SNCC Freedom Singer Matt Jones: A 1994 `Downtown' Interview--Part 1

The Summer of 1994 marked the 30th Anniversary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, in which over 1,000 student volunteers from around the U.S. participated, after attending training sessions in Oxford, Ohio. But in 2007 a former chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown (n/k/a Jamil al-Amin), is still imprisoned for life in a Georgia prison.

In 1994, Downtown spoke with former SNCC organizer and Freedom Singers Director, Matt Jones, about the Freedom Summer, the Freedom Singers, SNCC and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Jones lives in Manhattan and for many years has generously donated his time to sing at many human rights and peace benefits. At The People’s Voice Café (http://www.peoplesvoicecafe.org/) in Manhattan, a celebration of his 70th birthday took place in 2006. Following is part 1 of an interview with Jones, which first appeared in the September 21, 1994 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown.

Now it’s 30 years [in 1994] after the Mississippi Summer Project. What activities were you involved in that led to the Freedom Summer? What are your most enduring and vivid memories of that Summer?
Matt Jones: In January 1964, I went on tour with the SNCC Freedom Singers. Our job was to organize Friends of SNCC chapters in the northern part of the United States and to talk about the Movement to interested students, who would in turn give their bodies, their minds and their finances to the struggle. They knew, by the accounts of life and death that we would give them in our concerts, that to work for SNCC was as dangerous as any war.

In early 1964, we did a concert at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The KKK burned a cross on the lawn. Dick Gregory, who was touring with us, made fun of the incident. We wrote a song called “The Klansman:” (recites)

“Out of the night
When the full moon is bright
Rides a devil known as a Klansman.
Devil, who makes the sign of a K.
Devil, you’re bound to see your day.”

From the incident many students from Oxford got involved in SNCC. Their networking with the SNCC office in Atlanta set the stage for using Oxford as the meeting place for the Summer Orientation. Similar networking was done in other states, but none was as complex as The Mississippi Summer Project.

Seeing many students that we had organized with speeches and songs was an affirmation that we had done a good job. But that reality scared me. I suddenly felt an enormous responsibility. The people we had sung to and who we had organized were the students who were going South.

We heard that three students were missing in Meridian [Mississippi]. I became very nervous. I sat under the tree where we had taught many students nonviolent techniques, and hoped that they would decide to go home, because I did not want the responsibility of their deaths. I knew [SNCC Field Secretary] Bob Moses was talking to the students in the hall, and felt confident of Bob’s ability to explain things. Bob was a genius at making points with a few words. He had an eloquent silence. Bob was the leader of the Council of Federated Organizations [COFO] in Mississippi during Freedom Summer.

I knew I had a lot of responsibility for the students being there. I’m one of the cheerleaders, one of the people who talked them into coming down. Or talked them into thinking that was the place to be. But I had no way of knowing, when I was talking to them, that they would come down and somebody would actually get killed. A student would actually get killed. And we would have to deal with that.

So when we heard that three [civil rights] workers were missing, I looked at these students wishing they would go home.

Why was a decision made to utilize the student volunteers?
Jones: I had been arrested 29 times in the Movement.

Twenty-nine?
Jones: Across the South.

What kinds of arrests?
Jones: Well, you would go to register people to vote and they would throw you in jail. You would go to integrate a lunch counter and they would throw you in jail. You would go to integrate a movie theater and get thrown in jail. And it just wound up, in the final analysis, being 29 times.

We had found out, as early as the March on Washington [in 1963], that with white student involvement the country would pay more attention to the struggle. We knew from past experience that this country would not react to Black people being killed. So in bringing the student volunteers to the South, their parents, their home towns, their colleges and their congressmen would be interested in their welfare.

We were right. However, we were as shocked as the rest of the nation when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were killed. In 1963, we had previously used white students in other places throughout the South. However, the majority of these students were from the South.

So we took a calculated risk. We thought that something would happen. That people would get involved. And they did get involved. We didn’t want it to happen the way it happened…

Now when I was sitting under that tree, I knew that they were going. But I also knew I was going with them. So right after some of them left, I wound up going to Meridian. And being there with [Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC)] leader] Jim Bevel and a CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] worker named “Flukie” Suarez.

But I knew that some of the veteran workers had to go into Meridian at that time. And I was one of them that went into Meridian. I was frightened, but I also knew a little bit more about how to survive in that area than Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman had known. (end of part 1)

Next: SNCC Freedom Singer Matt Jones: A 1994 Downtown Interview—Part 2

Was Hillary Clinton's Husband a CIA Student Informant in the 1960s?

In the 1960s, most U.S. anti-war activists worked for the defeat of the 1964 Republican Party presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet in 1964 (according to a 1996 book written by a former senior aide to 1984 Democratic Party presidential nominee Walter Mondale named Roger Morris, titled Partners In Power), Hillary Clinton “to the delight of her parents, joined the campaign as an official Goldwater Girl, wearing her straw boater and sash to rallies, briskly canvassing the already solid Republican neighborhood” in which she lived in Park Ridge, Illinois. Four years later, she also worked for the 1968 presidential campaign of New York Republican Goverrnor Nelson Rockefeller, which most U.S. anti-war activists opposed.

In the 1960s, most U.S. anti-war activists also felt that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] should be abolished and that the CIA should not be allowed to recruit student informants on U.S. or foreign campuses. Yet the husband of 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, apparently may have worked during the 1960s as a CIA informant. According to Roger Morris’ Partners In Power book:

“`Bill Clinton’s ties to the intelligence community go back all the way to Oxford and come forward from there,' says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since destroyed…

“…The Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous Operation Chaos of the 1960s had been directed at uncovering some discrediting foreign hand in antiwar activities at home and abroad, to the point of recruiting American student informants…

“According to at least two former agency station chiefs and two more deputies who received the instructions and directed such covert operations, the inducements for the young informers ranged from cash payments to help with local draft boards and even promised deferments to more general and sweeping proffers of future help and influence with careers. `I could get them some money and accommodations if they needed it and see that selective service stayed off their backs,’ said one former CIA officer. `And most case officers were telling these young men…the agency’s in a position to help at some point in their careers, there’d be an institutional memory. The Rhodes and Fulbrights and others…knew the advantages of helping out.’…

“…There was a standing agreement between the CIA and their London counterparts not to conduct covert operations on one another’s home territory…According to several accounts of CIA officers on the scene in 1967-70, Operation Chaos evaded the secret intelligence agreement through an elaborate ruse in which the station at the US embassy in London arranged to contact certain American students at Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere and to be `turned down,’ with word of the attempted recruitment then leaking to the British…`In fact,’ remembered a ranking CIA case officer, `we went back and got the boys for real…’

“It would all befog still more the later allegations of CIA collusion by and around Bill Clinton at Oxford. One former agency official would claim later that the future president was a full-fledged `asset,’ that he was regularly `debriefed,’ and thus that he informed on his American friends in the peace movement in Britain. Similarly, he was said to have informed on draft resisters in Sweden during his brief trip there with Father McSorley…

“One more CIA retiree would recall going through archives of Operation Chaos at the Langley headquarters—part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s—and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant who had gone on to run for or be elected to a political office of some import, in Clinton’s case attorney general of Arkansas. `He was there in the records,’ the former agent said, `with special designation.’ Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft.”…

Book II of the U.S. Senate’s Final Repot of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, titled Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans and released in 1976, contained the following reference to the CIA’s Operation Chaos program:

“Under White House pressure, the CIA developed its own program—Operation CHAOS—as an adjunct to the CIA’s foreign counterintelligence activities…The first CHAOS instructions to CIA station chiefs in August 1967 described the need for `keeping tabs on radical students and U.S. Negro expatriates as well as travelers passing through certain select areas abroad.’…”

In a footnote to his book, the author of Partners In Power, Roger Morris, noted that “interviews on the issue of Clinton and the CIA were arranged in part through organizations of retired intelligence officers and other national security officials and included former ranking members of the CIA stations in London, Stockholm, Paris and Moscow, as well as some who served at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, during the late 1960s and who were familiar with the Operation Chaos files.”

Next: SNCC Freedom Singer Matt Jones: A 1994 Downtown Interview—Part 1

Was Clintons' Blind Trust Invested In War Stock?

As president, the husband of former Wellesley College Trustee and 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton approved the granting of lucrative weapons manufacturing contracts to companies like United Technologies and Boeing. In addition, according to The Buying Of The President by Charles Lewis, “Saudi Arabia chose Boeing and McDonnell Douglas…to share a $6 billion jetliner order after President [Bill] Clinton…called King Fahd on Aug. 17, 1993” and “Boeing gave $307,000 between 1991 and 1994” to the Dems in campaign contributions.

Coincidentally, the Boston firm that managed both the blind trust funds of former Wellesley College Trustee Clinton and the Wellesley College Endowment funds, Essex Investment Management, has apparently invested these funds in companies which profit from selling the weapons of mass murder to the Pentagon. In 1995, for instance, the Wellesley College Endowment portfolio contained 18,700 shares of Boeing Company stock (worth $1.2 million) and 16,400 shares of United Technologies stock (worth $1.3 million).

Hillary chose the same firm that manages the Wellesley College Endowment to invest her own family’s surplus private wealth in July 1993; following a May 1993 consultation with Essex head Joseph McNay at the White House in which he talked with the 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate “about his investment philosophy,” according to the Boston Globe (8/31/93)

Next: Was Hillary Clinton’s Husband a CIA Student Informant In The 1960s?

Schumann Center for Media & Democracy: Funds Alternative Media, But Invests in Halliburton

In 2003, the Montclair, New Jersey-based Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave a $115,000 grant to The Nation magazine’s Nation Institute to help fund the for-profit magazine’s What Liberal Media? book project, according to the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy foundation’s Form 990-PF for 2003. In 2004, the Schumann Center also gave a $25,000 grant to Democracy Now Inc. “to fund Special 2004 election coverage for Democracy Now” and an additional $250,000 grant to the Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting [F.A.I.R.]/CounterSpin alternative media group, according to the foundation’s Form 990-PF for 2004. Among the other alternative media groups that were given grants by the Schumann Center in 2004 were the following:

American Prospect magazine was given another $255,000 grant;

Mother Jones magazine/Foundation for National Progress was given another $100,000 grant;

The Hightower Lowdown was given a $98,775 grant;

The Tom Paine Project was given a $500,000 grant;

The Free Press was given a $600,000 grant;

The Washington Monthly magazine was given a $320,000 grant;

In These Times magazine/Institute for Public Affairs was given a $15,000 grant;

The Independent Media Institute/AlterNet was given a $150,000 grant; and

The Proteus Fund was given at least $1 million in grant money.

In 2005, the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy continued to fund alternative media groups, according to its Form 990-PF for 2005:

The Hightower Lowdown was given a $250,000 grant “to fund program expansion of The Hightower Lowdown in print and on the internet;”

In These Times magazine’s Institute for Public Affairs was given another grant of $155,000;

Mother Jones magazine/Foundation for National Progress was given two grants, totaling $170,000. One of the grants was a $100,000 grant “to fund the Media Consortium’s multi-organization educational collaboration on reshaping the terrain of independent media;”

The Center for Media & Democracy’s SourceWatch.org was given a $150,000 grant;

The Independent Media Institute was given another grant of $135,000;

The American Prospect magazine was given another grant of $500,000;

Global Exchange was given another grant of $140,000;

Washington Monthly magazine/WM Corporate was given a $375,000 grant “toward expansion of Washington Monthly magazine;” and

Media Matters for America was given a $500,000 grant “for general efforts to monitor and analyze the U.S. media.”

Besides funding these alternative media organizations, the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy also owned 1,700 shares of Halliburton stock (worth $117,724) on Dec. 31, 2005, according to its Form 990-PF for 2005. The Halliburton Watch group (http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/) described on its web site how Halliburton has profited enormously during this current “era of permanent war” in U.S. history:

“Under Cheney’s tenure as CEO, Halliburton’s revenues from federal government contracts nearly doubled…The company became the 18th-largest defense contractor, in terms of revenue, whereas before Cheney’s arrival the company was the 73rd-largest contractor.

“Halliburton saw its revenues increase 30 percent to $16 billion in 2003, largely because of its military contracts in the Middle East. Halliburton was the number one U.S. Army contractor in 2003 with the total value of its Army contracts valued at $3,731,725,648. Dan Briody, in his book The Halliburton Agenda, described Halliburton’s relationship with Cheney as `the embodiment of the Iron Triangle, the network of the government, military, and big business that President Eisenhower warned America about in his farewell speech.”

Besides owning Halliburton stock, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy also owned 5,900 shares of stock in the Clear Channel Communications media conglomerate (worth $185,555), 3,572 shares of Chevron Texaco stock (worth $202,782) and 2,200 shares of Coca-Cola stock (worth $88,682) in 2005.

The president of the Schumann Center foundation, former Johnson White House Chief of Staff Bill Moyers, was paid a salary of $200,000 by the “non-profit” foundation in 2005, according to its Form 990-PF. The de-classified FBI file of late 1950s and 1960s entertainer Bobby Darin (“a/k/a Walden Robert Cassato”) (File #NY25-78569) contains a copy of a November 30, 1964 letter from the FBI sent “BY LIAISON” to “Honorable Bill Moyers, Special Assistant to the President,” which states:

“Dear Mr. Moyers,

“In response to the request of Mrs. Mildred Stegall of your office on November 24, 1964, the central files of the FBI were checked concerning the following entertainers: Julie Andrews; Woody Allen; Harry Belafonte, Johnny Carson; Bobby Darin; Cary Grant; Bob Hope; Peggy Lee; Sophia Loren; Barbara Streisand.”

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Dean Emerita, former Columbia Journalism Review magazine publisher and former Public Affairs Television President Joan Konner (a business partner of Moyers) was also paid $25,000 in 2005 for sitting on the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy foundation board. In addition, Konner also sits on the board of directors of The Providence Journal mainstream newspaper. Coincidentally, the Schumann foundation apparently gave over a million dollars worth of grants to help subsidize Columbia Journalism Review magazine when Konner was the magazine’s publisher. In recent years a co-owner and former editor of The Nation magazine, Columbia University Professor of Magazine Journalism Victor Navasky, has also been the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Not surprisingly, very few articles written from a radical left perspective which are critical of Columbia University, Bill Moyers’s historical role in the Johnson administration or the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy’s investment policies have appeared in The Nation magazine since Navasky began working for Columbia University.

Next: Was Clintons’ Blind Trust Invested In War Stock?

`Ted Gold's Wisdom'

(chorus)
Life is so short
With so many things to do
Patiently Ted Gold talked
And his love for all shone through.

(verses)
Oh, I had a dream one night
Where I saw an old kind friend
For humanity
He died early
Don’t you miss Ted Gold’s wisdom?

He marched when just a child
For the cause of Black people
He passed through school
Broke all their rules
Don’t you miss Ted Gold’s wisdom? (chorus)

When SNCC did need a friend
Alone, Ted Gold did work
From dorm to dorm
And all night long
Ted Gold he got the funds.

He sought no cash reward
And wished to be no star
He taught the young
Turned on for fun
And was faithful to his love. (chorus)

The jets bombed Viet Nam
The ghettoes did erupt
Ted Gold he spoke
And gave us hope
That our masters would be crushed.

They could not break his spirit
He fought pigs to his death
He had no price
He sought to do right
And live like Che’s new man. (chorus)

Now many years have passed
And Ted Gold he does now ask:
“Are my brothers free?
How’s the family?
Do my sisters recall the past?”

Yes, I had a dream one night
Where I saw an old kind friend
For humanity
He died early
Don’t you miss Ted Gold’s wisdom?

To listen to this biographical folk song, you can go to the following link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/More+Biographical+Folk+Songs/Ted+Gold%27s+Wisdom

Ted Gold’s Wisdom was written deep inside of Brooklyn in the early 1980s. To mark the 20th anniversary of Ted Gold’s death, I also wrote the following column, which was published in the March 6, 1990 issue of the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse explosion in which former Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] vice-chairman and 1968 Columbia strike leader Ted Gold was killed, along with two other Weatherpeople. The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was triggered by a mechanical error made by one of the Weather activists while producing bombs. Ted was not yet 23 years old at the time of his death.

In conversation, Ted exhibited a wealth of knowledge about politics and could also be quite witty. He liked to write and sing parodies of rock songs, substituting leftist lyrics for the more apolitical lyrics. At Columbia, Ted seemed to be one of the best minds on campus and one of the most together people.

Twenty years later, I think students at Columbia and Barnard should consider the issues raised by the example of Ted Gold’s life. Unlike many of his former SDS comrades, Ted never became a yuppie. He was a radical political activist before completing his studies at Columbia and he was a revolutionary activist after leaving Columbia. Like the late Abbie Hoffman used to say: “You can either go for money and become a yuppie—or you can go for broke and fight for your freedom.” Ted Gold never became interested in either money or a bourgeois academic or professional career. He went “for broke” and fought for his freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people on the earth.

In recent years, some former Columbia SDS activists have joined yuppie mass media pundits, feminist yuppies and neo-Marxist yuppie professors in declaring that Weatherpeople like Ted Gold went “crazy,” became “super-macho” and “terrorist” and “destroyed” the white New Left student movement of the 1960s, in general, and the largest New Left student organization, SDS, in particular. And if you accept the conventional wisdom of our 1990s “Yuppie Left” and the “Yuppie Mass Media” of the United States, then you’d have to agree that Ted should be remembered as, at best, a Columbia student radical who, after the 1968 student revolt, became too left-sectarian and too left-adventurist in his politics.

Although no revolution developed in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, as Ted had predicted would occur during the eight months prior to his death, I think a logical case can be made that his Weatherpolitics resulted from the conclusions he drew from his own personal experiences and his desire to respond to the history of his times.

Recent events in Central and Eastern Europe indicate the collective power that students still possess when they collectively decide to fight for democratization and demands for greater freedom. Yet at Columbia in 1990, students still don’t appear to genuinely control the campus or possess access to the U.S. mass media. And Columbia SDS founder David Gilbert remains locked up in Attica [in 2007, he’s in Clinton Prison in Dannemora, NY] at the same time nearly 200 other U.S. political activists from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s also remain imprisoned. Because Ted Gold was a revolutionary, not a yuppie reformist, I don’t think he would have been satisfied with the current U.S. political situation, 20 years after his tragic death.
(Columbia Daily Spectator 3/6/90)

Next: Schumann Center for Media & Democracy Funds Alternative Media, But Invests in Halliburton

`Grit TV' Host and `Blue Grit' Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 `Downtown' Interview--Part 7

Before she began working as the Grit TV producer-host and Blue Grit author Laura Flanders used to co-produce and host a non-commercial daily alternative morning news show called Undercurrents with Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight of KPFA’s Flashpoints (www.flashpoints.net) daily alternative evening news show. Following is the seventh part of a 1991 interview with Flanders that appeared in the June 26, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.

In the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, your father was a fairly prominent entertainer and broadcaster within what we might call the “Establishment entertainment industry’ in Britain. Yet you seem to be, on a political level, hostile to the British Establishment. What turned you against the British Establishment? Is it more difficult to come to a radical politic from that background?
Flanders: Well, I think that the theatre world that I grew up in was a very irreverent world that helped to frame my politics of questioning. You know, not thinking as gospel what was labeled for me. My father was from a working-class background who made his career through his work. And a lot of his work was a struggle—being as he used a wheelchair and was not actually embraced by the Establishment, by virtue of his disability. That he fought a lot of struggles to get to where he was. And I think that I grew up with that sense of there being injustice in the world.

His strategy was to poke fun at it through satire and through comedy and through a kind of bitter-sweet humor that, in many cases, left a kind of ominous bell ringing in the mind about certain political trends and cultural trends in Britain at the time, and internationally.

My politics, I think, was influenced largely by my own experience, which was of fighting for my rights as a woman. I’d also had a vision of other people’s poverty, and been acquainted with it, through my father’s work and my mother’s work with different disability rights organizations, and other kinds of charities in Britain. But I think then I went on very much to change that…For example, by going to the Greenham Common and the Women’s Peace Encampment, which was a protest by British and women internationally outside the U.S. Air Force Base near London that was to be the home of 96 Cruise missiles.

That was an experience of really living outside the law, living a life of protest, living in resistance 24 hours a day, and being surrounded by people who were articulating their politics around that in a very intensive kind of educational forum. And I think a lot of my politics came from that, from going to Northern Ireland and living with people in the north of Ireland who taught me an enormous amount about maintaining a vision of an alternative society, even as the absolute worst that can be handed out by the administrators of your state is being handed out to you and the people around you. And other experiences beyond my family one…

I must have grown up in an atmosphere very open to other possibilities, and if I’ve gone further than my parents, as far as my political resistance goes, it’s probably a function also of having that much more in a way of a heritage behind me that let me go that bit further. And being a lesbian. I think being gay definitely puts me outside of the mainstream. And you have nothing you can do about it, but claim your difference.

At the BBC in the 1950s, your father analyzed the news. In the 1990s, the BBC probably wouldn’t hire you. Is that because the BBC has changed? Is it because of your politics? Is it because you’re a lesbian?
Flanders: I don’t know what kind of analysis he did of the news. It always astonishes me that I’m following to such an extent what it was that he did. I wasn’t even aware that he had done analysis of the news.

But you couldn’t imagine yourself doing the same thing? Is that because the BBC has changed or because your politics are too radical or because you identify as a lesbian?
Flanders: I project that it’s because my politics are too radical. I don’t know. I never tried to get a job with the BBC. I know that the BBC believes in sort of “objective” journalism and I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in there existing such a thing as journalism that does not represent the perspective of the people who are editing. And I think the BBC is a classic example of a state agency that gives some space to alternative viewpoints, but is overridingly a pillar of the Establishment.

So I think it would be politics that would exclude me from that.

What’s your feeling about the treatment Vanessa Redgrave receives from the British media, the British Establishment media? And your explanation for it?
Flanders: It’s red-baiting. It’s very simple. The British media are just as good at anti-communism as the U.S. media. I think it’s really as simple as that.

You mentioned your father was physically disabled. Yet he was able to pursue a theatrical and media world career. At least in the States, we don’t see many people with disabilities on the screen. Has there been a limiting of access as compared to the 1950s?
Flanders: I think he was an extraordinary case. He was, when he was in college, hailed as the “next Laurence Olivier.” He was an extraordinary acting talent. And it was his talent that forced the Establishment’s entertainment industry to make a space for him.

He was pulled up the freight entrance in the back of the theatres, many theatres that he went to, because there was no access for people using a wheelchair. He was, you know, dragged in and out of the back of airplanes. Because there was no access for people with disabilities.

The situation has changed to some extent with respect to legislation enforcing access. But I think as far as our society having any perspective of physical variety, of personal and individual difference, physically, politically, racially, sexually—it comes back to the same old thing of a fear of “the other.”

I think that program that has the autistic child is a breakthrough. Because it shows, the U.S. program, a child with a disability performing a useful function, living a rewarding life and confronting his own disabilities and the prejudices of those around him in a way that the general mass culture has yet to do. People with disabilities in the U.S. are the largest single minority in the country. Thinking of that, they’re made invisible in the media.

If Undercurrents ran out of money, what would you do?
Flanders: What if Undercurrents ran out of money, what would I do?

Scream and yell for a long time, because I believe that it’s unforgivable for the constituency that supports independent reporting not to support an institution that’s been around for four-and-a-half years doing the kind of work that Undercurrents has been doing, as an institution.

I would like to continue reporting. I really enjoy the reporting part of the work. I would perhaps take some time off and write. I had an idea that I would like to write a book about being away from Britain for 10 years and going back there and looking at the communities that I’ve been in touch with over this 10-year period, and seeing how they’ve changed. But beyond that, I think I would like to find myself some other position where I could advocate for the value of independent media.

I would like to find some forum where I could bring to the public airwaves, whether it’s the television or radio or even in print, the reservoir of people that we bring to Undercurrents. Because I think that in hearing from people in Guatemala, in Honduras, in South Africa, in Egypt, in Palestine, in Israel, in Turkey, in Southeast Asia, people in this country can feel connected to situations that are presented to them as entirely foreign.

And if I could find a forum like that in the commercial media, I would take it. Because I do believe that the responsibility is to take power and use it effectively, not to shy away from it.

You’re not worried you’d be corrupted by going into the commercial media?
Flanders: Of course, I’m worried. I hope that my friends and colleagues and comrades would keep me honest. My grandfather always said that “it was one’s responsibility to get one shade more radical every year, just to combat the trend to the right that happens as you get older.”

So I hope I can follow in his footsteps.

When you’re not working on your Undercurrents program, how do you spend your time?
Flanders: I go to a lot of movies. I swim. I do reporting. I do a lot of reporting. Travel. I’m a Sagittarian, and what can I say? I do like to travel and I like to hear other people’s stories. Journalism is its own excuse to hear other people’s stories. I spend a lot of time in the East Village. And I enjoy performance art. Anything that gets me a sort of different spin on the arts and living theatre. I also like to go dancing.

Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the 1990s?
Flanders: I’m pretty pessimistic about the 1990s. Maybe we will wrench ourselves out of this downward spiral in time for the next century. And maybe we will emerge from the 1990s in a better position, with a clear idea of who the enemy is, how oppression works and how bigotry and prejudice play a part of that and how people can reclaim their independence, their individual power and individual vision, in a way that helps the collective.

Do you think there’s going to be another war?
Flanders: Yes. I think that this is a decade of wars. And some of them aren’t even defined as such. I think it’s going to be a decade of war within the United States. And it already is. Look at Tompkins Square.
(end of interview)

Next: Ted Gold’s Wisdom lyrics

Columbia University Law School's Ruth Ginsburg-Ross Perot Connection

Besides giving a keynote address in March 2007 before a group that promotes on U.S. campuses opposition to Palestinian national self-determination rights, the Israel On Campus Coalition, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer has also been historically connected to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. A former classmate of the Columbia Law School Dean’s mother, Hazel Schizer, Justice (and former Columbia Law School professor) Bader-Ginsburg hired David Schizer to be her clerk during the 1994-95 court term. And when Columbia Law School needed a tax professor, Bader-Ginsburg recommended that the law school’s appointments committee hire Schizer.

Since July 2004, Schizer has been the Dean of Columbia Law School; and a daughter of Justice Bader-Ginsburg also apparently holds a position on Columbia Law School’s faculty. So don’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court to issue an injunction that blocks Columbia University’s plan to expand deeper into West Harlem, north of W.125th Street, despite the opposition of local community activists--if the legal case against Columbia’s latest land grabbing plan is allowed to reach the Supreme Court.

(In 1993, coincidentally, I wrote the following item about Justice Bader-Ginsburg’s historical links to Billionaire Ross Perot, which first appeared in the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.)

Anti-pot prohibitionist Ross Perot lost the 1992 presidential election. But the billionaire “populist” may soon have a special friend sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court bench for life. As the New York Times (6/16/93) noted on its back pages, the husband of former Columbia University Law School Professor Ruth Ginsburg—Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson corporate lawyer Martin Ginsburg—is “an expert on tax law who has been Ross Perot’s tax lawyer for years” and “was an economic adviser in Perot’s presidential campaign.”

In addition to representing the special interests of former Nixon Foundation Trustee Perot in recent years—at the same time his wife was sitting on a U.S. Circuit Judge or U.S. Court of Appeals bench—the husband of Clinton’s Supreme Court nominee also represented the special foreign interests of Switzerland’s Credit Suisse bank, as a registered foreign agent No. 3199, during the 1980s. The parent company of Credit Suisse—CS Holding—owned, in the early 1990s, 64 percent of the First Boston Corp. (whose executive committee chairman was a member of the New York Times Company corporate board named George Shinn).

Other clients whose special interests have been represented by the Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson corporate law firm with whom Justice Ginsburg’s husband has been associated between 1980 and 1993 are the following: The Embassy of Israel; The Government of Israel; The Israeli Ministry of Defense; Israel Military Industries; Mobil Oil Corp.; Occidental Petroleum; Michigan Tire; A.G. Metallgesellschaft; Grumman Corp.; Schenley Distributors; Virgin Island Rum Industries; Bendix Corp. and the Bank of America.

For many years, the senior partner in Martin Ginsburg’s corporate law firm was neoconservative “Reagan Democrat” Max Kampelman of the Anti-Defamation League [ADL]—which was criticized during the early 1990s for hiring private undercover agents to spy on U.S. citizens who criticize the Israeli government’s foreign policy.

Following her nomination by Clinton for a lifetime seat next to Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court, former Columbia Law School Professor Ginsburg confessed that “I have been aided by my life partner, Martin D. Ginsburg, who has been since our teen-age years, my best friend and biggest booster.” But Judge Ginsburg failed to disclose how much money her husband has received for representing the special interests of Ross Perot or acting as a foreign lobbyist for Credit Suisse, at the same time she was a U.S. Circuit or U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 7