craigslist | politics in western massachusetts

Learn about the food system by directly combatting hunger and poverty! (Amherst Common, Northampton Bus stop)

2008-07-22T16:03:00-04:00

Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world. There are hundreds of autonomous chapters sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty. Food Not Bombs is not a charity. This energetic grassroots movement is active throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Food Not Bombs is organizing for peace and an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. For over 25 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth.
Every Wednesday Amherst Food Not Bombs Serves a meal, and every Sunday Northampton Food Not Bombs serves at 2pm downtown, and distributes food that corporations and our local food system would have thrown in the trash or composted due to over-purchasing and overproduction.
In Amherst We meet at the Common at around 1 pm.
This wednesday (Tomorrow!) we have an extreme excess or squash and bread. please come by and pick some up!
We are living in a period in America where people are struggling to meet bill payments while food corporations are driving an overproduced market and wasting vast quantities of edible, healthy food. Please help raise awareness about our food system by eating some of its delicious unnecessary waste.
~Food Not Bombs

Volunteers needed! Nathan Bech for Congress campaign. (West Springfield)

2008-07-18T17:42:37-04:00

Volunteers needed in our campaign office on 86 Elm St, in West Springfield. Want to use you where your strengths are. Computers, phone calls, voter contact, community canvassing. There is plenty of work to do daily.

www.NathanBech.com

We want to help bring good representation back to Massachusetts. That means lowering gas prices, bringing jobs to Western Mass, and working in the interest of the people. All of this is accomplished through hard work and good policy. Let's bring growth to Massachusetts. We need your help. Volunteer today. Call our campaign headquarters at (413) 788-0669

www.NathanBech.com

++ Why Obama Campaign needs money? (Western Massachusetts)

2008-07-17T15:06:19-04:00

Obama needs a financial boost? This shows why...

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%27%27Dictionary+of+Painters+and+Engravers%2C+Biographical+and+Critical%27%27+%28Volume+II+L-Z%29& The National Council is composed of the People's representatives from various political economic and social sectors Its formation membership work procedures and its jurisdiction are determined by a special law called the National Council Law The deadline for the conclusion of drafting was extended on four occasions because of the lack of consensus on religious language In the end only three of the 15 Sunni members of the drafting committee attended the signing ceremony and none of them signed it Sunni leaders were split as to whether to support the constitution the scope of the phrase official language and the manner of implementing the rules of this article will be defined by a law that includes he suffered his first stroke in June 1999 In September 2005 a year and a half after the 2004 publication of the first portion of his memoirs he suffered his second stroke 64918940

Youth peace group forming (Westfield)

2008-07-05T14:16:12-04:00

This is the kick-off (first) meeting of the youth peace group!

Waronoke Peace Action
http://www.waronokepeace.org/
The TeaPot Gallery
22 Elm Street
Downtown Westfield
Thursday, July 17
6 p.m. � 7 p.m.

Bring your creativity and ideas to share!!
All are welcome!

Next Regular Monthly Meeting

Thursday, July 17 at 7:00 p.m.
Note: Our monthly meeting pattern is the third Thursday of the month.

Meetings are open to all who share our concerns.

Genesis Spiritual Life Center
53 Mill Street
Westfield, MA 01085

Mentally ill woman left to die in hospital waiting room (Capitqalist Medicine Survival of the Fit)

2008-07-05T08:05:32-04:00

A videotape aired on national television showing a patient dying in the waiting room of the Kings County Medical Center in Brooklyn last month has provoked a wave of revulsion.

Esmin Green, 49 years old, was taken to the psychiatric wing of the massive public hospital in New York City�s most populous borough on June 18. She was apparently having some form of mental breakdown. Ms. Green was left almost 24 hours in the psychiatric emergency room because there was no bed available.

Video cameras in the emergency room later showed the woman sliding off a chair at 5:32 a.m. the next morning, nearly a day after she had arrived. At first Ms. Green writhed on the floor, and then lay face down. For the next hour, a security guard and other staff members ignored her. At last one employee attempted to arouse the patient with her foot. Finally, an hour after she had fallen, an unsuccessful attempt was made to revive Ms. Green. A Jamaican-born immigrant, she worked at a day care center and was the mother of six children, the youngest 14 years old, all still living in Jamaica.

What brought this death in the emergency room to public notice was that it was captured on tape and also that the New York Civil Liberties Union had joined in a lawsuit against the public hospital a year ago, accusing the authorities of exactly the sort of behavior documented on the video. The suit charges not only that psychiatric patients are neglected at Kings County, but that they are kept in filthy surroundings and drugged in order to keep them more manageable.

The video was turned over to the Civil Liberties Union in connection with the ongoing court case, and that is how the graphic illustration of conditions at the hospital became public knowledge, shown on television and on the Internet.

The airing of the videotape has been followed by a predictable flurry of official reactions. Alan Aviles, the president of the city�s Health and Hospitals Corporation, issued a letter on July 1 to all hospital staff, expressing his �sorrow and shame,� and announcing that the HHC had now agreed, in connection with the NYCLU lawsuit, to increase monitoring of patients in the hospital�s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. Patients awaiting admission will now be checked every 15 minutes and the hospital pledges to reduce waiting time to between 10 and 13 hours within the next four months.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, declared: �That it took somebody keeling over and dying, and it being captured on videotape, for the city to come to the table in a meaningful way is unconscionable.�

Aviles also reported that six employees, including those who had ignored the patient, a nurse who falsified the patient�s medical chart after her death in an apparent attempt to cover up for gross negligence, and two senior psychiatric managers, had been fired.

It is not surprising that the entire focus of the official response remains on punishment for those with immediate responsibility, along with a few minor procedural changes. It has also been reported that federal and city authorities are considering criminal charges in connection with the death of Ms. Green.

This horrifying incident calls for more than outrage, however. This death begs for careful consideration of what it reveals about the health care system and more broadly about life in New York City and society at large.

The response of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was perhaps unintentionally revealing in this regard. After declaring that he was �disgusted,� the mayor said to reporters, �I can�t explain what happened there. Does it say anything about our society? �I hope not� is the basic answer.�

Of course Bloomberg knows the answer is yes, but he chooses to say �hope not� as a way of communicating concern without delving any more deeply into the significance of the incident, much less proposing any systemic changes in response. It is Bloomberg and the whole political and financial establishment who are responsible for the conditions at Kings County.

When a half dozen employees, who stand out in no particular way, are involved in something like this, the endemic character of the problem should be apparent to anyone. A lengthy investigation should not be necessary to discover understaffing and underfunding, low pay and inadequate training, all contributing to a demoralized workforce in which feelings of empathy or consideration for the patients with whom they work has declined or evaporated completely.

In addition there is the prevalent stigma attaching to mental illness, in which chronically ill and often �difficult� patients are shunted aside, treated with contempt or in some cases viciously abused.

Although conditions may be most severe for psychiatric patients who are unable to care for themselves, the crisis at Kings County is part of a broader, nearly universal state of affairs in urban public health. As a general rule, the poorer the population, the worse the services. The demoralization of the workforce translates, not all the time but all too often, into substandard care and occasionally abuse.

Nor is this problem confined to health care. The prevalent atmosphere is the law of the jungle, in which empathy is considered something quaint. Even in the wealthiest country in the world�especially in the wealthiest country, under conditions of growing inequality, poverty and social tension�life is cheap, the values reflected by reality television are increasingly encouraged, and ignoring or trampling on others is not considered anything special.

Social polarization permeates every aspect of life. The super-wealthy have their own private �concierge� health care and every imaginable luxury at their command. The growing numbers of the poor, like Ms. Green, are shunted aside and thrown literally onto the scrap heap. And the great majority of the population in the middle faces loss of jobs and joining the 47 million Americans without health benefits, only a step away from destitution and treatment similar to that suffered by Esmin Green.

See Also: Down With Feds� Anti-Immigrant Raids! Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/index.html

Viking stops publishing Arrogance of Power - Secret World of R.N. (Massachusetts)

2008-06-27T08:41:14-04:00

Does anyone know why Viking has pulled Anthony Summers books Arrogance of Power - Secret World of Richard Nixon and Official and Confidential: Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover?

Pumas (Western Ma)

2008-06-23T18:50:42-04:00

Calling all Pumas. Looking to start a support group for Hillary Supporters disappointed with the DNC and the presumed nominee

re: mayor higgins

2008-06-23T06:30:39-04:00

That's just stupid. Why don't you say "I know you are, but what am I?" Let's see, why wouldn't someone who is dissatisfied with the lousy performance of the mayor run for office? Biggest reason I can think of: the election already happened. Duh. And just because someone is pretty well informed, doesn't make them qualified for the job. Knowing that limitation and accepting it is a tremendous public service. Too bad she won't do the same. Last I looked, criticizing your government was theoretically legal, too. Just because she's a lesbian, doesn't mean she's progressive.

She's no Mary Ford.

If you love her so much, why don't you marry her?

Mayor Higgins...

2008-06-22T18:33:58-04:00

If yall are sooooo upset, why dont you run?

re: Mayor Higgins is a sell out

2008-06-21T20:53:13-04:00

She was double dealing in the back room last term, too. Where did anyone get the idea she was a progressive? Just look at her record. It's a shame there were no real opposing candidates.

You forgot the shady Hilton Hotel deal downtown. She HAD to practically give it to them because they would clean up the toxic waste? Even though the Feds were already paying out of Superfund? Give me a break. Goodbye Pulaski Park, hello empty hotel.

Mayor Higgins is a sell-out! (Northampton)

2008-06-21T10:55:47-04:00

First we have the expansion of the garbage dump.
Now we have Kollmorgen, a defense contractor, given incredibly valuable space on Hospital Hill, allowing them to dominate the south site and kicking to the curb years of work towards a mixed-use, mixed-commercial development.

Higgins is no progressive and a bad fit for Northampton!

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part Two)

2008-06-09T09:26:52-04:00

MANY OF that generation also became radicalized by the Kennedy administration's foreign policy, particularly when it came to Cuba and Vietnam. The Kennedy brothers were as committed to defending the American empire as any reactionary Republican. For much of the 20th century, Cuba had been, for all intents and purposes, a colony of the United States, where poverty wages were being paid--and huge profits reaped--by American corporations. It also was a haven for the American Mafia. Castro's leftist revolution in 1959 drove the American ruling class to hysterics, and they set out to destroy Castro. The Kennedy administration inherited plans from the Eisenhower administration and authorized the CIA's disastrous "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba in early 1961, the most spectacular of the U.S. government's failed attempts to crush the Cuban Revolution. But it didn't stop there. Bobby Kennedy led a special White House committee that oversaw "Operation Mongoose," a wide-ranging covert program of sabotage, assassination, blackmail and other activities directed against Fidel Castro and the Cuban government. Bobby declared that it was "top priority" to get rid of Castro. The U.S. failed, but its campaign resulted in untold death and destruction across Cuba.

The Kennedy brothers' failure in Cuba only made them more determined to succeed elsewhere. They became fascinated with "unorthodox" warfare: counter-insurgency, assassination and covert action. The Eisenhower administration had authorized the CIA to carry out 170 major covert operations in eight years, while the Kennedy brothers authorized 163 in less than three years. Vietnam became a laboratory for all these deadly programs. By the time of John F. Kennedy's death in November 1963, the United States was already fighting a proxy war in Vietnam. Its 15,000 military advisors were leading combat operations and bombing missions in a faltering effort to prevent the victory of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, called derisively by U.S. officials the "Viet Cong." In early November 1963, after the United States engineered the assassination of the corrupt South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, Bobby said to his brother, "It's better if you don't have him, but you have to have somebody that can win the war, and who is that?" The "who" never emerged, but that didn't stop the United States from destroying large parts of Vietnam in the hopes of winning the war against the NLF and the North Vietnamese. After John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Bobby remained in the cabinet as a lame-duck attorney general until August 1964, when he resigned and ran successfully for a U.S. Senate seat from New York.

Despite his personal hatred for the reigning Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who triumphed over his Republican rival Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election in part by pledging to keep the U.S. out of a ground war in Vietnam, Bobby supported Johnson's war policies in Vietnam. As a U.S. senator, he never voted against any appropriation bills that funded the war. I.F. Stone, the great radical journalist, wrote an article in October 1966 titled "While Others Dodge the Draft, Bobby Dodges the War." In the Democratic congressional primaries in 1966, a number of antiwar candidates ran against incumbents supporting Johnson's war policies. The best known of these was radical journalist Robert Scheer, who challenged Representative Jeffrey Cohelan, representing a district covering parts of Berkeley and Oakland in California. Kennedy endorsed Cohelan. Even the slavishly loyal Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger was forced to admit, "Kennedy brooded about Vietnam, but said less in public." What were Bobby and other Senate liberals "brooding" about? Two things: the prospect of the United States losing the war, and the growing dissent in the country that threatened the Democratic Party's domination of national politics since the early 1930s. How could the Democrats--the "war party" in Vietnam--capture the antiwar vote?

Antiwar sentiment was bound to find expression in the Democratic Party; it may have been the governing war party, but it was still the liberal party, and more importantly, it was the party that had traditionally played the role of capturing and disarming mass movements for social change. When Bobby Kennedy made it clear that he would not challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination, the field was left open for a little-known Democratic senator from Minnesota, Eugene "Gene" McCarthy, to run as an antiwar candidate. In November 1967, at the press conference announcing his candidacy, McCarthy was quite open about his political objective: "There is growing evidence of a deepening moral crisis in America--discontent and frustration and a disposition to take extralegal if not illegal actions to manifest protest. I am hopeful that this challenge...may counter the growing sense of alienation from politics which I think is currently reflected in a tendency to withdraw from political action, to talk of nonparticipation, to become cynical and to make threats of support for third parties or fourth parties or other irregular political movements."

Kennedy's "broodings" got worse after the Tet Offensive by the NLF and its North Vietnamese allies at the end of January 1968. A large majority of the U.S. population concluded from the offensive that the war had become a "quagmire" and couldn't be won. The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Richard Nixon, was proposing "peace with honor" to the Democrats' war policies. Gene McCarthy's campaign would have gone down as a footnote in history, but because of the Tet Offensive, he won 42 percent of the vote in the first primary contest in New Hampshire. It shocked Johnson, leading him to withdraw from the race. It was at this moment that Bobby announced his candidacy for the presidency.

IT'S IMPORTANT to be clear that Robert Kennedy never advocated unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia; in fact, he voted against this. While he peppered most of his campaign speeches in 1968 with rhetoric about the need for "peace" in Vietnam, he offered little more than talk of a "negotiated settlement," which was not very different from what Johnson or Nixon proposed, while they continued to wage war against the Vietnamese people. Bobby's chief political goal, like Eugene McCarthy's, was to capture the support of the antiwar movement and to deliver it into the safe confines of the Democratic Party. With a political record like his, why did Bobby Kennedy's campaign generate such excitement? Kennedy attracted large, enthusiastic, sometimes frantic crowds that just wanted to reach out and touch him. His most bland speeches elicited roaring approval from supporters. The media at the time described him as having a "pop star" appeal to the young. In many ways, Kennedy became the receptacle for the hopes of those millions of Americans who still desired change through the established political system.

He encouraged these illusions in him. He met with well-known antiwar activists like former Students for a Democratic Society president Tom Hayden and former Yale professor Staughton Lynd. He had a well-publicized meeting with United Farm Workers union leader Cesar Chavez while he was on hunger strike. Kennedy would also confide to reporters, "I wish I'd had been born an Indian" and "I'm jealous of the fact that you grew up in a ghetto, I wish I'd had that experience"--or even more ridiculously, "If I hadn't been born rich, I'd probably be a revolutionary." But he could also strike a chord with people. On the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, he spoke to a predominately Black audience and told them that he could identify with their anger because "his brother was killed by a white man."

Kennedy, however, worked both sides of the street. While crafting a left-wing, even rebellious, image for the younger generation, he also sought the support of the party bosses for his campaign. He sought but failed to get the support of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the very symbol of Jim Crow in the North, for his presidential bid. "Daley's the whole ballgame," Kennedy declared. One of his earliest supporters was Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the California State Assembly, who is attributed to popularizing the saying, "Money is the mother's milk of politics." Kennedy also didn't sound very progressive on many key issues. He opposed economic sanctions on South Africa for its apartheid policies, and he opposed busing to integrate schools. Kennedy even attacked Gene McCarthy during their televised debate prior to the California primary for his support for building public housing in the suburbs. Kennedy said incredulously, "You say you are going to take 10,000 Black people and move them into Orange County."

McCarthy believed that Kennedy advocated a "segregated residential apartheid." Kennedy's big idea to alleviate poverty in the inner cities was to provide tax breaks to corporations to move into blighted neighborhoods. Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan believed that "Kennedy is talking more and more like me." With all this in mind, how could Bobby Kennedy be turned into such an icon? The American myth-making machine is very powerful and usually does two things. It elevates people like the Kennedy brothers to a status that they do not deserve, while washing away the real radical politics that were at the core of activists like Martin Luther King. They are all mushed together into a candy-coated picture of the alleged greatness of American society and its political system. "The yearning for Robert Kennedy--or someone like him--is an open wound in some parts of America," wrote one reporter two decades after his death.

Some would say Barack Obama is an example of "someone like him" today. Yet when we remember Robert Kennedy, it should not be as someone who promised hope and idealism, but as an opportunist who was part of a political establishment responsible for the things the movements of 1960s struggled against.

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part Two)

2008-06-09T09:26:22-04:00

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part One)

2008-06-09T09:22:36-04:00

For many liberals, the hopes for progressive political change died when Robert Kennedy was assasinated. "The '60s came to an end in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6, 1968," Richard Goodwin mournfully declared in his popular memoir Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Goodwin was a former White House staffer during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations who had resigned over the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He would later become a speechwriter for Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy during their 1968 presidential campaigns. Jack Newfield, one of the leading journalists of the Village Voice, wrote in his memoir of Robert Kennedy that after his death "from this time forward, things would get worse." Goodwin, along with historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and many members of an adoring press corps who could barely contain their enthusiasm for Bobby Kennedy's quest for the White House when he was alive, would transform his life and death into a powerful liberal myth that has lasted to this very day.

Bobby Kennedy--in reality, an arrogant and intolerant political operative obsessed with his older brother John F. Kennedy's political career--is now remembered as a thoughtful, pained prophet who identified with the dispossessed and forgotten of American society. He has been placed alongside his brother and Martin Luther King Jr. as a trio whose assassinations collectively put America on the wrong historical path. Had they lived, much of the "turmoil" of the 1960s--the urban rebellions, the war in Vietnam and the long decades of conservative rule begun with Richard Nixon's election to the presidency in 1968--could have been avoided. Bobby Kennedy was the last hope--so goes the myth--for peaceful, progressive change. In the words of Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, "he was a man who actually could have changed the course of American history." The question we have to ask four decades later is whether any of this is remotely true.

ROBERT FRANCIS Kennedy was the third son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., a ruthless and politically ambitious businessman from Massachusetts. Kennedy Sr. made a fortune from a variety of enterprises, including real estate, moviemaking, the stock market and bootlegging alcohol during Prohibition. Joe Kennedy had extensive ties to organized crime and corrupt politicians, who helped make him very rich and to pursue his political ambitions. His own ambition to be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States, however, was thwarted by Franklin Roosevelt, and he transferred his dream to his sons. Three out of four would either become president or run for the presidency. It is one of the great ironies of U.S. political mythology that the Kennedy family, viewed today as the very symbol of liberalism, was, in fact, deeply conservative.

Joe Kennedy was openly supportive of the pro-fascist forces in Spain during that country's civil war in the 1930s. He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Great Britain by Roosevelt in 1938, and was known as an "appeaser"--one of those who supported making concessions to Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to Britain, told his superiors that Ambassador Kennedy was "Germany's best friend" in London. Kennedy was fired as U.S. ambassador in 1940. From this point onward, Joe Kennedy concentrated on promoting his sons' political careers and conservative causes in more covert ways. He was very close to the infamous anticommunist Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, after McCarthy became famous for persecuting liberals and radicals. During McCarthy's 1952 reelection campaign, Joe made a sizeable contribution and then asked that his son Bobby be placed on the McCarthy subcommittee investigating "subversives." Bobby only stayed on McCarthy's committee for six months, using it as a springboard for an assignment to another congressional committee that gained him greater notoriety--the Senate Rackets Committee led by the reactionary Democratic Sen. John McClellan of Arkansas, whom the conservative labor leader George Meany described as "an anti-labor nut."

As an assistant counsel to McClellan, Bobby carried on his particularly vicious persecution of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in pursuit of his political enemies and rivals. Joe Kennedy complimented his son on this character trait. "He's a great kid," Joe said. "He hates the same way I do." Throughout the 1950s, Bobby remained focused on building his older brother's political career. He was campaign manager for John F. Kennedy's first U.S. Senate campaign in 1952 and his presidential campaign in 1960. Bobby was his brother's closest advisor (after Joe Kennedy Sr.). When JFK won the presidency, he made Bobby his attorney general. The Kennedy presidency took place during a crucial time for three issues that would later come to dominate the rest of the decade: the civil rights movement, the Cuban Revolution and the war in Vietnam. The Kennedys relied heavily on the Black vote to win the presidency in 1960, making certain symbolic overtures to Martin Luther King during the campaign. But as Bobby recalled in 1964, "I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes."

That would soon change as Freedom Riders challenged segregation on interstate bus lines during the first year of the Kennedy presidency. The year before, a wave of sit-ins took place across the country to desegregate everything from lunch counters to public swimming pools. A mass movement against Jim Crow segregation was emerging--and the Kennedys did everything they could to contain it. The Democratic Party was still a Jim Crow party--white Southern Democrats were known as "Dixiecrats"--with Blacks almost entirely disenfranchised in the South and the border states. For most of the 20th century, the Democrats needed the "solid South" (the states of the former Confederacy voting for the Democratic ticket as a bloc) to win national elections, and Kennedy was no exception. During his short time in office, John Kennedy appointed five supporters of segregation to the federal judiciary. The Freedom Riders and sit-ins threatened to push the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. The Kennedys hoped to pressure civil rights activists in a direction that wouldn't jeopardize their southern support.

John Kennedy told Louisiana Gov. James H. Davis that his administration was trying "to put this stuff in the courts and get it off the street." As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy famously told representatives of student civil rights groups, "If you cut out this Freedom Rider and sitting-in stuff and concentrate on voter registration, I'll get you a tax exemption." He told Harris Wofford, special assistant to the president on civil rights, "This is too much," after King refused to call off the protests. RFK added, "I wonder if they have the best interests of the country at heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb? Yes, he even picketed against it in jail! The president is going abroad, and all this is embarrassing him." Robert Kennedy also authorized FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to begin wiretapping Martin Luther King's telephone conversations on the grounds that Stanley Levison, King's closest adviser, was allegedly a closet member of the Communist Party. Of King, RFK remarked, "We never wanted to get very close to him just because of these contacts and connections that he had, which we felt were damaging to the civil rights movement."

The Kennedys put enormous pressure on the organizers of the historic March on Washington in August 1963 to cancel the event; then, when that failed, to control it. Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader and future member of Congress John Lewis wanted to say in his speech: "I want to know: Which side is the federal government on?" The administration compelled him to take this out because, according to Bobby Kennedy, it "attacked the president." Lewis's frustration with the Kennedy administration would have resonated with many civil rights supporters. One major source of frustration with the Kennedys was their refusal to provide federal protection to civil rights activists. Bobby later admitted, "We abandoned the solution, really, of trying to give people protection." A generation of civil rights activists became radicalized in the face of the waffling compromises and inaction of the Kennedy administration.

craigslist | politics in western massachusetts

Learn about the food system by directly combatting hunger and poverty! (Amherst Common, Northampton Bus stop)

Volunteers needed! Nathan Bech for Congress campaign. (West Springfield)

+*+* Why Obama Campaign needs money? (Western Massachusetts)

Youth peace group forming (Westfield)

Mentally ill woman left to die in hospital waiting room (Capitqalist Medicine Survival of the Fit)

Viking stops publishing Arrogance of Power - Secret World of R.N. (Massachusetts)

Pumas (Western Ma)

re: mayor higgins

Mayor Higgins...

re: Mayor Higgins is a sell out

Mayor Higgins is a sell-out! (Northampton)

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part Two)

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part Two)

The Bobby Kennedy myth (Liberals Love Capitalism) (Part One)

++ Why Obama Campaign needs money? (Western Massachusetts)