"Pre-RNC" Protest March
Organized by United for Peace and Justice
.
"Published on Sunday, August 29, 2004 by Reuters
Huge Anti-Bush March Hits NY on Eve of Convention
by Grant McCool
NEW YORK - Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators toting colorful banners and shouting "no more Bush" took to Manhattan's streets on Sunday, the day before the Republican convention opens, to decry the Iraq war and President Bush's policies.
Organizers estimated 400,000 people turned out for the march, ......................."
.
<==Jump from here to articles while pictures load==>
Click on top photo to go to next photo
Thousands of protesters marched today (8-29-04) at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York.
"Stroller March" across the Brooklyn Bridge, before "Big March".
Critical Mass Bikers Arrested
Thousands of people protesting the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency marched in Manhattan on the eve of the Republican convention. One police estimate put the crowd at a half-million.~NY Times
CNN
.
A crowd fills Manhattan avenue during a protest march leading to the Republican National Convention site, sponsored by United for Peace and Justice, in New York, Sunday, Aug. 29, 2004. (AP Photo/Greg Bull)
"Many held banners and signs such as "Say No to the War Economy," "Bush Must Go" and "Bush lied, thousands died" in opposition to the war."
AP
A crowd marched in New York in the largest protest ever at a
political convention. (Photo: David L. Ryan / Boston Globe)
A.N.S.W.E.R. ---Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
In addition to the massive protest march, many, various, and ongoing protests including many Street Theatre events, occurred throughout the city, throughout the duration of the Republican Convention.
Abu Shame
"Just say OINK!"-------------------------for "Hallibacon bucks"
StripSing
GET OUT AND VOTE!!
GET OUT THE VOTE!!
.
Protest Articles: One / Two / Three / LINKS /
.
TOP
Back to
Mooncharts
Families and Individuals Join in Anger and Frustration
Published: August 30, 2004
| |
For each wildly costumed, madly gyrating, drum-beating protester, there was a family that had made the trip into Manhattan together to march as one.
And for all the chants denouncing President Bush as a terrorist, for all the obscenities screamed full throated, there were just as many people, young and old, who expressed in more subdued tones their anger with the Bush administration.
Whether it was a mother who has a child fighting in Iraq or a father wanting his children to see history in the making, the march past Madison Square Garden yesterday had the distinct feel of a family affair.
Susan Catalano, 66, and her daughters, Adrienne, 34, and Victoria, 39, had come to their opposition slowly. But the three, all from New York, marched enthusiastically.
"I was in support of the war in Iraq when it began," Adrienne said. "Although, at the time, my mother said not to believe all the hype."
She smiled, hand on her mom's shoulder, and said, "Older and wiser."
Victoria held an umbrella over her mother's head to shield her from the sun on the cloudless afternoon. She said her mother was a registered Republican who does not vote along party lines.
"I think people are really fed up with the war," said Victoria, who works as an assistant to an investment banker in New York City. "I think people feel really duped."
Adrienne agreed, saying: "I don't like the war. They tied the war in Iraq to the war on terrorism."
Although Adrienne said she believed that herself, she said she now feels betrayed. "Where is bin Laden? Al Qaeda attacked us, so why are we in Iraq?"
Dorothy Miller, 84, of the Bronx, and her husband, Alex, 86, looked like they could have been heading off to a Florida vacation.
She wore a floral button-down shirt that flapped in the breeze and a bonnet pulled tightly on her head, while he held her arm, camera slung around his shoulder. It had taken the couple two hours to amble the 10 blocks from 23rd Street to Madison Square Garden.
Mrs. Miller, whose husband was in the Army Air Corps during World War II, said: "We don't do this often. But what is happening in Iraq is really just terrible."
Members of the Larson family worried that they would not be able to get into the city to make the march because of traffic and security. Peter Larson, 50, said they had decided to drive from their home in Burlington, N.J., to Staten Island and take the ferry over.
Mr. Larson was joined by his wife, Michele, 40, and their children, Andrew 13, and Kirsten, 16. They were part of a group called Military Families Speak Out.
Mrs. Larson said they had been going to various rallies since Sept. 11, 2001, but when a good friend's son died last February in Iraq, it drove home how much the war is costing average families.
Kirsten said that among her high school friends, nobody is very concerned about politics. "But the other day someone brought up the draft," she said. "That got everyone excited, I guess because it affected them personally."
Among the thousands of people marching were many bearing signs with messages like "Draft the Bush twins,'' and: "My kids are in Iraq Mr. Bush. Are yours?"
At the end of the parade, marchers carried 1,000 cardboard coffins wrapped in flags meant to represent those killed in the war.
Nearby, a group calling themselves the "Raging Grannies" sang songs that spoofed Mr. Bush, set to familiar melodies. For instance, to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'' they sang: "No more lies from Dick and Georgie/We deplore their wartime orgy."
The Daniels family from Vermont woke up at 3 a.m. to make the drive into the city. Bryan, 38, and his wife, Terri, 42, were joined by their children, Taylor, 14, and Callie, 11. They also had their dog, Ellie, named after Eleanor Roosevelt.
"We felt we had to come to make some kind of statement," Mr. Daniels said. "We know there are a lot of complaints that there is not a lot of a difference between Bush and Kerry, especially regarding Iraq, but there are small differences that could have a big impact."
***********************************
TOP
............................cut from---
With Restraint and New Tactics, March Is Kept Orderly
Published: August 30, 2004
Even some of the Police Department's most persistent critics reluctantly gave the police good marks, though several said most of the credit for good behavior belonged to the demonstrators.
"A quarter of a million people made a commitment to a peaceful legal march," said one of yesterday's marchers, Ronald Kuby, the civil rights lawyer from New York who gave his own unofficial estimate of the crowd size. "They were the ones who kept the peace. They were the ones who were well behaved. So this notion that the police did a good job is true only to the extent that the demonstrators themselves had a powerful commitment to keep this demonstration peaceful and legal."
The greatest show of force came at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, where the march turned east after moving uptown. On one corner more than a dozen officers sat on horseback, while dozens of other uniformed officers lined the streets. Motorcycles, scooters and vans filled the pavement just beyond the border of the protest zone.
A few yards away, at around 3 p.m., a fire broke out when a papier-mâché float made to look like a dragon was set ablaze. The police quickly blocked off the route at 34th Street and Avenue of the Americas and put the flames out with fire extinguishers. Several people were arrested, one of whom was charged with arson.
For all the preparations to deal with the crowd, it appeared that the police forgot at least one essential detail - water for the officers who were weighed down with body armor and riot helmets. Officers had to rely on their supervisors to run into local convenience stores to buy water.
Still, over and over, as hundreds of thousands of people marched yesterday, up Seventh Avenue, across 34th Street and down Fifth Avenue, the police showed restraint, turning away, for example, when they were mocked for failing to secure a desired raise from the city. At one point, a large group of demonstrators surrounded a patrol car, waving anarchist flags and taunting the two officers inside. The police officers hit their siren, backed up and drove off. A few uniformed officers arrived and ordered the protesters onto the sidewalks, and the group just melted away.
There were red lines, however, and anyone on a bicycle seemed to be on the wrong side of that line. At a large bike protest on Friday, the police showed they were resolved to keep the bikes from blocking traffic, and they did that again yesterday. Bicycle-riding protesters said that the people in civilian clothing (who they assumed to be police) would ride into the pack of cyclists to slow them down. Protesters said the police strategy seemed to be contain, surge and arrest.
One incident involved a group of cyclists a few blocks away from the parade route. Chris Habib, 29, said police scooters sought to move the cyclists off the street by nudging their tires. He said that as the cyclists reached Seventh Avenue traveling west on 37th Street, they slowed, facing a dilemma. Police blocked any turn south and, the bikers believed that turning north on the southbound avenue would result in instant arrest.
Several bystanders said the police arrested people who were not protesting but happened to be in the area when the police swooped down.
At the Second Avenue Deli, Alexander Pincus, 28, and Isa Wipfli, 29, had just picked up a dinner of matzo ball soup, pirogi, pastrami and corned beef for Mr. Pincus's girlfriend when they stepped outside and saw swarms of police officers and bicyclists. Mr. Pincus said he and Mr. Wipfli approached a police officer looking for a way out.
"They took our bikes and handcuffed us," Mr. Wipfli said. "We were like, 'Look at the food. It's still warm.' They wouldn't listen to anything we said."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Michael Wilson,
Patrick Healy, Randal C. Archibold, Joyce Purnick and Ann Farmer.
TOP
Back to
Mooncharts
Yury and his MagicBike
by Geeta Dayal
August 29th, 2004 4:46 PM
Thanks to this week's protests of the Republican convention, the streets of Manhattan have become an outdoor gallery for the latest trends in the fusion of art and digital technology.
A loose network of tech-savvy activists has been working for months—in some cases years—to construct intriguingly bizarre electronic contraptions for creative resistance. This new breed of wireless activists is moving the Internet's power off the screen and into the streets.
"Why should I be inside, staring at a monitor?" says Yury Gitman, a 28-year-old Brooklynite and inventor of the MagicBike, a bicycle that's been hacked to double as a free wireless Internet hot spot. Yury, a quiet, soft-spoken sort of guy who cites Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the scientist Nikolai Tesla as his heroes— "because they were working with the emerging media of their times"—envisions himself as the ice cream man of the wireless age.
Using MagicBike, Yury sent what he believes to be the first documented e-mail in the New York subway. He addressed it to Mayor Bloomberg, and sent it from deep in the recesses of the Union Square subway station. "He never wrote me back," says Yury with a laugh. But the e-mail was sent, and a point was made—his bike could enable things that were not possible before. MagicBike is the secret weapon behind much of the Internet-enabled activist art happening at the RNC protests.
For instance, Yury's MagicBike is helping 25-year-old activist Josh Kinberg's quirky bicycle-powered chalk-printer to blog about the RNC protests. (Yes, even bicycles have blogs now. Welcome to the future.)
"I made a New Year's resolution that I would do everything in my ability as an artist to stop Bush from being re-elected," says Josh, explaining why he dedicated the last full year of his life to building the world's first wireless bicycle that receives and broadcasts anti-Bush text messages.
Here's how Josh's project, Bikes Against Bush, is working at the protests: Internet users worldwide are sending messages to the souped-up bike through Josh's website, Bikes Against Bush. A cell phone tied to the bike's handlebars receives the incoming text messages, and the bike automatically sprays the messages on the street behind it in big chalk letters. The effect is stunning: The bike looks like it's writing the messages magically. It lasts longer than a picket sign—the chalk takes about five days to rub off—and it's faster, flashier, smarter, and sexier. Using a webcam, the bike takes snapshots of the messages it writes and then automatically blogs about them on the website, so that users around the world can follow the bike's progress as it roams the streets of Manhattan.
Yury's MagicBike is also furnishing Internet access to Operation Urban Terrain, or OUT, a citywide video installation that also happens to be a networked live-action video game. The project is the brainchild of Anne-Marie Schleiner and other creators of the popular game Velvet-Strike. Featured at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Velvet-Strike was a version of the popular shoot-'em-up Counterstrike, hacked to have an anti-war message. OUT trades on similar themes, but it goes one step further, connecting an online team of five players around the world to the game happening in Manhattan. The result is projected onto walls of various buildings throughout the city.
Throughout the RNC demonstrations, protesters are blogging, sending photos, and text messaging each other. The Screensavers, a group of video DJs and like-minded artists, are remixing all this raw data, creating video performances from random images, sounds, and text culled from RSS feeds of the day's blogging activity. And a contraption called CoDeck, installed until September 3 in Avenue A's alt.coffee café, will function as a platform for people to share and discuss video footage of the protests.
Other wireless activists, worried about the inaccurate crowd counts that so often accompany media and police reports at big protests, have engineered an answer: the "Bureau of Inverse Technology." They're tying wireless video cameras to helium balloons, and setting them afloat above the crowds. A guy on skates blazes through the crowd with the balloon, while the camera bounces data to laptops, to create a composite photo— and count—of the crowd.
If you're looking for an easy way to join in the techie shenanigans, look no further than MoPort.Taking the popular trend of cell phone blogging, or "moblogging," one step further, MoPort allows the masses to contribute real-time pictures of the RNC protests. The goal is to join the disparate streams into a collective reporting effort. It's an ambitious idea, even you can't always tell the good guys from bad ones in the photos.Back to
Mooncharts
!!***SOLAR BUS~~"Election Fraud Special Report"***!!
Creative Activism--Exercising Free Speech--Freeway Blogging
IRAQ---Progress Report
Common Dreams --August 2004
Common Dreams --September 2004
The Unconstitution
Secrecy in the Bush Administration / by Rep. Henry A. Waxman
The Resort to Force / TomDispatch .com
Seymour Hersh / Alternative History of Bush's War
They Said It Couldn't Be Done / Nevada Voting Machines easily paper-trailed
Iraq Had No WMD: The Final Verdict
Friday, September 17, 2004 / Sharon Repudiates the Road Map
A FLIP and a FLOP and
now just a FLOP 9/16/04-- ". . . this week Iraqis sat down to watch a wicked television satire updating the legend of the genie and the lamp. Summoned to a darkened flat to grant his customary wishes, the hapless blue-bearded genie is asked to repair the electricity supply, but can only attach the wires to the neighbours' generator, which promptly breaks down.
Beseeched to improve the nation's security, he disappears only to reappear bruised and battered, having been run over by US tanks. The message is clear. In the land of the Arabian Nights, even the genie can't fix Iraq. "
Informed Comment / Juan Cole
Slippage of control in Iraq makes a mockery of power hand-over
Into The Abyss / The week Iraq's dream of peace fell apart
Journalism Under Fire / Bill Moyers
Think Again: Meanwhile, in the Real World…
Overrun by Assassins
Media Channel
If America Were Iraq, What Would It Be Like?
WeAreEverywhere.org
Despair Is a Lie We Tell Ourselves
Agents of Obstruction
9-29--Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush
Michael Moore / Put Away Your Hankies
NOW with Bill Moyers & David Brancaccio
"If you want a poll on the Kerry-Bush race, sit down and make up your own. It is just as good as the monstrous frauds presented on television and the newspaper first pages." —Jimmy Breslin, Newsday, 9.16.04
TOP
Back to
Mooncharts
From Al Gore in the NY Times, 9-29-04
"The biggest single difference between the debates this year and four years ago is that President Bush cannot simply make promises. He has a record. And I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined."