Sam Pillay

“Bushville” — a shantytown of tents — will greet Republican grandees when they turn up for their August convention in New York. America’s poor and homeless families will use Bushville to highlight President George Bush’s attacks on social services. The symbolic protest is only one of dozens planned for the northern summer by a host of United States civilian organisations, to highlight social anger and opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq. And the Democratic Party is due to come in for its share of the blame for America’s 35 million working poor when it meets at its July convention in Boston. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign plans to demonstrate in Boston. In New York, the PPEHRC will live in Bushville for five days before the August 30 to September 2 Convention. It will include “reality bus tours” from the shantytown tents to poverty-ridden areas of New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey. PPEHRC members and supporters will then march on August 30 from United Nations Headquarters to the Madison Square Garden convention venue to highlight their plight against a backdrop of a traditionally lavish Republican jamboree. The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) <http://www.cesr.org> is the convenor. The “Bushville” location remains a secret. A spokeswoman, Cheri Honkala, told Reuters on February 19, “We will be marching because both Democrats and Republicans alike have failed to address our real life and death issues”. Honkala, a formerly homeless mother in Minneapolis, Minnesota, said the political establishment neglected poor and homeless people and issues such as health care, housing and farm workers’ rights. The United For Peace and Justice (UPJ) group will lead off the northern summer protests with anti-war rallies on March 20 in New York and around the US. “The world still says `No’ to war” is the UPJ slogan to mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. A September Eleventh Families For Peaceful Tomorrows group will focus on grieving military families in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who lost loved ones in the Twin Towers inferno on 9/11.

From Green Left Weekly, March 10, 2004.
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