect updates.

October 13, 2009
Minneapolis, MN

Shortly after leaving my house today at 5:00, I was pulled over by an unmarked black SUV, and approached by two FBI agents from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They served me a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury in Davenport, Iowa on Thursday, October 15th. They identified themselves as Tom Reinwart and Melissa Henderson, and gave the Cedar Rapids, Iowa FBI office as their contact information (Phone number 319-366-2461). I was also notified recently that a federal agent had contacted my high school with a subpoena for my attendance records from 2004, presumably in relation to the same event. While it is still unclear what the grand jury is investigating, our basic internet research has found that there were some acts of animal rights vandalism in Iowa during the time period in
question.

A scan of the subpoena is attached here.

We have no information yet of other activists being subpoenaed. If you have any information about this grand jury or have been subpoenaed as well, please contact Earth Warriors are OK! at 612-29-EWOKS (612-293-9657) or e-mail ewok@riseup.net.

Stay safe, stay strong, and fuck grand juries!

Yours,

Carrie Feldman
Coldsnap Legal Collective
EWOK!

 

“Free” is free

Some seriously welcome news.

Update: Or not. Fuck.

 

Re:Activism Twin Cities

Come out & play!

We’re excited about bringing it here, and think it’s a good fit for the Twin Cities, for several reasons:

1. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the RNC, it offers an interesting – and hopefully fun and empowering – way to commemorate the events of last September before they’re shunted down the collective memory hole;
2. The focus on text-messaging and, perhaps, other emerging technologies that played such a primary role during the RNC can be metaphorically invoked in the way the game is played;
3. By placing the RNC and its attendant repression within the context of historical – and ongoing – local struggles, we can create for ourselves an opportunity to draw important parallels and bring these to the front of public discourse. We’d argue that for many, if not most, RNC activists, the point has always been that state oppression is the norm, that police brutality is systemic, that the sanctioned violence experienced by activists on the streets last September was simply a microcosm of the daily violence experienced by diverse communities every single day, and so on: Re:Activism, in whatever form we collectively shape it, contains within it a way to make these connections between struggles explicit, a way for us to learn about each other and further strengthen our solidarity; and
4. It’s probably a good excuse to bike around town, make noise, and generally disrupt business-as-usual, in a particularly theatrical fashion.

So, if you’re interested in playing, keep yr eyes on this page for details over the next week.

And we still need all kinds of help getting it off the ground, so if you’re one of those organiz-y types, hit us up: reactivismtwincities@gmail.com

We want a bunch of voices, a bunch of perspectives, and anyone interested in the history of radical struggle in Minnesota to be involved!

Facebook group here. Join us!

 

Self-referential shilling

Hey, anyone ever read this? It’s fun.

 

Extreme shrugs

International tastemaker and occasional revolution-enthusiast Andrew Sullivan finds the rather awesome and intrepid debunking of L.A. restaurant claims to veganism “insane.”

First note: I’ve eaten at one of those restaurants, accepted their word at face value, and consumed their products. Turns out I was duped. I’m pretty grateful for the information. Sully finds it “insane,” presumably, because it implies that one must lab-test their food before consuming; in fact, as my experience shows, it’s profoundly unlikely most people would ever do that, and the implicit reduction of veganism to lab-tests is run-of-the-mill libertarian (oh, I’m sorry: should it be Oakeshottian? thankfully, I have no fucking idea what that means) snark. But the cautionary tale here is simply buyer beware. And it’s nice to know which places to avoid.

Secondly, what, if anything, can ethically-minded consumers of food products do to live true to their ethics and yet not sink into the realms of lab-test “insanity?” Does Sullivan have a suggestion? Why, yes. Why, yes, he does:

For vegetarian options that don’t require lab tests check out Max Fisher.

Well, hot damn. Turns out the best thing to do is navigate your way over to his colleage’s page. Fascinating. Let’s do that, shall we?

Here’s my man Max, eschewing the tired, so-2007 phrase “flexitarianism” for his lighter, dancier, Michael Pollan swimming in a pool of compassionately extracted excretory organs with two pieces of spinach between his toes and thus way-more-2009 notion of “semitarianism:”

But meat remains bad for the environment, bad for your health, and really bad for the animals who die to produce it. What to do? In a culinary landscape marked by an increasingly sophisticated love of food (including meat) and by a rising awareness of environmental and dietary concerns surrounding food (especially meat), a compromise is emerging. It looks a lot like vegetarianism without being actual vegetarianism, that controversial ideology that has come to be as much political as dietary. You get all the benefits–be healthier, help animals, save the environment–with none of the sacrifices. You can still have bacon. You can still enjoy Pennsylvania hunting trips and Greek slaughtering celebrations and turkey at Thanksgiving.

Yes, you can, Sophisticated America. You can have it all.

Praxis divorced from theory. Ethics shunted in favor of expediency. Coherence maintained only by a muscularly willful disbelief and almost unimaginable cognitive dissonance, buttressed with utterly contemptible self-congratulation.

Vegetarianism while simultaneously being vegetarian, though? Insane.

 

And next up …

In the running for most offensive thing ever:

53 billion all told. Who’s hungry?

 

Good riddance, weiner

A bad man dies.

 

Vegetarians are evil!

The internet produces the greatest thing that’s ever happened. [thx, minku]