CURTIS 2014

The Canary Effect

dc_us — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:02:37 +0000

The grim legacy of America’s treatment of its native peoples is explored in detail in this documentary. Filmmakers Robin Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman take the perspective that if one is to define “genocide” as the a deliberate effort by a government to exterminate a people, then the United States is clearly guilty of the crime given their actions against America’s indigenous population over the past 300 years. Davey and Thunder Woman back up their argument with footage detailing the economic marginalization of American Indians, the consistent violation of legal agreements reached with native tribes, the mismanagement and consistent neglect of Indian reservations, the brutalization of Native Americans as they were segregated onto flinty soil and forced to live under substandard conditions, and the refusal of the mass media to report stories of suicide and Columbine-style school shootings among reservation youth. The Canary Effect was screened in competition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

Fax to Eric Holder RE: Bradley Manning (Rev 1)

dc_us — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:16:37 +0000

Asher Platts to serve as campaign manager.

dc_us — Tue, 14 May 2013 23:10:55 +0000

Asher Platts

joins David Curtis for Sec. of State on a 3 wk trial basis as the campaign manager in June/July 2013.

bio:

“Asher Platts was born in York, PA, where his parents lived in the renovated second story of a barn.

His family moved to Portland, ME when Asher was just one year old.

Growing up in Portland, Asher enjoyed riding his bike all through Portland’s many neighborhoods. He was enrolled with the Cub Scouts, and eventually got his Eagle Scout while living in Texas.

He moved around a lot growing up, and saw a lot of the State of Maine, as well as the United States of America.

He has traveled the Allegash Waterway and has a deep love of the outdoors. He grew up taking it for granted that every child has a right to swim in waterways without worries of being poisoned by the byproducts of industry. While living in Cleveland, Asher saw that rivers and streams had signs posted that banned people from swimming in them, due to the high concentrations of industrial pollution. He later learned while taking a course on Environmental Law, that Ohio has one of the weakest State Environmental Protection Agencies in the USA.

While this bolstered his pride in being a Mainer, it also caused him to be far more appreciative of the protections that the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, and the Land Use Regulatory Committee provide to the people of Maine.

Having lived in both Cleveland, OH and Glenburn, ME, Asher has experienced firsthand both rural poverty and urban poverty, and understands the connections between economic and environmental justice.

Living in a suburb of Dallas, TX and attending school with the sons and daughters of CEOs of major corporations during his high school years, he also grew up with firsthand experience with the flipside of that coin as well. While living in an affluent community, he experienced his affluent friends and neighbors dying of drug overdoses, and committing suicide. Meanwhile, other friends of his struggled to make ends meet, and lived in tiny apartments which can only be described as servants quarters in gated communities, where their parents worked cutting the lawns of the absurdly wealthy. While some were drowning in wealth, they were not happy, and turned to drug use and suicide. Meanwhile others were barely able to keep a roof over their head. This suburb was very much a microcosm of America. Our entire economic system is unjust, it’s not making even the most successful of us happy, and needs to be radically reformed.

Thanks in large part to his mother being a community activist, Asher was active himself from an early age. While a toddler, he was at community meetings in which storm drains were spraypainted with “no dumping signs” and even helped spraypaint a few himself.

While living in Glenburn, a small rural community outside of Bangor, members of his community and he rallied to save their public school from financial collapse. What was discovered was cheating in the budget on the part of town council. One community activist simply dug through the town’s record’s and found discrepancies in the town’s budget, and then presented a graph to the town hall meeting, much to the dismay of the sitting members of the town hall, who were siphoning taxpayer funds from public resources and placing them in a secret , off-budget slush fund.

Those on town council who didn’t resign were handily defeated in the next election. The power that one intelligent and passionate individual can have, very much stuck with Asher.

Asher has worked in a long series of dead-end jobs, under abusive management, and knows what it is to be working and poor. His experience in the workforce coupled with his intolerance for the injustice that capitalism inevitably brings, is a strong motivator in all things he does.

Asher Platts started a non-partisan, “all-purpose” activism group in 2002, called “University Student Activists (U.S.A.).”

His successes in organizing led to a full scholarship and training with the League of Young Voters (then the League of Pissed Off Voters) at their first annual meeting in 2004 in Columbus, OH.

He worked for EnviroCitizen as a campus fellow (2004) where he organized his campus to get out the vote, and created voter guides for local elections.

He has served as an intern on Dennis Kucinich’s campaign for president,in 2007, working in the campaign headquarters in Cleveland, directly under the supervision of the campaign manager, where he co-coordinated the student outreach program and led canvassing teams in New Hampshire.

It was on the Dennis Kucinich for President Campaign that he met political vlogger Dennis Trainor Jr, who inspired Asher to create the YouTuber persona “The Punk Patriot.”

Asher went on to do social media consulting for Green Party Candidates Cindy Sheehan for Congress 2008, and Rev Billy for Mayor of NYC in 2009, where he came in contact with GreenChange.org’s Marnie Glickman of the Green Party of California.

Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Asher Platts organized an online campaign to Revoke BP’s Corporate Charter, and Green Change and Public Citizen eventually joined the effort, which is still ongoing.

Asher and Dennis Trainor Jr collaborated on many failed attempts to spark people’s imagination against Wall Street criminals. During the planning stages for the occupation of DC at Freedom Plaza, (an effort predating Occupy Wall Street, but with none of the same success), Dennis Trainor decided to make a documentary film about this protest. After the call to Occupy Wall Street went out, and Occupy Wall Street solidarity camps exploded across the country, the documentary’s scope and focus broadened greatly to encompass the Occupy movement. Dennis Trainor Jr hired Asher Platts to work as a cameraman and assistant producer on that documentary, (which is due to be released on June 1st). In his time working on that film, Asher spent three months occupying in both Washington, DC and in New York City, and now that he is back in Maine running for office, remains active in the movement, organizing with Occupy Maine and Occupy USM.

He currently serves on the Maine Green Independent Party’s Steering Committee.”

Green Wake #1 (Rev 4)

dc_us — Sat, 11 May 2013 05:34:19 +0000

Concert: The Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood, CA

July 11th, 6:20pm -9pm

$22 at the door, $15 (students and seniors).

Or donate online at:
https://davidcurtis.nationbuilder.com/green_wake_1_donate

(it’s better if you donate online that way we can pay the bands faster)

6:20 pm Speakers: Laura Wells and David Curtis

Special Guest: The PunkPatriot

Performances by:

6:35 pm Marlon Storm
7:00 pm Nellie Bly http://www.breech.net/

7:30 pm Dan Murphy http://youtu.be/TBsjLXcLYas

8:00 pm Eliza Rickman http://www.elizarickman.com/
8:30 pm Tone Def Sirens (Yellow Thunder Woman of the Bastard Fairies) http://youtu.be/oPoHs0GVIf8

(415) 233-4721

Ann Garrison to serve as communications liaison for Curtis (Rev 1)

dc_us — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:08:27 +0000

Ann Garrison has agreed to serve as a communications liaison to the Curtis for Secretary of State campaign. She begins work in July, 2013.

Ann’s Bio:

“I wrote a teen column for the Bremerton Sun, now the Kitsap Sun, in Bremerton, Washington, at age 13, and I’ve been a writer, of various sorts, ever since.

Since 2006 I have focused on writing about energy, indigenous, and social justice issues for the San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper, with recent focus on war and resource extraction on the African Continent. My work has also appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Focus, Macworld, Macweek, the Op-Ed News, Global Research, Pambazuka News, Colored Opinions, the Ghana Business Times, and a City Lights Press anthology, “Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture.”

My Examiner.com energy reports have been posted to USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Sacramento Bee, Egypt Daily, the Karachi Times, and many oil and gas industry publications and TOPIX websites.

I have been interviewed and/or have broadcast editorials on NBC News, KTVU Channel 2 San Francisco Bay Area, KQED Radio 89.5FM, KPFA Radio-Berkeley 94.1FM, KMEC Radio-Mendocino 105.1FM, Pirate Cat Radio-San Francisco, 89.7LPFM, and Earthcycles.net, and I sometimes co-host on Tuesdays, on KMEC 105.1FM.”

David Curtis testifies to the Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting (Rev 3)

dc_us — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:31:52 +0000

“I am David Curtis, of Marin County, California. I am with the Green Party. I oppose this measure which would require a specified number of votes, as it attempts to apply a performance criteria, an imposition of corporate mentality on a public process. This bill would prohibit write-ins. Prohibitionist devices historically fail under their own ill-conception. The write-in option acts as a fail-safe. Fail-safes are necessary when a system is so corrupted and polluted that the only recourse left is the fail-safe.”

“I would like to reserve time for addressing the other measure later”

(Later)

“The Green Party of California unconditionally opposes ACA9. The 2010 passage of Proposition 14 led to the fewest number of candidates on the ballot in 2012 from California’s smaller parties than at any time since 1966, when only the Democrats and Republicans were on the ballot. The resultant lack of diversity from Proposition 14 robs voters of political choice and ignores important perspectives.

ACA9 would make that worse, by eliminating one of the only routes to the general election ballot still available to five of California’s ballot qualified parties.

The argument that ACA9 is justified because it would carry-forward a prior 1% write-in primary threshold and therefore ACA9 would have “limited impact” is false. The past 1% threshold was discriminatory against California’s smaller parties whose membership was not large enough to practically reach the write-in requirement, and should have been modified to be a percentage of the registered party members in the electoral district in which a candidate was running.

But at that time, these same parties still had guaranteed general election ballot via the primary election ballot, which it utilized 99% of the time. Now that Proposition 14 has effectively taken that away, the only route to the ballot is via the write-in option in place today. That means the practical effect of ACA9 is to suffocate the remaining gasps of diverse political voice in the state.

In your hearing materials, it states that the six candidates who made the 2012 general election ballot via the write-in route received 13% to 36% of the general election ballot. Does this mean that 13% to 36% of the voters don’t matter? In most OECD countries with which the U.S. is compared, 13% to 36% of the vote would mean 13% to 36% of the seats in parliament. Here it doesn’t mean any seats. Should it also mean no voice?

Rather than further restricting voter choice, the GPCA is on record that Proposition 14 should be amended to restore write-in votes in general elections, a right we’d had pre-statehood, since the founding of the California Republic.

Putting ACA9 on the ballot instead would give impression that Proposition 14 works, and only needs tinkering to further minimize political voice and give the impression that the false general majorities rendered by Proposition 14 are valid.

The Green Party believes Proposition 14 has already proved to be the failure that many predicted….

(Chairman Fong interrupts and asks that the speaker close)

For these and other obvious reasons, the Green Party of California unconditionally opposes ACA9 and urges you to oppose this ill-conceived deform of our electoral system.” 1.

-David Curtis, 5/7/2013

1. Excerpts from the official GPCA letter of opposition, Alex Shantz and Sanda Everette co-signers

Oakland Green Party meets David Curtis

dc_us — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:04:34 +0000

Oakland Green Party meets David Curtis

Cynthia McKinney, Ann Garrison, David Curtis

dc_us — Sun, 05 May 2013 19:54:48 +0000

Ann Garrison and David Curtis question Cynthia McKinney in Santa Rosa, CA

Letter from Michael McCue

dc_us — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:52:23 +0000

Michael McCue

I have officially resigned as the Green Party’s “Cheerleader-in-Chief” and will no longer respond to any request from any Green or Green candidate until Greens, such as yourself, demand that the Green Party of California respond to MAPA’s very public charges made against Michael Feinstein, Jack Lindblad and Sasha Karlik regarding the “racially-motivated political revenge” that was behind the unfair arrest and repulsive, 2-year long, disgraceful, and fruitless persecution of MAPA (then) president, Nativo Lopez.

The Green Party has had their heads in the sand for far too long re: the malfeasance of MF and his centralized power crew and until Greens and Green candidates, who purport/dare to represent our Key Values, actually pull their ostrich heads out of the sand and DO something about this deplorable and very specific problem, that has already driven hundreds of our best Green volunteers away, and is currently driving our Green Party over the cliff in California, heading us towards certain and complete loss of ballot status for our party in the state of California (which is imminent, thanks to the MF cabal…)…then I refuse to lift one finger to help any Green until this problem is finally settled, which, unfortunately, includes your request.

I am through helping Greens until they prove to me that they truly will support, protect and defend our 10 Key Values, which they have certainly not been doing.

The continuing and ongoing disgrace of hypocrisy represented by the corrupt MF private millionaires’ club is an anathema to our values, and is murdering our party in California.

I’m through with it, until I see Greens DO something about that motherfucker, which is, I guess, what his initials stand for. You may quote me.

Sorry to unload on you, David, but this is deadly serious, and if you don’t believe me, ask any one of the hundreds of Greens who left our party because of our shameful hypocrisy, which I will no longer support or even tolerate.

Even the thought of getting involved in any more Green campaigns sickens me, knowing what I know about the 1%’ers who are running our party into the ground and covering up their centralized base that is wrecking our chances for a strong Green Party that believes in the 10 Key Values.

Sorry you got caught in the crossfire on this one, David, and I wish you well, but I will not help any Green until this issue is resolved satisfactorily (which it won’t be…because we’ll lose our ballot status long before the ostrich Greens do anything about it).

Los Angeles County is the worst county for Greens in the nation and the most corrupt and hypocritical of any political party membership…including the Republicans, and that makes me ill.

This is not personal at all. It is political. If you want my support, my help, my fundraising skills, etc…then go do something about MF. Until then, please don’t ask, because I will merely repeat this message over and over.

Thank you for understanding.
Today
5:52am

David Curtis

Thank you Michael, I do understand. And please know that I am actively working to correct the situation(s).
8:25am

David Curtis

“Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Mike Feinstein has GOT TO GO”

Zuckerberg for Fuhrer 2016

dc_us — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:28:45 +0000

Zuckerberg for Fuhrer 2016