I’m usually not one to be too picky about labels — depending on the dialectical context and the aspect of my politics that I want to emphasize at the moment, they can accurately be described as Leftist, a libertarian, free marketeer, socialist, anarchist, democratic, republican, individualist, mutualist, populist, radical, feminist, et cetera. But there is one thing that I just refuse to call myself anymore. I am not a Progressive, God damn it, and no matter how much I may like some individual people who call themselves that, and no matter how much I may sympathize with a broad cluster of their personal concerns and subcultural values, I just will not call myself one for love or money.

Why not? Well, there are some specific historical reasons having to do with what the folks calling themselves Progressives in the early 20th century actually were like and what they actually did. But there are also some contemporary reasons, too. Look at the prominent political figures and organizations calling themselves Progressive, and the kind of politics that they endorse when they have their Progressive hats on. You are now looking at a bunch of losers. Sometimes they’re noble losers, and sometimes they are silly milksop losers, but losers they remain, and you may as well go around calling yourself pudd’nhead for all the grace and dignity that the mantle of Progressivism confers.

An example: here is the latest series of e-mails I’ve received from MoveOn. Quick! Everybody wring your hands!

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Tue., 14 Jun 2005

…

A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and other commercial-free children’s shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS:

…

If we can reach 250,000 signatures by the end of the week, we’ll put Congress on notice. After you sign the petition, please pass this message along to any friends, neighbors or co-workers who count on NPR and PBS.

And:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 15 Jun 2005

In less than a day, we’ve blown past our goal–more than 300,000 of us have signed the petition to save NPR and PBS from losing public funding. This is huge, but we need your help.

Tomorrow, the House Appropriations Committee will decide whether to approve these severe cuts to NPR and PBS. We can stop the cuts–and save public TV and radio–with a strong show of public outrage. We’ll report to the committee members on our petition before they vote.

Can you help us reach 400,000 signers by the end of the day?

And then, when the effort to stop the committee vote failed:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 17 Jun 2005

Yesterday, a House committee slashed half of the federal funding for NPR and PBS, specifically targeting popular children’s shows like Sesame Street and Postcards from Buster. These cuts will decimate local stations and undermine quality news reporting. This is nothing less than an effort to kill off NPR and PBS.

But people like you are fighting back, making the petition to save NPR and PBS one of the most popular we’ve ever seen–750,000 signers to date! Already, the public outcry has delayed the effort to eliminate funding entirely, but we must fight to restore full funding at once. The House will vote on these massive cuts to NPR and PBS as soon as Tuesday, and representatives are making up their minds right now.

Make sure Rep. Dingell doesn’t take away the programs you love. Call him today at:

Congressman John Dingell
Phone: 202-225-4071

And then:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 20 Jun 2005

In the next few days, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to slash funding for NPR and PBS. And tomorrow, before Congress votes, we’ll present stacks and stacks of printed petitions and public comments to save public broadcasting. We’ll be joined by members of Congress and the public TV and radio staff fighting for survival.

Over 817,000 people have signed the petition so far–simply incredible. But we want to present 1 million signatures to the press tomorrow, and we can do it with your help. In all our years of online organizing, we’ve never heard of one million Americans signing a petition in a week, but we’re within striking distance now.

Help us reach 1 million signers by the end of the day. Sign the petition at: …

The stakes are high: some of the best programs on the air are at risk. After you sign, please send this message on to your friends and colleagues–it’ll take all of us pushing together to get to the 1 million mark.

…

If the House passes these massive cuts, we’ll fight to restore the funding when the Senate takes up public broadcasting. But even if we stop the House cuts, we’ll need to make sure Senate Republicans don’t try the same thing.

Together, we can stop the House from slashing NPR and PBS in the federal budget. Can you help us hit 1 million signers today?

MoveOn’s online petition campaign had exceeded their goal of one million petitioners. In fact, they’d reached 1,091,509 last I looked.

And, the last I heard, they managed to get the programming funding restored, but the House voted for another $105 million of government funding to be eliminated from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget anyway:

After a storm of protest from supporters of public television and radio, the House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to restore $100 million in programming money to next year’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget. The CPB is the private agency that disburses funds to the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio and their member stations.

At the same, however, $105 million in funding, including $23 million for children’s programming and educational outreach, was eliminated. The fight over that money will now move to the Senate, which has traditionally been a strong backer of PBS and NPR.

San Jose Mercury-News 2005-06-24: House restores public TV funding, but fight continues

If you want to know why Progressives keep losing all the time, then here it is:

If we can reach 250,000 signatures by the end of the week, we’ll put Congress on notice. …

We can stop the cuts–and save public TV and radio–with a strong show of public outrage. …

But people like you are fighting back, making the petition to save NPR and PBS one of the most popular we’ve ever seen …

Make sure Rep. Dingell doesn’t take away the programs you love. Call him today …

And tomorrow, before Congress votes, we’ll present stacks and stacks of printed petitions and public comments to save public broadcasting. …

What this has accomplished, so far, is that it’s sent 1,091,509 copies of the following e-mail to members of Congress:

TO: Your senators and representative
FROM: (Your Name and Email)
SUBJECT: Save NPR and PBS

Dear senators and representative,

(Your personal note)

Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.

Don’t get me wrong. I like PBS and NPR is just about all the radio I ever listen to. The issue here isn’t whether they should face a funding crisis or not; I hope that they don’t. Rather, it’s what you should do in the face of that funding crisis. MoveOn just invested an incredible amount of time, money, and energy into mobilizing a bunch of Progressives to whine about it in Congress and beg for the money back. Meanwhile, instead of signing an online petition, calling my Representative, and e-mailing my friends and colleagues to get them to shake the change cup with me, I shut up and put down a pledge of $10 / month to Detroit Public Television.

Now, if 1,091,509 people in MoveOn’s orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, then by my calculations PBS and NPR would have $130,981,080 more money for programming in the upcoming year. More importantly, they’d have that $131 million no matter what Congress and the Senate decided to do.

You might claim that not everyone who gets MoveOn e-mails will put down a pledge, but a lot more people will put down a zero-cost signature. You might think that MoveOn just can’t command that kind of money. Well, that strikes me as making excuses: we are talking about the group that just threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (depending on the as-yet unreleased budget data for their 501(c)(4) branch) down the tubes for electable John Kerry just last year. But fundraising is tricky, and maybe they wouldn’t make as much as they might hope. But think it about it this way: when you give money directly to people doing good work, the economics of failing to meet your goals are different. Lobbying is, more or less, an all-or-nothing game, with very few chances for gains on the margin. Names on a petition may or may not make a difference; but if they don’t make a difference (and, frankly, it doesn’t look like they made much of one here) then the names and pious hopes that NPR and PBS got out of the campaign aren’t worth the electrons that they’re printed on. But if you don’t hit your targets in direct support, the contributions you did get are money in the bank, no matter what. If only half as many people pledged as signed the petition, well, then PBS and NPR would have $65,490,540 that they didn’t have before. If the average contribution was $30 instead of a $10 / month pledge, they’d would have $32,745,270. Maybe that will save Big Bird and maybe it won’t; but even if it doesn’t it’s a darn sight better and more secure than the nothing that failed petitioning campaigns produce.

There’s a general principles here worth mentioning; it’s a principle the Left used to care about. It’s called direct action, and the longer the Progressive wing of the Left keeps ignoring it — the longer that they spend throwing time and organizing effort down the tubes to beg the government to support the institutions that they like — the longer we are all going to be losers.

We can do this ourselves, so quit begging. Shut up and put up.

(Link thanks to Lew Rockwell [2005-03-02].)

I’ve commented on the obliteration of any notion of proportionality in modern police forces before (in GT 2005-04-26: Peace Officers and GT 2004-11-14: Civil defense). The plain, ugly fact is that what we have today is not civil policing, but rather paramilitary cadres occupying most of our urban centers. Cadres of paras who feel no particular qualms about using physical violence to maintain order and control in any and every situation, without any particular concern for whether the force matches the threat. In Aurora, Colorado, this took a turn for the straightforwardly absurd:

Police talked to the Chuck E. Cheese manager, who told them that a customer had refused to show proof that he had paid for food. The manager said the man was seen loading his plate at the salad bar.

The officers confronted Danon Gale, 29, who was at the restaurant with his children, aged 3 and 7. Patrons said the popular kids pizza parlor was packed with children and families at the time.

According to police, Gale was asked to step outside to discuss the incident.

According to witnesses (Gale) refused to cooperate with police and a struggle ensued, said Larry Martinez, a police spokesman. He said that Gale became argumentative and shoved one of the officers, a fact disputed by another patron.

One of the officers kept poking the gentleman in the chest, Felicia Mayo told the Rocky Mountain News.

She was there with her 7-year-old son. She told the newspaper that Gale told the officer You don’t have to do that. She said Gale never put his hands on the officer who was confronting him

The argument escalated until Gale was shoved into the lap of Mayo’s sister, who was sitting two booths away, holding a 10-month-old baby. That’s when police pulled out a Taser stun gun to subdue him.

They beat this man in front of all these kids then Tased him in my sister’s lap, Mayo told the newspaper. They had no regard for the effect this would have on the kids. This is Chuck E. Cheese, you know.

Gale’s two children were screaming and hollering and crying as Gale was hit two times with the stun gun.

Police arrested Gale as his children and other customers watched. They took him outside, leaving his children inside the restaurant.

Gale was arrested for investigation of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing.

— NewsNet5.com 2005-03-02: Dad Accused of Chuck E. Cheese Salad Theft Zapped by Police

Cops bully people, hurt them for no good reason, use tasers to end arguments, and then make up lies to cover it up. If you or I did that, we would be in jail. Cops did it here, so we are treated to this:

AURORA, Colo. — Aurora police have reviewed a weekend incident in which a man accused of stealing salad from a Chuck E. Cheese salad bar was hit with a stun gun twice by officers and said that proper procedures were followed.

… which, apparently, is supposed to make everything alright. As long as the police department determines that cops are following the procedures that the police department determined to be proper, blasting 20,000 volts through a man who is at most guilty of grand salad bar larceny is a perfectly appropriate response to the situation. Move along, citizen, nothing to see here.

Support your local CopWatch.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-04-26: Peace officers
• GT 2004-11-14: Civil defense

As a nice set piece to my May Day paean to wildcat unionism–that is, workers organizing themselves on the free market, without the suffocating patronage of the government, Ampersand passes along a nice reminder that modern corporate capitalists–the Behemoth from Bentonville chief among them–are not creatures of the free market; they are Frankenstein creations of government privilege for the bosses. Jonathan Tasini at TomPaine.com (2005-04-21) is mired in a host of confusions about free market economics, but he is precisely, and importantly, right to remind us that Truth is, Wal-Mart could not survive in a real free market. Remember that we are talking about a company that routinely robs the land that it needs for its gigantic stores by Mau-Mauing local governments into using eminent domain powers and handing out tax-funded subsidies. Remember that Wal-Mart’s business model for the past decade has been directly dependent on the repression of workers’ wages by the government of Communist China.

Putting aside the morality of forcing people to work in slave-like conditions, the so-called free market does not exist in China when it comes to wages. China artificially suppresses wages by anywhere from 47 to 85 percent below what they should be, according to the AFL-CIO’s complaint about China’s labor policies filed with the United States Trade Representative last year. With Wal-Mart as its willing customer, an authoritarian regime ruthlessly warps the market for wages by enforcing a system that controls where people can work and imprisons and tortures people who attempt to organize real unions or strike. Maybe the rock-bottom labor costs are really behind Wal-Mart’s slogan always low prices, but the company is certainly not an example of how to win in a free market economy.

It’s easy to see why Wal-Mart and its conservative defenders discard ideology: money. By ignoring free market principles, the left-wing Harvard Business School estimates that Wal-Mart reduces its procurement costs by 10-20 percent, primarily by taking advantage of the artificially suppressed labor market in China.

…

Back at home, Wal-Mart’s free market mantra stops at the water’s edge of the public till. By one estimate, Wal-Mart has pulled in $1.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies (see www.walmartwatch.com). And that’s at the low end, because subsidies are sometimes hard to track based on the lack of public reporting requirements. Wal-Mart is happy to cash in on government largess like property tax abatements, infrastructure support, free land and just straight-out cold cash–all of which are the antithesis of free market ideology.

Free software advocates sometimes like to point out that there are a couple of meanings of the word free; there’s free as in free speech and free as in free lunch. The thing about Right-wing blowhards is that they routinely support pro-business giveaways, whether in the form of subsidies to Wal-Mart, endless coercive monopolies for pharmaceutical companies, or government-enforced union busting (see: right-to-work laws; see also: Taft-Hartley). When they start pontificating on the virtues of the free market they never mean it–unless by free market means a market that’s free as in free lunch, i.e. a government-guaranteed market for big consolidated businesses that they don’t have to work for or earn.

That’s the real reason to oppose Wal-Mart: not because they supposedly represent the worst of the free market (it isn’t a creature of the free market at all), and certainly not because of some cracked anti-consumerist claptrap. The problem with Wal-Mart is that they steal your money and use it to keep their business running whether you want to shop there or not. But it’s for precisely this reason that I think the best way to take the fight to Wal-Mart is not to dismiss the free market or to try to block Wal-Mart through local zoning controls. Wal-Mart is what it is today because it’s better at manipulating the State than you are, and there is no reason to think that that’s likely to change substantially as long as they remain what they are. (Trying to turn Leviathan against Behemoth has always been a sucker’s bet.) If Wal-Mart couldn’t survive in a free market, then the best way to fix what’s wrong with them is to make them compete on a free market–a real free market, not the corporatist sham market of today–a market where workers organize in freely-constituted unions that aren’t subject to the constraints of government colonization, where competitors can enter the market without having to buy off town and county governments and homeowners aren’t forced to sacrifice their own homes on the altar of Commerce. The system of state patronage is the problem; freedom, as usual, is the solution.

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: a day to celebrate the long, hard struggle of workers for freedom, self-determination, and a better life. The day originated during the heady days of the Eight Hour Day campaign in the late 19th century, a campaign led not by bureaucratic union bosses, much less by Marxist thugs, but by ordinary workers agitating and organizing amongst themselves. Most of them were anarchists, and their struggle was as much against State power as it was against the bosses (part of the reason for May Day commemorations, mind you, is to remember the Haymarket martyrs, anarchists murdered by the state of Illinois).

One of the (many) crimes of the state socialists in the 20th century was their wholesale theft of May Day; what had been and properly remains a day for celebrating the free actions of ordinary workers became, in the bloody talons of the so-called workers’ states, a day for celebrating socialist God-Kings and hideous parades of military power. The folks over at Catallarchy have gone so far as to name May Day a Day of Remembrance for the victims of state Communism. What they are doing is important. The Moloch of Marxist-Leninism consumed more victims than any other power that the world has known in history–through mass executions, through unbelievable mass starvation, through pestilence, through death camps, through war. History is important and memory is political; the stories are harrowing but they need to be told. But I do not think that May Day is the day for the solemn observations. I think that this gives the butchers too much credit. Marxist-Leninism stole May Day from anarchists, from workers, like it stole everything else it ever gained in the 20th century. It did its best to silence its victims, like it did to silence all its other victims, with a bullet to the head and piles of pirated loot to parties and unions that would toe the Bolshevik line. I will not give up May Day to them any more than I will give Juneteenth up to William Tecumseh Sherman or give Easter up to the Holy Inquisition. (If you’re looking for a day of remembrance, I’d suggest the 6th of March, the day that the Kronstadt massacre began.) But today is the International Workers’ Day, not the State’s day–meaning neither the bureaucratic-managerial state so beloved of the conservative AFL-line unions, nor the blood-soaked workers’ states (a contradiction in terms). As I said last year:

May Day is a celebration of the original conception of the labor movement, as expressed by anarchist organizers such as Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Benjamin Tucker, and others: a movement for workers to come into their own, by banding together, supporting one another, and taking direct action in the form of boycotts, work stoppages, general strikes, and the creation of workers’ spaces such as local co-operatives and union hiring halls. The spirit was best expressed by John Brill’s famous exhortation to Dump the bosses off your back–by which he did not mean to go to a government mediator and get them to make the boss sit down with you and work out a slightly more beneficial arrangement. Dump the bosses off your back! meant: organize and create local institutions that let you bypass the bosses. Negotiate with them if it’ll do some good; ignore them if it won’t. The signal achievements of the labor movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century were achievements in this spirit: the campaigns that won the 8 hour day and the weekend off in many workplaces, for example, emerged from a unilateral work stoppage by rank-and-file workers, declared by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and organized especially by the explicitly anarchist International Working People’s Association, after legislative efforts by the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor failed. The stagnant, or even backsliding, state of organized labor over the past half century is the direct result of government colonization and the ascendency of government-subsidized unions.

— GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!

I don’t really have much to add to what I said before; you can get most of what I would have said by reading what I did say last year. All that I have to add is that the labor news this year has proved it again: when workers free themselves of the State, workers win.

[The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ victory in the Taco Bell boycott campaign is] also — although you won’t hear this as much — a major victory for government-free, syndicalist labor organizing. The CIW is not a bureaucratic government-recognized union; as a form of organizing it’s far closer to an autonomous workers’ syndicate or a local soviet (in the old sense of a democratic, community-based workers’ council, not in the sense of the hollow state apparatus that the Bolsheviks left after the party committees seized power at bayonet-point). Of course, not having the smothering comfort of the US labor bureaucracy to prop them up has often made things harder on the CIW; but it’s also made them freer, and left them free of the restraints on serious and innovative labor activism that have held the government-authorized union movement back for the past 60 years. (Example: the strategic decision to target Taco Bell in the first place–that is, the whole damned campaign that allowed the Immokalee workers to win such a huge improvement in their standard of living–was a secondary boycott, and so would have been illegal under the terms of the Taft-Hartley Act and the Landrum-Griffin Act. But since the CIW doesn’t need a permission slip from the NLRB to engage in direct action, they won the day–not in spite of, but because of their freedom from government restraints on labor organizing.

— GT 2005/03/23: El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

(You can read more at GT 2005/03/23: El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! and GT 2005/03/30: Anarquistas por La Causa.)

Dump the bosses off your back. Free the Unions–and all political prisoners!

The Seventh Annual Southern Girls Convention will be held June 17-19, 2005, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Every year for the past 6 years, the Southern Girls Convention has brought out hundreds of rad folks to meet and to talk and to learn from each other–learning skills for activism and everyday life, sharing our experiences organizing deep in the heart of the so-called Red States, and taking it home to raise hell and work together to make our homes freer, safer, more just, and more loving places to be. It’s a place for Southern women and pro-woman activists to find each other, get together, work out our plans and our priorities, and begin to build the communities we want to live in in our own hometowns.

SGC is an unapologetically feminist, bottom-up, grassroots meeting. Each year it’s held in a different Southern community and put together with a new set of local organizers, working together with organizers from years past (if you didn’t know, I’m one myself; together with my friends Claire Rumore and Ailecia Ruscin, I helped put on the third annual Southern Girls Convention, which drew about 600 radical activists to Auburn, Alabama). The convention’s been held in Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Auburn, Alabama; Athens, Georgia; and Asheville, North Carolina; last year it returned to its birthplace in Memphis, and this year the seventh annual Southern Girls Convention will be held on June 17-19, 2005, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’re working to reconnect with the radical history of the American South–the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the Klan, yes, but also–lest we forget–the home of the modern Civil Rights movement, the birthplace of SNCC, and the home of women like Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Elaine Brown, Casey Hayden, Rita Mae Brown, and others. We’re working to build an infrastructure for women’s liberation in the South — because the South is our home, it needs to change, and by God we’re the ones to do it.

There will be a weekend of workshops and social events for sharing skills, learning from each other about issues and campaigns, and just meeting and talking and networking (as they say) with each other. There will be music shows, free food, and a talk by bi feminist artist Magdalen Hsu-Li. There will also be childcare for children over the age of one, incidentally, and children will also be welcome in the convention space. Interested? Consider registering to attend. While you’re at it, if you have a skill you’d like to share or an issue or organization you’d like to talk with radical folks from across the South about, you should consider proposing a workshop! Part of the point of Southern Girls Convention is that we can all learn from each other; we don’t need professional activists coming in from the North to lecture us about how to organize ourselves. (N.B.: this doesn’t mean that professional activists from the North will be unwelcome at SGC; if you are one, we’d love for you to come. Just don’t expect it to be all about you!)

Here’s the announcement from this year’s organizers. Be sure to spread the word to anyone you think might be interested!

We are counting on you to spread the word for us! Please forward this message to any friends, family, colleagues, bulletin boards, listservs, or web pages that might be interested in the event!

---

Seventh Annual Southern Girls Convention

June 17-19, 2005 Baton Rouge, Louisiana

WWW: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/

WHAT IS SOUTHERN GIRLS CONVENTION?

The Southern Girls Convention is an annual grassroots meeting for networking, organizing, educating, agitating, and activism, devoted to empowering women and girls in the South and furthering the struggle for social justice. Each year’s convention is hosted by a different Southern community and facilitated by local organizers. Past conventions have brought together hundreds of folks in Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Auburn, Alabama; Athens, Georgia; and Asheville, North Carolina.

This year’s convention will be heading as deep South as you can get: Southern Girls Convention invites activists from across the country to meet in BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA on the weekend of June 17-19, 2005. Hundreds of activists will meet for discussion, action, and entertainment devoted to building pro-woman community in the South.

WHAT CAN I DO THERE?

Southern Girls Convention is based around discussions, workshops, and presentations which give participants the opportunity to share skills, share ideas, discuss important issues, organize campaigns, and have fun as a community. All workshops are organized and facilitated by the participants themselves–that means you! Other events will include a talk by Southern bi feminist musician MAGDALEN HSU-LI, an “un-shop” swap meet, nightly music shows, and tables for participants and organizations to display information, zines, art, and things they have made.

SGC also allows hundreds of activists from across the country to meet, network, strategize, and organize in their efforts on behalf of social justice. Feel free to bring video projects, zines, writing, and anything you are interested in sharing to the convention.

Childcare will be available at the convention space.

Past workshops at SGC have included:

• Group discussions on fatphobia, abortion rights and access, radical parenting, “100 Years of Revolutionary Wimmin,” the criminalization of women, “Queer and Trans Youth in the South,” gender bias in schools, sexism in the activist community, “Marginalization and Tokenization within the Grrrl Movement,” roles and strategies for boys in the struggle against male supremacy, and “Radical, Southern, and All Fired Up–Where Do We Go From Here?”

• Skill-sharing on radical cheerleading, community access television, gun safety and self-defense, workplace union organizing, screen printing, sexercises, Internet organizing, and how to start a consciousness-raising group.

• Organizing meetings for campaigns from Amnesty International, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and Planned Parenthood, and state-by-state caucuses for people to meet fellow organizers in their own area.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Website: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/
E-mail: SGC’05 Organizers organizers@southerngirlsconvention.org

PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL FAR AND WIDE! Send it to friends and e-mail lists, post it on your website, blog, or bulletin board… we are counting on YOU to help us spread the word. A fresh copy of the e-mail can be sent from our website at: http://www.southerngirlsconvention.org/2005/spread-the-word

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

Southern Girls Convention 2005 Organizers
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I’m doing my part with this note and a banner at the top of the page. If you support SGC and can help out by forwarding an e-mail to activist groups you’re a member of, putting up a banner, posting on your website, or whatever you like, don’t hesitate to do so–or to get in touch with me or with the Baton Rouge organizers to see what you can do to help us out.

Further reading:

• GT 2002-07-24: SGC’02 rocks the South from Athens, Georgia
• GT 2001-07-27: Southern Girls Convention builds pro-woman community in the Deep South
• Southern Girls Convention: History
• Kate Zernike, New York Times 2002-07-22: Where a Southern Girl is also a Feminist
• Ashley Sayeau, The Nation 2004-11-18: Southern Ms.
• On a related note, see GT 2004-11-09: Dear Democrats, GT 2002-05-30: It’s Time To Stop Blaming the South, GT 2001-11-14: And the other shoe drops, GT 2001-03-16: Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals