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Green Party Protests War at Laney College Gathering By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Tuesday September 20, 2005

Former gubernatorial and vice-presidential candidate Peter Camejo told a gathering of progressives in Oakland Saturday that recent events in New Orleans and the drop in American support for the occupation in Iraq “is a tremendous opening for the Green Party. This is a peculiar moment where we can win over people massively by explaining to them what is happening in our country and in the world.” 

The speech by Camejo, the Green Party co-founder, was the keynote of a “Back to School Not War” rally at Oakland’s Laney College, part of a two-day statewide conference sponsored by the party. 

The event was the first general gathering of California Greens in three years. 

Camejo said his comments on Iraq were prompted by a New York Times/CBS poll showing that 44 percent of individuals polled believed that the United States made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq, a figure the New York Times said was “the lowest rating since the question was first asked by this poll more than two years ago.” 

The newspaper also reported that 52 percent of people interviewed called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, “even if that means abandoning President Bush’s goal of restoring stability to that country.” 

The war in Iraq was also the subject of the speech by the rally’s other main speaker, rising local Green Party star Aimee Allison, a Gulf War conscientious objector who placed fourth last May in a nine-person race for the District 2 Oakland City Council race. 

“I am thinking that we know right now in this country what it must have felt like to be in Germany in the 1930s,” Allison said, “when ordinary Germans saw Hitler take over the courts, used an attack on the national legislature to take over the legislature, and waged war abroad as well as on the German people.” 

Without naming George W. Bush by name but in an obvious reference to the president, Allison declared to shouts and applause from the audience that “we have a war criminal in our midst. I don’t want to see him out of office. I want to see him jailed.” 

Allison announced that she will be a Green Party candidate for the Oakland City Council. 

Ragina Johnson, the campaign director for the November College Not Combat ballot advisory proposition asking San Francisco voters to call for the banning of military recruiters from the city schools, linked Iraq and Hurricane Katrina together, stating that “the war is being paid for with the lives of people in the gulf coast.” 

It was an allusion to the fact that National Guard troops were unavailable for rescue work following the hurricane and floods because many of them were on duty in Iraq. 

The rally’s third major speaker, former Black Panther Party Chairperson Elaine Brown, could not deliver her speech by telephone from Brunswick, Ga., because of technical problems. Brown is a Green Party candidate for Brunswick mayor. 

But Brown’s place on the program was taken by two last-minute additions recently returned from the New Orleans hurricane disaster, San Francisco paramedics Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who received a heroes’ welcome from the crowd. 

Bradshaw and Slonsky said they “happened to be in New Orleans when the hurricane hit,” and their e-mail account of their horrific experiences during the disaster was widely circulated around the Internet this month. The message included stories that Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputies in neighboring Gretna, La., fired shots over the heads of New Orleans hurricane survivors to prevent them from walking across a Mississippi River bridge into Gretna, and charges that a Jefferson Parish deputy later looted food from those survivors after they were forced to disperse. 

Bradshaw said he wanted to dispel the myth that New Orleans citizens simply sat around following the hurricane and waited to be rescued. 

“We witnessed incredible acts of heroism being carried out by ordinary people,” he said, “maintenance workers using forklifts to carry out the sick and the wounded, refinery workers stealing boats so they could rescue people trapped by the floodwaters, engineers hotwiring cars and then using them to transport people out of the disaster area.” 

Slonsky contrasted those actions of “ordinary people” with their experiences with many police and National Guard officials, who they said often hampered relief efforts rather than helping them. 

“It was clear that if you were black and poor, you were not going to be able to get out of New Orleans immediately after the hurricane,” she said. Both Bradshaw and Slonsky are white. 

Workshops during the two-day event were divided between progressive issues—- such as education, American Muslims in the era of the Patriot Act, universal health care, for example—and strategies for building the Green Party and winning elections. 

Alameda County Green Party central council member Greg Jan said that the state party holds two to three decision-making sessions a year among party officials, but “wants to hold more informal gatherings on a regular basis so that we can network among ourselves and share information with other progressive organizations.” 

At one of the Saturday workshop sessions, a Green Party presenter said it “felt good to be able to debate some of these ideas in person; usually we’re just exchanging e-mails.”