Every year Senator Russ Feingold holds listening sessions in all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Under dreary midwinter skies, two hundred people crowded into the Mazomanie Community Center in rural Dane County, Wisconsin, on February 22 to chat with their junior senator.

I caught up with Feingold before the session started. (In fact, I may have been the only member of the press there until Molly Stentz, news director at WORT-FM, Madison’s community radio station, showed up.)

The Progressive: What are you hearing at your other listening sessions?

Feingold: Most of the comments at 27 listening sessions already this year have been about health care, but not exclusively. People are asking about cap and trade, about government spending, but health care is still the biggest.

The Progressive: What’s your opinion on the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United case?

Feingold: Terrible decision. One of the most lawless decisions in the history of this country and of the Supreme Court. It throws open our political process to huge corporations including foreign money. Unfortunately the only thing that basically is still standing is the McCain-Feingold bill that I wrote. But that’s not enough. That just has to do with direct contributions. This creates a massive transfer of power to large corporations. It’s a real threat to our democracy. In fact, I am noticing that people all across the political spectrum, other than apparently the Republican Party, agree that it’s a bad decision.

The Progressive: How will this affect your re-election campaign?

Feingold: I’m not concerned about that. I’ve been outspent every single time. That’s not the issue. The issue is the taking away of democracy from the average citizen.

The Progressive: What do you think of the Move to Amend group, the people who are organizing to change the Constitution to address issue of campaign contributions?

Feingold: I don’t think the way to do it is by amending the Bill of Rights. I oppose that and I think that’s unwise but I certainly understand the sentiment. The best thing to do is to get new justices, different justices, who will do the right thing. They completely ignored the judgment of the Supreme Court from two years ago. So, really, this is a lawless thing by people who pledged to follow precedent. I also am open to legislative changes that will help. But in the end we need these decisions reversed back again.

The Progressive: When will the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq end?

Feingold: Iraq is under way; it’s not as fast as I’d like, but it’s starting. And Afghanistan I’m very worried about. I think we’re moving in the wrong direction. I’m very concerned about that and we need to push hard against the [Obama] Administration on that particular thing.

It’s too bad that no television crews were around to capture this animated town hall. It was an older crowd, though some young women wearing bright pink T-shirts stood out in the back. Mazomanie lies about 45 minutes northwest of Madison, but that didn’t stop a contingent of AARP folks from the state’s capital from showing up.

Health care dominated the debate. Person after person stood up and talked about the dire need for reform. One woman said she was at the point where she had to choose between food and medicine. An unemployed architect was worried about COBRA running out. We need help now, he said, adding he was dipping into his 401(k) to pay for his insurance. Robin Transo runs a free clinic in Crawford County and she talked about the need for preventative care. Her clinic served 850 people last year and gave 450 kids access to dental care.

The majority of attendants supported single payer and asked the Senator to be a vocal advocate for it. Feingold said that he is fighting for public option in closed door meetings. “Frankly, something as big as this, we’re much better off if we’re bipartisan,” said Feingold. He admitted that single payer is a better option “but we don’t have the votes.”

A few people said it was time for the Democrats to “start playing tough,” which was met with applause. There’s a growing sentiment across the country that government can’t do anything, one guy said. Where is the push back from the Democrats?

“I do push back,” said Feingold. “And I’m not a big government guy. I think government should stay out of things unless it has to get in. But for me to have to listen to people who are on Medicare saying that ‘it’s terrible that the government wants to get involved in health care,’ and ‘don’t touch my Medicare,’ is absurd. That’s what we’ve had to put up with. And here’s the other thing I really find fascinating. People are saying they are so worried about big government. Where were these people for eight years when I was trying to point out the big government intrusion in our lives through the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping?” [more cheers]

“Why was there no interest in the abuses of big government then?” he asked. “When a government abuses its power and goes into areas it doesn’t need to belong in, I’ll be the first to call them on it. But I will defend the VA, I will defend Medicare, I will defend Social Security. There’s a serious proposal out there being endorsed by many Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, that saying anybody under 55 will no longer be eligible for Medicare and Social Security as a public program That is their agenda, honestly stated. And I disagree.”

While health care seemed to be on everyone’s mind at this listening session, people brought up other concerns, including the need for strong environmental protections, the plight of local dairy farmers, and unfair trade practices. When asked about President Obama’s commitment of $8 billion for new nuclear reactors, Feingold said he was “not a fan” of Obama’s position, noting that Wisconsin could be a disposal site for radioactive waste.

Dr. Gene Farley, 83, has been a staunch advocate for universal single-payer health care for decades. He asked the first question: “How do we get health care reform passed this time, even though it’s not necessarily the one I want? We have to have it.”

“I think single payer is much better than the current system. I don’t back off from saying that. But obviously we do not have the votes to do this now,” said Feingold. “Gene Farley is my test. If Gene Farely is willing to say we’re going to do something less than single payer, and he doesn’t want to say it, I’m going to say it too. I’m worried only a comprehensive system can actually provide the savings and controls that we need.”

I spoke to Dr. Farley afterward. “I’m a great admirer of Russ. I don’t always agree with him. I feel he’s very ethical,” said Farley. “Most of the time I support him. Sometimes I’d love to push him. His strength is he’s not always pushable; his weakness is he’s not always pushable. But he’s good.”

I asked him if he wanted health care legislation to pass. “Obviously I’m for single payer,” he said. “I feel strongly that we have to pass what’s there now. . . . If we can pass this bill, however incomplete it is—it has a lot of good things in it—then we get a building permit. Once you have a building permit you can start building and you can modify the blueprints as you go along and make improvements. My goal is the nearer single payer we get, the better. I want that building permit.”

As President Obama guarantees $8 billion in loans to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades, states are getting into the act, too.

Here in Wisconsin, nuclear power is tucked into state legislation called the Clean Energy Jobs Act.

“About 95% of the bill is great. The major portion of the bill talks about setting the first ever energy efficiency standards for Wisconsin and also boosting the use of renewable energy sources in the state,” says Diane Farsetta, the Carbon Free, Nuclear Free campaign coordinator with the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.

“The problem is it would also gut the protections that we have had on the books for twenty-five years.”

Currently, Wisconsin law says that new nuclear reactors can’t be built here unless there is a federally licensed repository to permanently store the toxic radioactive waste that nuclear reactors produce. That type of facility doesn’t exist, so radioactive waste is piling up at the two working and one defunct nuclear reactor sites. Changing this law could allow more nuclear waste to pile up.

The Clean Energy Jobs Act is based on recommendations of the Governor’s global warming task force. “Here in Wisconsin giving support to new nuclear reactors is a way to get Republican votes,” says Farsetta. “It’s a political gamble. It’s not based on the science, it’s not based on the actual merits of this power source.”

“The people who are crafting the bill thought, hey, maybe we can get some votes that we wouldn’t get otherwise, if we add that language in there,” she says. “We’re saying, that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough to put communities across the state at risk to becoming de facto nuclear waste dump sites.”

Farsetta says there’s no need to pretend we have to choose between building more coal plants or building new nuclear reactors. Renewable energy costs are decreasing while storage systems for renewable power are becoming stronger.

“Nuclear power is just a dangerous and costly distraction from doing that,” says Farsetta.

On Tuesday February 23, the Carbon Free, Nuclear Free campaign is organizing a lobby day at the state capitol. Proponents of the bill hope it will pass by Earth Day.

“We have a window of opportunity now,” Farsetta says. She encourages people to call their representatives and say I’m really glad Wisconsin is considering a bill about climate change, but the nuclear power language needs to be taken out of it.

For more information contact the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice Carbon Free, Nuclear Free campaign at http://www.wnpj.org/cfnf.

Millions of people will lose unemployment benefits in the coming months unless Congress takes action. Now’s the time to extend the social safety net programs in the stimulus package.

Here in Wisconsin, the first state to enact unemployment insurance, the headlines blare that more than 100,000 Wisconsinites could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of April.

Wisconsin legislators are contacting members of its congressional delegation and sent a letter to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asking for a reauthorization of critical benefits in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

“Without this extension, 104,000 Wisconsinites will lose their benefits by the end of April, 2010,” reads the letter. “The job market has not rebounded.”

While state legislators write to Congress, the state’s Department of Workforce Development is sending out letters notifying people their unemployment benefits will end within several weeks.

2009 was a tough year for Wisconsin. Places like Janesville have been hard hit by the downturn in the automotive industry. The state has lost about 163,000 jobs during the past year. Wisconsin’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is just under 9 percent, which is below the national rate but far higher than the state rate of 5.9 percent from a year ago.

But those numbers do not portray how bad it is. In 2005, The Progressive published a story called “The Stealth Depression in Black America.” Among African American men, Milwaukee’s jobless rate stood at 59 percent. And that was before the recession started.

Like other states, Wisconsin’s unemployment fund is in crisis. Wisconsin will have to deal with a projected deficit of about $2.8 billion by the end of 2011.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state facing depleted funds as this so-called jobless recovery continues. A new National Employment Law Project report finds that without congressional action, nearly 5 million jobless workers will lose benefits by June.

Congress needs to act now and extend these benefits.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

I am deeply saddened by the news of the death of Howard Zinn. He was a longtime columnist for The Progressive, and his most recent piece, “The Nobel’s Feeble Gesture,” expressed his dismay about President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here’s an excerpt:
“I think some progressives have forgotten the history of the Democratic Party, to which people have turned again and again in desperate search for saviors, later to be disappointed. Our political history shows us that only great popular movements, carrying out bold actions that awakened the nation and threatened the Establishment, as in the Thirties and the Sixties, have been able to shake that pyramid of corporate and military power and at least temporarily changed course.”

It was a “classic” Zinn piece—piercing but playful, saying in no uncertain terms what needed to be said. It’s not surprising he was a favorite columnist for many of our subscribers. He was my favorite, too.

On matters of war and peace, he was absolute. In our July 2009 issue, he wrote, “We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what. No matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.”
What I loved most about Zinn was his sense of humor, which didn’t always translate onto the page. I didn’t know how funny he was until I heard him speak at our 95th anniversary party six years ago. He was gracious enough to attend our recent 100th birthday bash, too.

When I was a just becoming politicized, I read A People’s History of the United States and it blew my mind away. Reading Zinn’s book was a rite of passage in my activist circles, and I hope it still is.

It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve read A People’s History, and it is no small thrill to be at a magazine that regularly publishes the work of a peace mongering historian, a World War II soldier who flew bombing missions over Europe but later staunchly advocated for peace. That was thing about Zinn—when he spoke of war, he knew what he was talking about.

Back in 2003 when George W. Bush was gunning for Saddam Hussein, Zinn wrote a cover story for The Progressive called “A Chorus Against War.”

This is how it ends:
“If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families. And all of use will be responsible for bringing that to a halt.

“Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.”

I would have loved to read what Zinn thought about the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing even more money into our political system. Or what he would have written after hearing Obama’s first State of the Union Address. The President’s speech hasn’t even started yet tonight, but this much I do know: Zinn would have reminded us, as he did over and over, that we need to organize our neighborhoods and workplaces and schools in order to create change, and not leave it up to the politicians.

“Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war,” Zinn wrote in a piece called, “Election Madness” back in March 2008. “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

On his second day on the job, President Barack Obama promised to shut down Guantánamo by January 22, 2010. As we near the deadline, the U.S. detention center remains open, and nearly 200 detainees are still being held at the prison, including dozens already cleared for release.

To mark the ninth year of detaining prisoners without charge or trial, human rights activists are protesting in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, January 11, Witness Against Torture and the Center for Constitutional Rights collaborated on a vigil in front of the White House and a briefing at the National Press Club, where two former detainees at Gitmo addressed the audience via phone and video link.

“Nothing’s changed inside the prison,” said Omar Deghayes, a former inmate who now lives in the UK. “People are still being tortured, still being beaten, psychologically harmed.”

Former detainee Lakhdar Boumediene was finally released in May after seven years at Guantánamo, including two and a half years on hunger strike. “I try but I can’t forget,” said Boumediene, who called from his home in France. “When I wash my hand, I see the mark of the shackles.”

Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush. The court affirmed that Guantánamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts.

January 11 was also the start of an eleven-day “Fast for Justice” demanding that Guantánamo close and torture end.

One of the reasons some Witness Against Torture activists have decided to fast is to be in solidarity with hunger strikers in the prison. “This isn’t a well known story, but there are a number of men in Guantánamo who have not eaten of their own volition since 2005, who are on hunger strike,” says Frida Berrigan, a national committee member of the War Resisters League who has been organizing with Witness Against Torture since its inception.

“They are being kept alive by force feeding twice a day. This is their act of resistance, of non-compliance, non-cooperation with their illegal detention,” she says. “So for some of us, this fast is our way of putting ourselves in relationship in some small way with the men who remain on hunger strike in Guantánamo.” Fifty people in the D.C. area are fasting, along with 150 nationwide.

Berrigan says that last year, the group decided to not do direct action because candidate Obama pledged to close the controversial facility.

“We were so excited and happy on January 22, 2009, when President Barack Obama, forty-eight hours after taking the oath of office, signed the executive order, and said very clearly, I’m going to shut down Guantanamo and I’m going to do it within a year,” Berrigan says.

“The hope that we felt and that excitement has been replaced by outrage, indignation, and frustration as we’ve seen the Obama Administration create more problems instead of solving the problem left to him by the Bush Administration,” she adds.

So this year, the group has descended upon Washington, D.C., to do direct action and talk to legislative aides. “Some of us did a silent prisoner walk, a very slow walk, through the Hart Building of the Senate, wearing orange jump suits, with a little banner on the back with the name of a man at Guantánamo who has been cleared for release, but remains at Guantánamo,” says Berrigan.

The foiled Christmas day attack only strengthened Berrigan’s commitment. “We’re facing a more hardened public, a public that is afraid, a public that is awash in hateful rhetoric, for the last three weeks,” she says. “At the same time, the failed terrorist attack proves our point. Where is that young Nigerian man being held? He’s being held in Michigan. He stood before a judge a week ago and pled not guilty. He’s going to have a trial and he will be sentenced if he is found guilty. Our criminal justice system, in this way, works.”

“All of the institutions that are supposed ensure that justice is followed and laws are followed have failed the men at Guantánamo and at Bagram,” says Berrigan. “People are detained throughout the world in the name of security in the War on Terror. So it’s up to us as people to not fail, to do something, to urge these institutions to not fail.”

But not at Guantánamo or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at secret prisons elsewhere.

Civil liberties took a back seat to national security threats during the Bush Administration. It’s time for Obama to keep his promises to close Guantánamo and end torture.

“Bicycling, once largely seen as a simple pleasure from childhood, has become a political act,” writes Jeff Mapes in his new book, Pedaling Revolution–How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities.

Mapes, a Portland-based reporter for The Oregonian who regularly commutes by bicycle, offers a thoughtful account of the bike scene, past and present, with a glimpse of the future.

I read the book after the UN Climate Change talks broke down in Copenhagen. Bikes, Mapes notes, could play a crucial role in shrinking the U.S. carbon footprint. He cites some startling data. “If everyone cycled for an hour and reduced their driving by an equivalent distance, the U.S. would cut its gasoline consumption by 38 percent,” he writes. “Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 12 percent, which is greater than the reductions called for in the Kyoto treat.”

But Mapes isn’t naïve about getting every American out of a car and onto a bicycle. It was his love of bicycling that inspired him to write the book, not a churlish attitude towards cars.

Mapes fell in love with bicycling as a kid, but didn’t think seriously about it until the 1990s when Portland embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of bike lanes, trails, and bicycle boulevards that crisscrossed the city. “The improvements helped turn me into a daily bike commuter,” he writes.

He first traces the history of bicycle advocacy in the United States. Then he tours around the world, stopping in bike mecca Amsterdam, Davis, California, and New York City.

One of the things I found compelling about the book is Mapes’ analysis of the two philosophical camps within the bike scene: those who want to bike on the roads like a vehicle and those who advocate for separate space.

The number one reason why more people don’t bike is safety. “As long ago as 1996, the U.S. surgeon general, in a landmark report on physical activity, said that 53 percent of people who had cycled in the previous year said they would commute to work by bike if they could do so on ‘safe, separated designated paths,’ ” Mapes writes. 53 percent!

Separate paths of bikeways may be the future (some cycle tracks already exist in Portland and New York City). Currently the most popular and cheap way to accommodate biking is bike lanes.

While critics say bike lanes can give a false sense of security, there is some safety in numbers. Mapes quotes Jane Stutts, a retired safety researcher from University of North Carolina, who acknowledges a paucity of hard data. “About best you can do is show [bike lanes] increase bike traffic without increasing crashes,” she says.

After reading Mapes’ book, it seemed to me that we need more bike lanes, more bike ways, and more cycle tracks.

It’s a sign of the “mainstreaming” of bicycling that funds from the stimulus package include spending on improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians. Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Tom Coburn (OK) attacked the funding as “pork.”

Streetsblog reports:  “McCain and Coburn released a report criticizing 100 projects being funded by the Obama administration’s stimulus law. On the senators’ hit list were three bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure projects, in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood fired back at McCain and Coburn’s report  on his blog:

“We’ve worked hard this year to get our Recovery Act dollars out to the states quickly and effectively. Yes, some of those projects include bike paths, a key ingredient in our livability initiative to allow people to live, work, and get around without a car. . . . We don’t call that waste; we call it progress.”

It is progress! Bikes may only get 1 percent of the transportation budget, but it’s something.

The book ends with a chapter called “Bringing Kids Back to Bikes.” Too many kids do not ride to school, often because their schools lie on the outskirts of cities near dangerous intersections. He suggests bike clubs, held after school. Kids would get the exercise they need and learn to become safer riders.

What I appreciated most about this book was the tone. Mapes does an exemplary job explaining the arcane workings of federal funding and offers readers a ride through cities we may never get to visit. He also describes the sadness of a memorial ride for a young cyclist who was killed by a cement truck turning right on red.

But he has no fury towards cars. At the core of the book is joy—Mapes really does love his bicycle.

(I interview Mapes on WORT-FM on December 23. Click here to listen. It starts 45 minutes in.)

Hilarious. Tender. Brutal. These are the trademarks of one of America’s most dazzling writers, Sherman Alexie. His latest book, War Dances (Grove Press), a collection of poetry and short stories, renders emotional landscapes—anger, joy, anxiety, grief, fear—with skill.

In “War Dances,” the short story that lends its name as the book’s title, the narrator remembers visiting his sick father in the hospital. His dad, post-surgery, is cold in bed, and the narrator asks a busy nurse for a blanket.

“With blanket in hand, I walked back to my father,” the narrator notes. “It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.”

War Dances contains good poetry, too. My favorite of the bunch is his “Ode to Mix Tapes.” The digital revolution has changed how people create these soundtracks of seduction. Alexie writes that it’s too easy to make mix tapes these days with CD burners, iPods, and iTunes.

But I miss the labor

Of making old-school mix tapes—the
midair

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time. It sometimes took days

To play, choose, pause,

Ponder, record, replay, erase,

And replace. But there was no magic
wand.

It was blue-collar work. . . .

But O, the last track

Was the vessel that contained

The most devotion and pain

And made promises that you couldn’t
take back.

Malalai Joya’s A Woman Among Warlords (Scribner) tells the amazing story of one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists.

The Progressive had the opportunity to meet and interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her steadfast resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

So it was a real pleasure to find out more about her life by reading her autobiography. As a girl she loved poetry and would “read late into the night by the light of our propane lamp” the works of Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht. Inspired by her father’s own activism, she tells of opening secret schools for girls in basements, calling it “the most important act of rebellion against the Taliban.” On her wedding day, for security reasons, her bodyguards had to search every flower arrangement for explosives.

Joya fearlessly denounced the warlords at the constitutional assembly in 2003, which she attended. Two years later she ran for office and won, becoming the youngest member elected to parliament. She was later suspended from office for her persistent criticisms of corruption and advocacy of human rights.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke, and warns about Obama’s further escalation of the war. “It could well be that people in Afghanistan will soon say that Obama is even worse than Bush,” she writes. She urges the American people to pressure Obama to withdrawal all our troops.

“In the past thirty years, every kind of atrocity has been committed in Afghanistan in the name of socialism, religion, freedom, democracy and liberation,” she writes. “Now these acts are justified by a so-called war on terror.”

With A Woman Among Warlords, Joya takes her place alongside such leading democracy activists as Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, and Rigoberta Menchu. It was Joya who should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Click here to read Favorite Books of 2009 by editors and writers for The Progressive magazine.

I’m inspired by the grassroots activism happening at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Police have arrested more than 1000 people so far.

Here’s what my friend and colleague, Molly Stentz of WORT-FM, reported today on her blog from Copenhagen:

We know the drill by now. Head honchos arrive tomorrow. Checklist for today:

• Polish up the Bella Center (vaccum, mop, install more metal detectors)
• Remove untidy protest contingent
• Move in on the groups that police have been surveilling and detain their organizers
• Seize any likely protest equipment
• Arrest & detain now, deal with consequences later

One of the best sources of info is Indymedia Denmark.

For updates from the grassroots, visit Via Campesina, 350.org, and, of course, Democracy Now.

The Yes Men are once again up to their shenanigans.

Looking back and looking forward  . . . to Copenhagen

November 30 marks the tenth year anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, a proud moment in activist history when protesters shut down the free trade talks of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Thousands of people—unionists, students, environmental activists, farmers–took to the streets and joined a nonviolent direct action blockade which circled the Kingdome, where the WTO talks were held.

Police responded in a violent way and tossed tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray at demonstrators, and made around 600 arrests. The city declared a state of emergency and suspended basic civil rights in the downtown area.

David Solnit was living in a Seattle at the time and organizing with the Direct Action Network, one of the main groups behind the Seattle demonstrations.

He, along with his sister, author Rebecca Solnit, offer their takes on what happened, and tackle the myths surrounding the uprising in their new book, The Battle of the Story of the Battle in Seattle (AK Press, 2009).

David Solnit describes the activist myths, such as Seattle was a spontaneous uprising. Solnit points out the massive organizing, alliance building. and strategy that allowed thousands of people to participate. What made the Seattle protests effective, Solnit writes, was “a common strategic framework and massive grassroots education, organizing, alliance building, and mobilizing.”

Solnit also addresses the myth of activist violence in Seattle. Some members of the “black bloc” broke windows of businesses, against the agreement to not engage in property destruction. Solnit notes that authorities have attempted to criminalize protests since Seattle by propagating myths such as “protesters throwing urine,” and fabricated references to overturned police and emergency vehicles. These kinds of fables are used “to create greater public acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties and the use of violence and repression against protests and participants,” Solnit writes.

While Solnit spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the Hollywood movie by Stuart Townsend, The Battle in Seattle, he does offer an insightful analysis about lessons learned from successfully shutting down the WTO.

Rebecca Solnit, too, challenges the myth of the savage activist. She even takes on The New York Times for perpetuating the stereotype of the riot-prone protester. “The significant violence in Seattle was police violence,” she asserts in a letter to the paper.

The correction The New York Times printed gave Solnit no solace. She writes:

“What remains relevant is why the myth of activist violence persists. My belief is that those who characterize us as violent correctly perceive us as a threat. But to acknowledge us as a threat to the status quo is to acknowledge many dangerous things: that there is a states, rather than a natural order, that it is vulnerable, and that actions in the streets can chance it.”

This book is a great read for any activist. It also includes a day-by-day “view from the ground” by Chris Dixon, a participant in the demonstrations.

A few pages later Dixon writes, “As the day [November 30] drew on, confrontation between police and protesters intensified once again. Thos of us near major blockades became more and more used to the burning sensation of tear gas, and a few angry protesters began throwing the canisters back. Like many others, I was hit with rubber bullets while retreating from an intersection.”

Looking back at Seattle ten years later is extremely valuable in and of itself. (The book reprints the original information published in the Direct Action Network broadsheet.)

But now we are days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Copenhagen December 7-18. Activists are planning public protests in Copenhagen to push governments to demand action on climate change.

And the environmental group 350.org is advising people to have events and vigils in their hometowns.

With little doubt, activists will once again be portrayed as violent. But we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the COP15 talks. Civil society has been busy making preparations, and hopefully taking the lessons of the Battle of Seattle to heart.