Code Pink

[odannyboy]

http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?id=51

This woman was thrown out of the Prime Minister of Iraq's speech before Congress the other day for protesting the war. After Googling info on this woman and then looking at her website and seeing who she was I was struck by this simple message:

Medea has been working to promote a U.S. foreign policy that would respect human rights and gain us allies instead of contributing to violence and undermining our international reputation

I cannot disagree with a word of what I italicized. We are digging a hole daily with our foreign policy run by people who are disconnected from reality. I guess that is what I find most baffling amongst all the armchair warriors who keep shrieking we need more bombs to bring peace is how they think what we are doing is helping in anyway. It is doing the opposite and is a failed vision of the neocons. Most Americans, a majority, can clearly see this failed vision is responsible for many deaths and for making the world a much less safer place.

[KBay84]

There was a reason she was tossed out.

A) Disrupting congress to demonstrate for or against just isn't allowed

B) The press release might make her out to be a saint, but there's a little more to her and the big picture than what has been presented...

FrontPageMagazine.com | March 26, 2003

Like any other group, Communists come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors. This time they’re wearing pink, they’re on the nightly news, and more than anything, they want the mothers and grandmothers of America to identify with them.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the leaders of the women’s anti-war group Code Pink got lost on their way to the carpool line. Since October, these hot pink-clad "marching moms" have been spinning the same tale to reporters from coast to coast, the one about how concern for their families moved them to trade their oven mitts for placards and take to the streets in protest of an unjust war on Iraq.

They’ve played the part so convincingly that over the last six months, they’ve become the media darlings of war protest movement, raking in the television talk show invites and making national news when they were arrested in front of the White House. But the untold story is what they were doing before October.

Unless you travel in Marxist circles or work for the FBI or CIA, the names of the Code Pink moms may not ring a bell with you, though you’ve probably been reading news reports about their collective exploits for years. In the wake of their war against capitalism and self-determination, they’ve left a trail of anarchy and destruction that has cost property owners, corporations and consumers millions of dollars.

Naturally, they’ve toned their Marxist rhetoric down for their stint with Code Pink. Though they’ve taken great pains to differentiate themselves from the other, more radical anti-war protesters, they are one and the same. The leaders of Code Pink didn’t merely take part in the Washington and San Francisco protests that made international headlines – they also organized them. In the process, they’ve provided a rare public glimpse of the faces behind the modern, highly organized American Marxist movement. Needless to say, these women have little in common with the carpool moms of America.

At the center of Code Pink is legendary leftist organizer Medea Benjamin, the 50-year-old mother of two widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization. In addition to Code Pink, Benjamin’s San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange was the founding force for United for Peace and Justice coalition, the nexus of the anti-war protests.

The United for Peace coalition, which includes Socialist Action and the Socialist Party USA, is also led by Leslie Cagan, who has a long history of activism with the American Communist Party. If you want to know what anti-war activities United for Peace and its more radical partner, Act Now To Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) have planned for the near future or contact information for how you can join in, you can click on the Communist World Workers Party website, one of the central grassroots clearing houses for communist organizers in the United States and around the world.

The mindset of Benjamin and her friends can best be summed up by her description in the San Francisco Chronicle of how she felt on her first pilgrimage to Cuba in the early 1980s. Compared to life in the United States, the communist social equality of Cuba "made it seem like I died and went to heaven," Benjamin enthused. Now it appears that Benjamin is trying to recreate it here.

The ties that continue to bind Benjamin, Cagan and the others behind Code Pink and today’s anti-war movement were formed in the early-to-mid 1980s when the still young Marxist-American activists found the cause that first unified them: a communist government in Nicaragua. Using the same sort of incestuous, sprawling coalitions they created to oppose the war in Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, they helped aid the Marxist Sandinista regime in its struggle against the American-backed Contras for control of the Nicaraguan government.

Benjamin worked as a project coordinator for Institute for Food and Development Policy (IFDP), which was widely credited with aiding the Marxist Sandinista regime while Cagan, coordinator of the National Mobilization for Justice and Peace in Central America, led marches against US aid to the contras at home that at times attracted upwards of 75,000 people.

When Sand Brim, the widely interviewed voice of Code Pink, insisted to the reporters who interviewed her in January that she was not an activist, just a businesswoman with reservations about war, her 1985 stint in Nicaragua must have slipped her mind. As the executive director of Medical Aid, Brim flew an American neurosurgeon to San Salvador to operate on Marxist Revolutionary Party Commander Nidia Diaz’s hand, which had been injured in combat. That Diaz’s group had claimed responsibility for the murders of four U.S. Marines and nine civilians two months before was apparently not an issue for Brim. Nor were such ironies a problem for Kirsten Moller, the current executive director of Global Exchange and Code Pink organizer who, like Benjamin, also worked for IFDP in the 80s.

In the 1990s, Benjamin and other Code Pink Marxists focused their energies on organizing sometimes-violent protests against free trade across the globe, targeting large corporations with high-profile campaigns and lawsuits that cost consumers and companies like Gap, Nike and Starbucks millions of dollars. As with the anti-war protests of the moment, the Marxist World Worker’s Party website has played a crucial organizing role in their anti-corporate activities, letting would-be agitators know when and where to show up for demonstrations.

Meanwhile, other Code Pink organizers were making a name for themselves in domestic and eco-terrorism in the 1990s. Code Pink Co-Founder Jodie Evans also sits on the board of directors of Rain Forest Action Network (RAN), a radical anti-capitalist, anti-corporate coalition of environmental groups co-founded by Mike Roselle, who also founded the domestic terrorist organization Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which along with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is ranked the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat by the FBI. The FBI attributes over 600 criminal acts and $43 million in damages to the two groups since 1996. Wherever RAN pops up, you’ll also tend to find the Ruckus Society, which has trained activists for ELF/ALF. Ruckus Society organizer Steve Kretzmann, also a Code Pink coordinator, has helped train activists in the agitation tactics that have earned the Ruckus Society its reputation. The Ruckus Society, it’s also worth mentioning, is a coalition member of Benjamin’s United for Peace and Justice.

Code Pink may be communism central for the moment, but if the past is any indication, the group will be left to die on the vine as soon as public attention shifts away from the war in Iraq. Like the other wedge issues these activists are so skilled at creating and taking advantage of, the Iraqi conflict is little more than an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the American public and swell their volunteer rosters while energizing and solidifying the organization they’d been building since the Seattle riots.

While it may seem chaotic with its mass of groups with varied interests, "the movement" as the organizers like to call it, is built around a simple theme: that America and the rest of the world is increasingly controlled by corporate powers that threaten democratic rights. Its goals, as laid out by Benjamin and others in a variety of newspapers over the years, are clear-cut.

They want to redistribute wealth from the top tiers of society to the poorest Americans by raising minimum wages, choking off trade, pushing up inflation, limiting corporate growth and dragging down the stock market, cutting into the profits of the country’s largest corporations or shutting them down completely and prompting white collar layoffs.

As Benjamin explained to The Sunday Oregonian in 2000, these changes would be made slowly, perhaps over 20 years or more. Though she admits that the above would cause an economic shakedown or even a stock-market crash, she insists the changes would lead to a "healthier, more stable economy."

"Seattle was this kind of battle cry," Benjamin told the San Jose Mercury News in 2000. "We now know we can mobilize hundreds of thousands of people."

But to the dismay of the movement’s organizers, September 11 crushed some of that momentum. Ironically enough, September 11 was the day they’d planned to announce their biggest demonstration yet, which was slated to draw well over 100,000 protesters to Washington from around the world in late September. It was instead replaced with a small peace demonstration.

The Code Pink ladies have been biding their time ever since, reaching out to middle America, building their contact lists and dreaming of the Marxist America that might one day be.

http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?id=51

[Woodmonkey]

The Anti-American: Medea Benjamin


There is scarcely a calamity, an injustice, or an act of outright barbarism occurring anywhere on earth, that Leftists cannot somehow trace to the doorstep of the United States. In their view, all attacks against our country are understandable, if not laudable, retaliatory strikes against an aggressive, arrogant nation that has too often tried to bully the rest of the world. Conversely, any American response – be it with military or law-enforcement measures – is seen as a form of aggression that will only provoke further anti-Americanism and thereby perpetuate "the cycle of violence."

A leading proponent of this view is the outspoken Medea Benjamin, who in 1988 founded the activist organization Global Exchange, and in 2000 was the Green Party candidate for US Senate in California. In her view, America’s war on terror is, itself, a form of terrorism. Late last year Ms. Benjamin took a group of Americans, each of whom had lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks, to Afghanistan to meet people whose relatives had perished in the US bombing campaign there. She returned from that trip weighted down with photographs and heart-rending tales of Afghan children who had been injured, killed, or orphaned by the war. "We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives," she said.

This remarkable characterization of the US military effort implies, of course, that the Bush Administration defines justice, at least in part, as the retributive taking of innocent lives – rather than as an effort to bring down deadly terrorist networks like al-Qaeda. Benjamin’s other planted axiom is that merely because some innocent Afghans were killed by American bombs, the events that brought about their deaths were morally equivalent to the attacks of 9-11. Strangely, however, she has not a word to say about the Taliban’s culpability in forcing the war by refusing to hand over bin Laden and his henchmen – as President Bush demanded – during the weeks preceding the American air strikes.

Instead, Ms. Benjamin asserts that Bush "has responded to the violent attack of 9-11 with the notion of perpetual war . . . a war in Afghanistan that included dropping over 20,000 bombs, many of which missed their targets and led to the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians." Global Exchange, she explains, "hired a survey team in Afghanistan that documented over 800 civilian deaths and many more wounded." Yet she does not acknowledge that this number is remarkably small, given the massive firepower dropped upon this nation of 26 million people. Had the US been truly careless or malicious, casualties could easily have numbered in the millions.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that some non-military targets were bombed by mistake, and Leftists like Ms. Benjamin can allow no American error to go un-condemned – no matter how noble our nation’s intentions might have been. Thus Global Exchange has pressed the US government to create a fund that would pay $10,000 apiece to Afghan victims who need medical care, help in rebuilding their homes, and compensation for the loss of a caretaker or breadwinner.

Naturally, Benjamin makes no demand that Americans who lost loved ones on 9-11 receive reciprocal restitution from ousted Taliban leaders – or even from Saudi Arabia, the land from which fifteen of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers hailed. Nor has she issued any call for other Arab nations to help Afghanistan. As always, America is expected not only to climb unaided out of its own dark pit of tragedy, but to rescue everyone else as well. In the condescending paternalism typical of the Left, nothing is expected – or even asked – of other nations. Even though much of Afghanistan had been rendered a virtual wasteland by twenty-three years of war that had killed and maimed untold numbers of innocents, Benjamin holds only America’s military campaign accountable for the unintended damage it inflicted.

Like any good Leftist, Ms. Benjamin predictably advises us to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world – from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." Presumably it is unjust for our country to show "bias" favoring the Middle East’s lone friendly democracy, a nation that has repeatedly been assaulted by neighboring armies and legions of suicide bombers. Presumably we ought to demonstrate equal affection for nations and peoples that wish to see "infidels" like us obliterated.

The bombings, says Ms. Benjamin, have "made Afghans so upset that some [have] talked about waging a jihad, or holy war, against the United States." "If the Muslim world sees the United States as willing to bomb but not feed people," she adds, "it will deepen the suspicion and mistrust already felt by millions . . . that the United States doesn’t care about the lives of the Muslim people." Never does she mention that since the 9-11 attacks, Americans have led the world in sending money, food, clothing, and medicine to needy Afghans. Charities, churches, concerned organizations, and private corporations from coast to coast have raised enormous sums to help those people living in the very land that harbored the masterminds of the 9-11 attacks. What other nation on earth has ever demonstrated such generosity in the wake of such an atrocity?

Moreover, the US government has already pledged hundreds of millions of dollars for this fiscal year alone to help Afghans rebuild their schools, develop an adequate health-care system, vaccinate their children against measles, rehabilitate landmine victims, improve sanitation facilities, repatriate Afghan refugees, modernize agriculture, and restore roads and bridges.

All of the aforementioned issues, of course, long predated the American military campaign in Afghanistan; in essence, our nation has volunteered to clean up the abominable mess that others – many of them Muslims – made for the Afghan population. Added to this, our political leaders have stated ad nauseam that our war is not against Islam, but against terrorism. This message has been repeated countless thousands of times in both the print and electronic media. Yet still, as Ms. Benjamin points out, many Islamic nations perceive the US as being anti-Muslim. There comes a point where we must simply acknowledge that we can do nothing more; we can deliver our message in many different forms, but we cannot comprehend it for those who are unwilling or unable to comprehend it for themselves.

Ms. Benjamin further decries our government’s current preparation for possible war with Iraq. She organized last month’s "peace" demonstration in San Francisco, and was a featured speaker at its sister rally in Washington, DC. "While other nations are desperately trying to come to a deal with Iraq to resume weapons inspections," she says, "the US government opposes any moves that reduce its justification to wage war." She says not a word about the farcical twelve-year history of the inspections process, fraught with Iraqi lies, evasions, defiance, and noncompliance.

"We are . . . determined," Benjamin adds, "to stop the US government from unilaterally dictating to other people – be they Palestinian, Iraqi or Venezuelan – who their leaders should be. This is for the people themselves to decide." This is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order, for surely she understands that the people of Iraq – where political dissent is met with torture, imprisonment, or death – do not choose their own leaders. Benjamin is an intelligent woman who knows better than to believe that Saddam’s recent electoral victory, in which he captured fully 100 percent of the vote, was anything but a sham.

Ms. Benjamin often expresses her desire to build "a world that rejects ethnic and religious divisions, celebrates diversity . . . [and] focuses on building a global community." Carried away by her own flowery prose, she is unwilling to acknowledge that the effort to rid the world of such divisions and to celebrate diversity are uniquely Western concepts – more highly developed by America than by any other nation in world history. By the same token, she is silent about the fact that Muslim lands have shown no similar impulse, plagued as they are by a spirit of cultural and religious intolerance.

Not even the deplorable human rights abuses that occur throughout the Middle East are, in Ms. Benjamin’s mind, any worse than what takes place in America. "When most Americans hear of human rights abuses," she states, "they likely think of atrocities in some far-off country in a forgotten corner of the globe. . . . [But] abuses against individuals’ basic rights also occur regularly here in the United States, and our money-saturated political system hardly deserves the title ‘democracy.’ "

Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature. The Washington "peace" rally at which she spoke last month, for instance, was organized by the Workers World Party, a Communist organization proudly dedicated to "fight[ing] against capitalism" in America’s "racist, sexist society." In years past, she staunchly opposed US military aid to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America. More recently, she has worked to take California’s energy production out of the hands of private companies and place it under public control. She favors the creation of a government-sponsored universal health care system funded by taxpayer dollars. She exhorts the US government to lift its trade embargo against Cuba – a nation she notably lauds as a place where people have managed to "thrive despite the odds" against them.

Earlier this year Ms. Benjamin, along with scores of other notable American Leftists, signed a declaration titled "Not in Our Name." This document asserts that the US war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world"; that "war and repression . . . has been loosed on the world by the Bush Administration . . . [in] a spirit of revenge." Again we encounter the ever-recurring theme of the Left: all problems are America’s fault. Benjamin and her fellow signatories angrily denounce the Administration’s "simplistic" characterization of the war on terror as a battle of "good vs. evil." In their view, there is no good or evil. Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill are merely variations on a theme, neither one better than the other.

The Source

[odannyboy]

Naturally, Benjamin makes no demand that Americans who lost loved ones on 9-11 receive reciprocal restitution from ousted Taliban leaders – or even from Saudi Arabia, the land from which fifteen of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers hailed.

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!!

Good luck with that!! This is the country responsible for bombing us on 9/11 and the President spirtis their citizens, some related to Bin Laden, out of the country when the airspace is still closed to all flights! Furthermore he allows them to leave without being questioned by the FBI even though almost 3000 Americans were murdered by their countrymen.

Yes, this is a President who is concerned with "justice"..........

Earlier this year Ms. Benjamin, along with scores of other notable American Leftists, signed a declaration titled "Not in Our Name." This document asserts that the US war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world"; that "war and repression . . . has been loosed on the world by the Bush Administration . . .

Not in my name either. Dont wage war based on lies and wrap in your "war on terror" nonsense when it is the Bush Administration causing the terror.

Many, many Americans are standing and saying "not in our name" and you can count me in as well. This President neither represents me nor speaks for me.

[odannyboy]

Originally Posted by KBay84

They want to redistribute wealth from the top tiers of society to the poorest Americans by raising minimum wages, choking off trade, pushing up inflation, limiting corporate growth and dragging down the stock market, cutting into the profits of the country’s largest corporations or shutting them down completely and prompting white collar layoffs.

This is horsesh*t, I wonder how much more of the article is? I see she was blamed personally for the WTO riots and damages that incurred, as if she was standing on a platform with a bullhorn screaming out orders.

"You there, smash the windows on that building! You there, throw rocks at the police! The rest of us will start fire to these cars!"

Sure. After reading part of that article I see what appears to be a statement from those who would continue to outsource every American job in the name of greater profits for corporate America and further disintegration of the middle class.

Keep on doing their work for them, the Chinese are very grateful for your efforts. Yep, the Communists that she is linked to love articles like these, its more jobs for them.

[Scrappy]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, stop, freaking stop.

Originally Posted by odannyboy

This is the country responsible for bombing us on 9/11 and the President spirtis their citizens, some related to Bin Laden, out of the country when the airspace is still closed to all flights! Furthermore he allows them to leave without being questioned by the FBI even though almost 3000 Americans were murdered by their countrymen.

This is one of the reasons I asked you a question in another thread.

One, the family of Osama that was in this country had cut OBL off years earlier. Two, the family had been under scrutiny long before 9-11. Three, they had already been cleared from any direct contact with him, before and up to the attack. Four, we, excluding you, realize that despite the fact that at they did not aid OBL concerning the attack, understood that there would be a knee jerk reaction an a possible backlash. Five, unlike you, the US thought it would be best for the guests to leave for their own protection. Six, the air space was not closed to all flights.

You speak of justice, who's justice?