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Clinton Legacy: “Restoring Slavery” at $300m Haitian Industrial Complex October 23, 2012

Posted by rogerhollander in Caribbean, Haiti, Imperialism.
Tags: Bill Clinton, clintons, haiti, hillary clinton, imperialism, roger hollander, sae-a-korea, sean penn, U.S. imperialism, walmart
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Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

Re-imagining the “Taiwan of the Caribbean,” again

– Common Dreams staff

The Clintons are in Haiti to inaugurate the new $300 million industrial facility touted as “transformative” for the quake-ravaged country, but many wonder if this is simply the next round of imperialism in a country that has been plagued (literally) by outside intervention for too long.

The Clinton’s travel to Haiti to celebrate the opening of a new $300 million sweatshop. (Photo by Associated Press)

The Caracol Industrial Park, which is hailed as “the centerpiece of the U.S. effort to help the country recover from the 2010 earthquake,” according to Trenton Daniel for the Associated Press, is slated to be built on a remote 617-acre site of farmland, mangroves and coral reefs in the northern part of the country.

Critics of the project believe that the industrial park does little more than replicate failed efforts from the past and will benefit outsiders more than Haitians. Writing for Haiti Liberte, Mona Péralte notes, (translated) “this park is a direct illustration of the role of imperialism in the country namely for exploit [if it] come cheaply, if not restore slavery.”

Alex Dupuy, a Haiti-born sociologist at Wesleyan University, adds, “this is not a strategy that is meant to provide Haiti with any measure of sustainable development […] The only reason those industries come to Haiti is because the country has the lowest wages in the region.”

Workers are already protesting the wages offered by the park’s anchor tenant, the South Korean apparel company and Walmart supplier, Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. Etant Dupain writing on the Let Haiti Live website, notes:

Before the official inauguration, several thousand employees have been working in the Caracol park for the last three months at a wage of 150 gourdes ($3.75 US) a day. Since October 1st, the new minimum wage law has gone into effect, with the government setting the minimum at 300 gourdes a day. Despite this, the managers of the factory operating at Caracol aren’t respecting the new official minimum wage.

Sae-A’s Haiti representative, Daniel Cho, told AP that the employees “will be paid almost $5 for eight hours of work.”

In an effort to attract other tenants to the park, the project’s architects are offering duty-free status and a 15-year tax holiday. Dupuy says that because of these tax breaks, “outside investors will have more to gain than Haitians,” from this project.

The Clintons and their celebrity supporters (Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, fashion designer Donna Karan and British business magnate Richard Branson were all in tow) were in Caracol on Monday to celebrate the opening. Government officials have been lauding the Caracol project as panacea for Haiti’s debilitating economic woes. “We had learned that supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti meant more than providing aid,” Secretary Clinton told a roomful of investors. “So we shifted our assistance to investments to address some of the biggest challenges facing this country: creating jobs and sustainable economic growth.”

Backers of the complex estimate that the park has the potential to generate up to 65,000 total jobs; Sae-A Korea, who already employs 400 people, agreed to create 20,000 permanent jobs within six years and build 5,000 employee houses on site.

The project—which was in the works before the earthquake—became a top priority for the Obama administration after the disaster. Washington has since invested $124 million in the project, making it the U.S.’s biggest single investment in the aftermath of the quake. According to the Associated Press, “it is certain to shape the legacy of the Clintons.”

For many local Haitians, there are flashbacks to the baseball factories built in the 1970s and 1980s under the regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. AP writer Daniel notes:

Those jobs prompted thousands of farmers to leave their fields for the capital, and agricultural areas suffered from neglect. Shantytowns like Cite Soleil emerged to house the new workers. The factories got tax breaks but there was no income to offset Duvalier’s alleged plundering of state coffers. Haiti was supposed to become the “Taiwan of the Caribbean” but instead suffered through economic collapse brought on by political instability.

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What Media Coverage Omits about US Hikers Released by Iran September 26, 2011

Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Iran, Media.
Tags: american hikers, bilal hussein, cia prisons, Cindy Sheehan, corportate media, desmond tutu, detainee abuse, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, human rights, ibrahim jassen, Iran, iran hikers, iran hostages, joshua fattal, Media, Mohammad Ali, Noam Chomsky, propaganda, roger hollander, roxana saberi, sami al-haj, sean penn, shane bauer, solitary confinement, torture
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Published on Monday, September 26, 2011 by Salon.com

by Glenn Greenwald

Two American hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released last week and spoke yesterday in Manhattan about their ordeal. Most establishment media accounts in the U.S. have predictably exploited the emotions of the drama as a means of bolstering the U.S.-is-Good/Iran-is-Evil narrative which they reflexively spout. But far more revealing is what these media accounts exclude, beginning with the important, insightful and brave remarks from the released prisoners themselves (their full press conference was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now).

Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, “solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives.” Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the “32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran,” and said: “the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.” After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were “total shams” and that “we’d been held in almost total isolation – stripped of our rights and freedoms,” he explained:

In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments – including the government of Iran – to act in kind.

[Indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process -- still -- to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.]

Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials.

Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference. Instead, typical is this ABC News story, which featured tearful and celebratory reactions from their family, detailed descriptions of their conditions and the pain and fear their family endured, and melodramatic narratives about how their “long, grueling imprisonment is over” after “781 days in Iran’s most notorious prison.” This ABC News article on their press conference features many sentences about Iran’s oppressiveness — “Hikers Return to the U.S.: ‘We Were Held Hostage’”; “we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten” — with hardly any mention of the criticisms Fattal and Bauer voiced regarding U.S. policy that provided the excuse for their mistreatment and similar treatment which the U.S. doles out both in War on Terror prisons around the world and even domestic prisons at home.

Their story deserves the attention it is getting, and Iran deserves the criticism. But the first duty of the American “watchdog media” should be highlighting the abuses of the U.S. Government, not those of other, already-hated regimes on the other side of the world. Instead, the abuses at home are routinely suppressed while those in the Hated Nations are endlessly touted. There have been thousands of people released after being held for years and years in U.S. detention despite having done nothing wrong. Many were tortured, and many were kept imprisoned despite U.S. government knowledge of their innocence. Have you ever seen anything close to this level of media attention being devoted to their plight, to hearing how America’s lawless detention of them for years — often on a strange island, thousands of miles away from everything they know — and its systematic denial of any legal redress, devastated their families and destroyed their lives?

This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi’s case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind — Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters’ photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge — it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.

What we find here yet again is that government-serving American establish media outlets relish the opportunity to report negatively on enemies and other adversaries of the U.S. government (that is the same mindset that accounts for the predicable, trite condescension by the New York Times toward the Wall Street protests, the same way they constantly downplayed Iraq War protests). But to exactly the same extent that they love depicting America’s Enemies as Bad, they hate reporting facts that make the U.S. Government look the same.

That’s why Fattal and Bauer receive so much attention while victims of America’s ongoing lawless detention scheme are ignored. It’s why media stars bravely denounce the conditions of Iran’s “notorious prison” while ignoring America’s own inhumane prison regime on both foreign and U.S. soil. It’s why imprisonment via sham trials in Iran stir such outrage while due-process-free imprisonment (and assassinations) by the U.S. stir so little. And it’s why so many Americans know Roxana Saberi but so few know Sami al-Haj.

An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption and wrongdoing of their own government. By contrast, a propaganda establishment press is eager to suppress that, and there is no better way of doing so than by obsessing on the sins of nations on the other side of the world while ignoring the ones at home. If only establishment media outlets displayed a fraction of the bravery and integrity of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had a good excuse to focus exclusively on Iran’s sins but — a mere few days after being released from a horrible, unjust ordeal — chose instead to present the full picture.

California To Observe First Harvey Milk Day May 21, 2010

Posted by rogerhollander in California, Human Rights, LGBT, Civil Liberties.
Tags: Civil Rights, roger hollander, gay marriage, gay rights, harvey milk, dan white, sean penn, lisa leff, California, lgbt, george moscone, same sex, schwarzeneger, harvey milk day, san francisco politics, openly gay
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Lisa Leff, www.huffingtonpost.com, May 21, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO

Presidential Medal of Freedom? Got that. A place in the California Hall of Fame and Sean Penn playing you on-screen? Those, too.

Now, Harvey Milk has a holiday of sorts to call his own. California will observe its first day of “special significance” Saturday honoring the slain gay rights leader on what would have been his 80th birthday.

It took two legislative tries and the 2008 movie “Milk” to help persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a bill last fall establishing May 22 as Harvey Milk Day. Memorial events are planned in 20 other states.

The California measure does not close state offices as an official holiday would but does encourages public schools to conduct activities commemorating the first openly gay man elected to public office in a major U.S. city.

Milk was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978 when he and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated at City Hall by former supervisor Dan White.

Milk preached a message of pride that made him an inspiration to generations of gay rights activists, and he is credited with helping defeat a ballot initiative that would have prevented gay teachers from working in public schools.

The range of activities planned in his memory – concerts, voter canvassing to repeal California’s gay marriage ban, and students at some schools handing out malted milk balls and Milk Duds – speaks to Milk’s singularly iconic place in gay rights history and the public’s continued polarization on gay rights issues.

The day is shaping up to be even grander than its supporters anticipated. Demonstrations in St. Louis, Savannah, Ga., Fulton, Miss., and other cities are aimed at putting pressure on Congress to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the military and to pass a law protecting gays and transgender people from job discrimination.

“The creation of the first official day of recognition for any openly gay person in the history of this country has really touched people, many of whom have been closeted in life or faced rejection or government discrimination which continues to this day,” said Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California.

In Milk’s adopted home state, however, few public schools are marking the occasion, despite the language in the California bill that created it.

Having May 22 fall on a Saturday this year may have muted the celebrations. But a conservative group’s call for parents to pull their children out of class if any Harvey Milk activities were planned probably had an effect as well, said Carolyn Laub, executive director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, a San Francisco group that trains students to be gay rights advocates.

“We have heard from students and teachers who are facing resistance from school administrators who do not want to acknowledge this day,” Laub said.

Some students decided to sponsor movie screenings and other activities at lunch or after school in the absence of school-wide events, she said.

Zac Toomay, a 17-year-old junior at Arroyo Grande High School in central California, said he was surprised when his principal agreed to encourage history and English teachers to mention Milk during classes Friday.

“I encountered some apprehension, not because the principal or teachers are uncomfortable with it, but because they didn’t want to have too much of a controversy within the classroom,” Toomay said. “I said, ‘We have controversy in the classroom all the time, and if we are going to avoid that one, we are going to have to avoid all of them.’”

At in San Juan Hills High School in Orange County, Calif., where scheduled state achievement tests prevented classroom activities, 15-year-old Benji Delgadillo and other members of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance Club planned to sell Harvey milkshakes and to hand out fliers after school explaining who Milk was.

Besides Delgadillo, San Juan Hills only has one or two other openly gay or transgender students, he said. The club of about 25 members nevertheless persuaded the principal to change the dress code for dances so girls could wear suits and to cancel the annual “Battle of the Sexes” pep rally after some students said it was offensive to gender non-conforming students.

“Harvey Milk is a civil rights icon who sparked a movement that today is really helping to address the issues of harassment that lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or gender non-conforming students face in our school and our community,” Delgadillo said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was scheduled to appear at a fundraiser Friday night tied to Harvey Milk Day and benefiting Equality California’s political action committee, which hopes to qualify a ballot initiative in 2012 that would repeal California’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Events planned for Saturday include the premiere of a musical based on Milk’s life written by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk” the movie, and performed by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. The chorus plans to take the piece into high schools next year as part of project to prevent anti-gay bullying.

Stuart Milk, Harvey Milk’s 49-year-old nephew and one of the guardians of his legacy, thinks his uncle would be thrilled by the various tributes, but he also wants his day to be more about uniting all marginalized minorities than merely about gay rights or the accomplishments of one man.

“It’s still a hard concept for people to get,” Stuart Milk said. “This isn’t about having a Harvey Milk curriculum in every school. It’s an opportunity to talk about what discrimination means and why it’s important for everyone to feel included.”

As Criticism of Obama Mounts within Gay Community, Gay Rights Pioneer Cleve Jones Calls for March for Equality on Washington June 23, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Human Rights, LGBT.
Tags: aids awareness, aids quilt, amy goodman, briggs initiative, castro street, cleve jones, clifford alexander, defense of marriage, Democracy Now, doma, don't ask don't tell, gay rights, gay rights activists, george moscone, harvey milk, human rights, lgbt, lgbt federal employees, lgbt rights, obama administration, obama gay, roger hollander, san francisco gay movement, sean penn, tammy baldwin
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AMY GOODMAN: In recent days, many in the gay community have been sharply critical of the Obama administration’s positions on some of the hot-button issues affecting gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer Americans across the country. On Wednesday, President Obama signed a memorandum to extend some, but not all, benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. Comprehensive healthcare, for example, is not included.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

Currently, for example, LGBT federal employees can’t always use sick leave to care for their domestic partners or their partners’ children. Their partners aren’t covered under long-term care insurance. Partners of American Foreign Service officers abroad aren’t treated the same way when it comes to the use of medical facilities or visitation rights in case of an emergency. And these are just some of the wrongs that we intend to right today. […]

It’s a day that marks a historic step towards the changes we seek, but I think we all have to acknowledge this is only one step. Among the steps we have not yet taken is to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. I believe it’s discriminatory, I think it interferes with states’ rights, and we will work with Congress to overturn it.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama’s promise to work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, Wednesday came one week after his administration filed a controversial legal brief supporting DOMA, an action which greatly disappointed activists fighting for marriage equality.

In a strongly worded letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, the president of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, said, quote, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

The President also has been criticized for not pushing more strongly for an end to the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Taken together, the administration’s actions have angered a number of gay rights activists. Some prominent voices in the community have decided not to attend a gala LGBT fundraiser for the Democratic Party next week, which Vice President Biden is expected to attend.

Well, I’m now joined by one of the giants of the gay rights and AIDS awareness movements. Cleve Jones is the founder of the NAMES Project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In the 1970s in San Francisco, Cleve Jones was a close friend of the pioneering gay rights leader, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. In fact, he found his body under his desk as he was shot dead in his office. Cleve Jones worked as a student intern for Milk after he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

More recently, Cleve served as a historical consultant to Gus Van Sant’s award-winning film MILK, and he works with UNITE HERE to strengthen the growing coalition between the labor movement and the LGBT community. Now Cleve is planning a national equality march on Washington for October 11th, National Coming Out Day, to call for equal rights for the LGBT community.

Cleve Jones, Welcome to Democracy Now!

CLEVE JONES: Thank you. My pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: There has been a lot of action in the Obama administration in the last few days. Is it really because there’s this big fundraiser planned and some of the leading gay rights activists and donors are pulling out?

CLEVE JONES: Well, of course, I can’t get inside their heads, though I’ve wanted to very much over the last couple of weeks. I think the people pulling out of the fundraiser is part of it. I think the momentum building for the march on October 11th is part of it. I think that they understand that the anger and frustration is not diminishing, it’s getting much stronger.

We’re really baffled by this. You know, we voted in enormous numbers for Obama. We want very much to believe that he has our best interest, as well as the entire country’s, in his heart. But he seems to be continuing this really hurtful policy of doling out increments of rights, fractions of equality. And I think our movement is really beyond that at this point. We’re tired of this state-by-state, county-by-county, city-by-city struggle for fractions of equality. And this latest thing, this is really just crumbs. And it’s disheartening to see so many of the leaders of our community standing there behind him while he sprinkles out these crumbs.

AMY GOODMAN: One of those who was there was Tammy Baldwin, well-known lesbian Congress member. She will not be boycotting the fundraiser. She said she’ll be there, but she’ll bring the concerns of those who are boycotting. And she, too, is deeply concerned.

This memo that he signed, it was late in the day. Not to be confused with an executive order, it means whatever of the limited rights that were granted expire on the day President Obama leaves office. And we’re not talking about healthcare here for federal employees who are gay or lesbian—visiting rights, I guess he said, to the hospital.

CLEVE JONES: Well, it feels like Clinton all over again. You know, Bill Clinton gave wonderful speeches and told of his vision of a country, a vision that he claimed included us, and what we got out of that was the Defense of Marriage Act and “don’t ask, don’t tell.” So, what we’re getting now from President Obama are flowery proclamations, probably a few key appointments for some of our more powerful community members, and very little for ordinary people.

And on this issue of healthcare, I think it’s ironic that this memorandum does not extend healthcare benefits. But that’s also an example of an area where my community could be very helpful, I think, in helping to build support for the President’s healthcare package. My community cares deeply about access to healthcare. So much of the impetus for marriage rights has really come out of our experience with the epidemic, so we certainly would be a staunch ally in his efforts to provide affordable healthcare to all Americans. So I feel that he’s burning some bridges rather rapidly.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip from this past year’s Academy Awards. Actor Sean Penn, who won an Oscar for his role as Harvey Milk in the film MILK, talked about equality and gay marriage in his acceptance speech.

SEAN PENN:

AMY GOODMAN: That was Sean Penn, who played Harvey Milk, won the Oscar for that. We’re going to be talking about “don’t ask, don’t tell” in a minute.

We’ll be speaking with the first African American Secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, who is a strong proponent of Congress repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But I wanted to go back in time a bit. Actually, Harvey Milk graduated from my high school, from Bay Shore High in Long Island. But you met Harvey decades ago. You have devoted your life to helping to fulfill his dream. Can you just talk for a moment about what that dream is, and your experiences with Harvey, how you met him, the assassinated San Francisco City Supervisor?

CLEVE JONES: Well, I met Harvey on Castro Street back in 1975. I was pretty much a street kid. He got me off the street. He got me to go to school, got me to cut my hair, get a job. He was a great father figure.

AMY GOODMAN: When was this?

CLEVE JONES: I got to San Francisco at the end of 1972. I met him in passing but didn’t really pay attention to him until probably ’75. And then, when I came back from a couple of years of hitchhiking around the world, it was 1977 and his last campaign and the campaign against the Briggs Initiative. And that’s when we got close.

AMY GOODMAN: Which was…? The Briggs Initiative?

CLEVE JONES: The Briggs Initiative was a really hateful initiative. It was a referendum to require the dismissal of all gay and lesbian schoolteachers—or actually, not just teachers, anyone working in the school district, plus any heterosexual who supported their rights. It was a bitter fight that we won statewide in California thirty years ago against many of the same people who opposed us with Proposition 8 this past year.

And, you know, Harvey had a message of liberation and equality, but he also was very critical of the established gay leadership at the time and said that they were all too willing to accept crumbs, to accept compromises. I think Harvey understood clearly that every time our community accepts compromises or delays, we are really participating in undermining our own humanity. No other group of people would settle for fractions of equality. There is no fraction of equality. You are an equal people, or you are not. So, I am—

AMY GOODMAN: He was the first openly gay elected official in the United States?

CLEVE JONES: Actually, I want to correct that. He is known to be the first openly gay, but in fact I believe that honor goes to a woman named Elaine Noble, who had been elected to the Massachusetts state legislature two years prior. And then there were two members of the Ann Arbor city council who came out after they had been elected. But he was, I think—I think his significance was as our first really shared public martyr. There are many martyrs to this cause, but he was the one whose name became known.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain, for those who aren’t familiar with what happened to Harvey Milk—extremely outspoken fighting for gay rights, as well as just for everyone in San Francisco—the day he was killed and who he was killed by.

CLEVE JONES: Yeah. He predicted his death. In the film, when you see him making this tape recording predicting his assassination, that wasn’t contrived. He actually believed that. I used to tease him about it and tell him he wasn’t important enough to be assassinated.

But he was killed by a former colleague, a former member of the Board of Supervisors, a former police officer, a man named Dan White, who was very troubled and, I think, clearly confused about homosexuality, homophobic. I don’t want to claim that I have any great insight into what was going on in his mind, but he was very troubled and very much in over his head in the day-to-day dealings of the Board of Supervisors. And he assassinated both Harvey Milk and our mayor, a wonderful man named George Moscone, on November 27th, 1978.

AMY GOODMAN: And it was you who was walking towards Harvey Milk’s office, when you saw?

CLEVE JONES: I was outside of City Hall when the shootings occurred and was frightened by all of the confusion over towards the mayor’s office, which is on the other side of City Hall. And I let myself in through the back door to the supervisors’ chambers and found his body there. And then—

AMY GOODMAN: Recognized his feet?

CLEVE JONES: Yeah, Harvey only had one pair of dress shoes, these old battered wingtips.

You know, it was terrible. It was terrible. And I remember thinking all day long, it’s over, everything’s over. You know, he was really a father figure to me. I’m very close to my actual father, but at the time I was estranged from my family. And he was so kind to me, and he was our leader. And all day long, I just kept thinking it’s over, until the sun went down, and San Franciscans, gay and straight, young and old, black and brown and white, began to gather by the tens of thousands and lit their candles and marched down to City Hall. And then I knew it was really just beginning.

AMY GOODMAN: And now, decades later, you are organizing this march on Washington. You were also the co-founder of the AIDS Quilt. And talk about the significance of that and how it’s led into this mass march.

CLEVE JONES: Yes, I’ve had a lot of experience organizing protests and demonstrations. But, you know, back in the ’80s when the pandemic was so horrifying and so many of my friends were dying, I was struggling with new ways to try to communicate to the media and to the public and the politicians about what was happening to my community. And I was also obsessed with the reality that most of my friends were dying, and it seemed to me that we were all going to die and leave no trace. And my friends were brilliant people. You know, had they lived, they would be taking home Emmys and Pulitzers and Nobels and sitting in the Senate and the House of Representatives. And so, I was struggling with a way to break through the stupidity and cruelty and ignorance, that still hampers our planet’s response to this pandemic.

And I was at a protest where we climbed up the walls of the Federal Building in San Francisco and covered it with names of people who had died. And as I looked at that patchwork of names, I thought it looks like a quilt and thought immediately of my grandma, my great-grandma back in Bee Ridge, Indiana. And it worked.

I think it’s important to go to Washington. And we’re going back on October 11th. We’re not taking a quilt. We’re not having a rock concert. It’s not going to be Lollapalooza. It’s going to be a demonstration, a protest. It is not against President Obama. It is for equality. And it’s for shifting the strategy.

Back when Harvey Milk was alive, we had no choice with the strategy. There were only a few pockets in the entire country where we could gain any rights at all. When I came out of the closet, it was a felony to engage in sexual behavior with another person of the same sex. People went to prison. People committed suicide. People were arrested regularly and prosecuted. For young people, it may be bizarre to hear this, but it was illegal for us to dance. Two people of the same gender were forbidden by law from dancing. You could be arrested for that. So, in the ’70s, we took whatever we could get. In a small college town like Ann Arbor or Madison, you know, you might be able to get some kind of job protection.

But that was a long time ago, and we’re not putting up with that anymore. We want full equality, which I define as being equal protection under the law in all matters governed by civil law in all fifty states. It’s the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. That’s what we want.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Cleve Jones, who’s organizing a mass march for gay equality on October 11th in Washington, DC.

Milk: Hollywood Does Gay History February 23, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Human Rights.
Tags: anita bryant, brokeback mountain, castro district, dan white, gay, gay liberation, gay rights, harry hay, harvey milk, human rights, james franco, josh brolin, matthew silverstein, milk assassination, movies, oscar, roger hollander, san francisco, scott smith, sean penn, social justice
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By Matthew Silverstein
February 20, 2009, www.religiondispatches.org

While Milk does much to revive the history of the gay liberation movement, it misses a few big opportunities.

Got milk?

Milk goes into the Oscars with eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, for Sean Penn. Aside from 2005’s Brokeback Mountain this is one of the only recent big-budget films to deal sympathetically with the lives of gay people.

The movie is framed by a spoken narrative that Harvey Milk recorded “only to be played if I am assassinated.” But the dramatic tension in the film doesn’t depend on the anticipation of Milk’s death. Instead the viewer is drawn into the story by Milk’s transformation from a closeted insurance salesman (who jokes that he is “responsible for all the evils that afflict society”) to a beacon of hope for the modern gay liberation movement.

As if on cue, the film’s release date—December 22, 2008—coincided with a national staging of protests against the passage of California’s Proposition 8 and similar ballot measures elsewhere that eliminated the right of same sex couples to legally marry. Milk, then, turning the dial of time back a click, holds up a mirror to the American psyche even as it pays homage to a father of gay liberation.

Behind the film’s opening credits, newsreel footage of men in mid-century suits being corralled into paddy wagons from bars and other meeting places gives a quick history lesson, shows the trauma that police brutality, criminalization and public scorn have inflicted on the gay community. We hear the echo of that theme when we learn that the film’s antagonist, Dan White (played by Josh Brolin), is consigned to the hellish prison of internalized homophobia. “He is one of us,” Milk confides to his staff after White pays a visit to Milk’s new office in City Hall. And, later, White drunkenly confesses to Harvey, “I have issues.”

While White and Milk (what an ironic pairing of names!) are forever linked by Milk’s murder, it is another couple that is central to the film—the sumptuously portrayed romance between Milk and his lover, Scott Smith (James Franco, who deserved an Oscar nod). From the first tender sex scene between Milk and Smith, openly gay director Van Sant demonstrates a masterly feel for the subtle electric fire that crackles between men who are in love with each other, and in lust. But the romance does not stop there. Milk and Smith develop into an intimate couple who keep each other in check. Smith comes to represent the earthy, live-for-the-day aspect of their gay partnership, while Milk embodies the loftier, shooting-for-the-stars energy that will eventually propel him into politics.

Refreshingly, when Milk and Smith separate it’s not because gay love is impossible (see: Bent, Querelle, Brokeback Mountain, Wilde, etc.) but because political life is stressful. Their falling out also augurs Milk’s growing involvement in the “political machine” and the potential for reactionary violence that a gay man’s reaching for power entails. Toward the end of the film, Milk watches with fascination a staging of Puccini’s Tosca, which ends in several tragic, twist-of-cruel-fate deaths. At the denouement, Van Sant has Milk staring out of a City Hall window at the opera house as he is fatally shot by White.

Where Do We Go From Here?

For all its virtues, the film does miss a few golden opportunities. Milk often speaks about the role of the “gay movement,” but what exactly is this movement? There are assorted references to the history of the oppression of gay people, as in Nazi Germany and under the thumb of oppressive laws and Christian fundamentalism in the United States. But the vision of this movement could have been elaborated more clearly with a gesture toward Harry Hay, an earlier “father of gay liberation” who was doubtless an influence on Milk. Hay’s argument that homosexuals are in fact “a people” with a purpose in society is a message implicit in everything that Milk carries forward.

Also, the film does not find a way to highlight more effectively Milk’s vision of forging a coalition between gays and other oppressed minority groups, namely (non-gay) people of color, women, and the elderly. In The Times of Harvey Milk, the 1984 documentary that this film is based on, the budding politico says, “Gays, ethnic minorities, and feminists need to link together so that we can affect the total direction of the city [San Francisco]” toward more inclusive and therefore more authentic forms of democracy and social justice.

The movement as portrayed in the film is predominantly white—which may have been a reflection of the demographics of the gay Castro in the 1970s; however, Milk’s awareness of the deep, wide roots of civil rights was clearly a more pronounced aspect of his vision than was captured in this film (footage in The Times of Harvey Milk reveals more direct involvement with people of color). Nevertheless, the theme of unity is rendered movingly in Milk—the filmmakers gathered more than 2000 volunteers along with 200 paid extras to recreate the candlelight vigil for the slain hero, and to create, in effect, a new act of mourning. (It was shot in two takes and “later digitally enhanced to achieve the the look of the crowd winding all the way down Market Street to the Castro from our shoot location near City Hall,” one of the filmmakers explains.)

At a rain-drenched press conference after his victory in the race for a spot on the Board of Supervisors, Milk jokes, “Anita Bryant said gay people brought drought to San Francisco. Well it seems that the drought is over.” The joke is also on Milk, for his ending of the drought leads to a fresh deluge of collective pain in the politically rudderless decades that followed his assassination. (White himself becomes the symbol of the most difficult-to-embrace aspects of gay liberation—one’s disowned, despised, and fragmentary self.)

The film thus leaves the viewer to consider the direction of the modern gay liberation movement. Where do we go from here? Milk underscores the importance of combining the dual strategies of carrying the torch—in the streets, the courts, the voting booth, and the movie theater—while also turning that light inward.

Get Milk November 27, 2008

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Human Rights.
Tags: activism, AIDS, castro district, Civil Rights, dan white, discrimination, documentary, gay rights, harvey milk, josh brolin, propositon 8, robert epstein, roger hollander, san francisco, sean penn, sheerly avni, the times of harvey milk
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www.truthdig.org

Posted on Nov 26, 2008

filminfocus.com

By Sheerly Avni

First things first. Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is a movie to be thankful for. Go see it, tonight if you can, and in a crowded theater. See it because as a grass-roots activist and California’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk led and won the fight to defeat Proposition 6, an anti-gay measure as bigoted in its own time as Proposition 8 is today. Or because it features one of our best actors at his least actorly—in his most winning performance since “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Or because on Nov. 4, civil rights took a step back on the very day it leaped forward—though Milk would have known how to use that defeat to galvanize a movement. See it because Milk is a legend in his community and in San Francisco but he hasn’t yet been written into the history of American civil rights at large, where he belongs.

Hell, see it because it’s going to take all Wednesday night to defrost the turkey, anyway, and how often does a movie about a martyred hero leave you wanting to buy tinted prescription glasses and dance in the street?

roger hollander

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Get Milk November 27, 2008

www.truthdig.org

Posted on Nov 26, 2008

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