How this all got started: A movement to drive out an illegitimate regime
High school students, street protests, prominent voices in print and on the streets

In the summer of 2005, people were starting to come out of their 6 month long depression over the outcome of the 2004 election.  It was somewhat of a struggle to get people to stop blaming Bush voters, and grasp and grapple with the depravity of the Bush program, and the fact that two aggressive wars had been launched on the basis of lies.

Some of us already working to end the wars, torture, and in many other causes wrangled with the problem that, “fighting against each outrage and winning on important fronts — from immigrants rights to defending the right to due process, to defending abortion, evolution, against discrimination or to defend critical thinking on campus — is invaluable to making real change in a world that desperately needs it.  But we are fighting each and every one of these battles on losing ground – ground that is rapidly disappearing under our feet.”

The future is unwritten…

A better outcome for the world required a mass movement of people united in acting to drive George Bush, “Dick” Cheney, and their illegitimate regime from office, and repudiating and reversing the program which had become to be identified with them, especially after 9/11/01.  That movement needed to act independently and stop looking for a savior from the Democratic Party.  It needed a spirit, call, and direction, which World Can’t Wait supplied in the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime.

The Call was quickly distributed hand to hand in about a million copies nationwide starting that summer, and published in several full page newspaper ads in The New York Times, many local papers, and USA Today, with 40,000 people ultimately signing it. While it aggravated some, the points outlined in it captured what was coming down from the heights of power in a belligerent way, and moved many to act:

Reading the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime, Los Angeles 2005

YOUR GOVERNMENT, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.

YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing people, and justifying it.

YOUR GOVERNMENT puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.

YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.

YOUR GOVERNMENT suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.

YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.

YOUR GOVERNMENT enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.

Over Labor Day weekend in 2005, as the waters of Katrina were covering New Orleans, 250 people gathered in New York City to found The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime.  Sunsara Taylor and Debra Sweet chaired the discussions.  We took time out to march, with about 150 more joining us, around midtown, demanding, “rescue, not repression!” for New Orleans, which set a basic approach of immediate response to government action – or inaction.

Don’t Go to Work! Walk Out of School!

It was a bold call, and thousands followed it. On Thursday, November 2, 2005, on the year-anniversary of Bush’s re-election, tens of thousands marched around the U.S., inaugurating the effort to drive out Bush and Cheney, and reverse and repudiate the Bush program.  Older people heeded a message from Gore Vidal to:

“join together in a popular movement dedicated to ending pre-emptive wars and restoring the nation to its traditional tax base which repaired levees, educated the citizenry and at regular intervals repaired the wall that Thomas Jefferson wisely put in place to separate church from state.”

Howard Zinn issued a call to students.  High school students at more than 200 schools across the country left school and walked out, sometimes for miles, to join organized political protest in unprecedented ways.  Protests took place in more than 60  cities, and involved at least 40 college campuses, in addition to the high schools. The outpourings of people all over the country had many faces. Local office holders came out and spoke at New York, Chicago and San Francisco rallies with mothers of soldiers who died in Iraq. Prominent public intellectuals and Hollywood celebrities gave their support to this effort to actually drive out the Bush regime.

In San Francisco, Latino day laborers joined with thousands at the Civic Center as Cindy Sheehan, California State Senator Carol Midgden, and others spoke from the stage. Statements of support came from artists and figures such as Jane Fonda, Harold Pinter and Gore Vidal, who signed on to the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime.

Drivers Wanted

NYC January 2006  Photo by Fred Askew

In the dead of winter, as 2006 broke, and Bush gave his State of the Union address, people gathered in 68 cities to “drown out” the lies with street protests – then traveled to Washington, DC to protest in cold rain February 4, 2006, demanding Bush step down. The Bush Crimes Commission held hearings with testimony from people like former Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky and former UK ambassador Craig Murray on the crimes that the Bush regime was actively carrying out. In October of 2006 more than 200 cities across the country held mass protests of thousands. With heart and courage, thousands of us came together to make a powerful and precious political statement against a truly dangerous and repressive government. More on driving out a regime.

Stopping torture as a key expression of
the Bush program
Spreading a culture of resistance through
the Declare It Now: Wear Orange campaign and wearing orange jumpsuits

World Can’t Wait has led the fight against torture, making it something that people nationally and internationally associate with US government policies: the Bush Regime and Obama’s refusal to bring the Bush gang of torturers to justice and his refusal to put an end to torture under his administration. As one sign of this, pictures of our waterboarding demonstrations are almost as well known as Abu Ghraib’s iconic photograph of the black-hooded prisoner on a box with electrical wires dangling from his arms.

Declaring Resistance

Borrowing the orange that prisoners are forced to don while being detained and tortured, World Can’t Wait took the color of orange and made it into a symbol of resistance to torture recognized worldwide both in our actions and in the Declare It Now! campaign that encouraged people to wear orange (e.g., orange ribbons and wristbands.) In 2008, the year that Alex Gibney won the Oscar for Best Documentary for his heartrending expose Taxi to the Dark Side, he and dozens of others such as Best Actress nominee Julie Christie and Director Paul Haggis (who won the Best Director Award in 2006 for Crash) wore orange to show their opposition to what our government is doing. As Haggis put it:

"The orange ribbons were worn in protest against state sanctioned torture. The ribbons are the color of the jumpsuits at Guantanamo Bay, and at our secret detention camps, where prisoners are kept indefinitely, in violation of our constitution, and tortured. This is something that our government has long condemned as the heinous behavior of dictators, but something that unbelievably we now condone ... Every American of any political party should be loudly condemning this grossly un-American activity, but it is barely even mentioned anymore. The orange wristbands some of us wore said simply ‘Torture + Silence = Complicity.’ I received mine from The World Can't Wait campaign."

After years of denying that they were torturing people, the Bush Regime finally came out and openly admitted that they were waterboarding people, a practice that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and that in World War II led directly to criminal prosecution for Americans who used it. While George W. Bush did not invent torture, with its use stretching from slavery to U.S. domestic prison policy, his regime transferred the practice to Guantanamo and then onto Abu Ghraib and beyond. The Bush Regime spent years methodically building the case for claiming that the “war on terror” required extraordinary and extra-legal measures and that anything, including the most egregious ones, were justified in “protecting American lives.” This rationale rests upon the immoral premise that American lives are worth more than anyone else’s and moreover flies in the face of all of the evidence that torture does not even work to prevent terrorist incidents. Indeed, torture has the opposite effect: it fuels anti-state terror and a cycle of violence. Those who carry out torture and other acts of terror know this. It is, in fact, why they use it: they profit from the ongoing cycle of violence because it provokes fear in the populace and allows those who rule to justify all manner of extra-legal actions in the ostensible name of preventing terrorism.

Silence + Torture is Complicity

World Can’t Wait has been uncompromising about the immorality and cynical purposes of torture and is notable for that fact when so many others have conceded implicitly the alleged superior status of Americans over all others. The most infamous torturers such as John Yoo, who testified in Congress that a president could order a young boy’s testicles be crushed in the course of an interrogation, have been the target of World Can’t Wait’s and others’ persistent protests at occasions such as Berkeley Law School’s graduation ceremonies, where orange ribbons have dotted the crowds and graduate’s black robes. John Yoo’s work at the Office of Legal Counsel, popularly designated the “Torture Memos,” provided legal cover for not just torture, but also for war, indefinite incarceration without trial, rendition, and massive spying on American citizens (see more on this at FireJohnYoo.org). Other war criminals identified by World Can’t Wait’s War Criminals Watch project are being sheltered in public institutions, including universities, where activists confront them on a regular basis.

Torture, as Dennis Loo has written, is the very epitome of terror. It is terror inflicted upon one individual but designed to terrorize entire populations, both those abroad and Americans at home, so that people will fear speaking out against the brutal iron-fist of US rule. Terror, whether employed by anti-state terrorists or by state terrorists, makes absolutely no distinctions between combatants and innocents. It does so purposefully: the point is that you are supposed to be fearful that you could be the next capriciously chosen victim of terror and therefore go along with whatever the terrorists (governmental terrorists or allegedly anti-state terrorists) want, regardless of its irrationality or immorality.

The US government’s use of torture reveals volumes about the dramatic shift in the new social compact that the American people have been led to: anything and everything in the name of Empire is all right. If we do it then it’s right, if others do it, then it’s not. “Shut up and go along as we’ll not shrink from even torturing you and killing you.” Torture, in other words, concentrates everything that is so wrong about where things have come to and where they stand today.

Torture is universally wrong—we all know this. The world has a name for those who stood by silently and allowed the atrocities of murder and torture committed by the Nazis in World War II – Good Germans. World Can’t Wait, in the face of the almost total collapse of moral opposition from leading pundits and public officials and their nearly universal acceptance of the immoral premise that Americans matter but nobody else does, has insisted that “Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them,” as our 2010 ad in The New York Times and other leading publications stated, signed by thousands, including prominent intellectuals, actors, and other notables. Rather than caving into expedience or narrow nationalism, World Can’t Wait continues the fight to bring forth an alternative moral authority in the face of the horrid new “normal.” We stand in solidarity with all people of conscience to say NO! to torture in our name—we refuse to live in a torture state.

Standing up for abortion rights
Opposing the culture of bigotry and political repression

When World Can't Wait started, the goal was to Drive Out the Bush Regime and repudiate its whole program: from the illegitimate wars of aggression and open use of torture to domestic spying, suppression of science and much more. The domestic agenda of political repression and a whipped up atmosphere of bigotry and discrimination came hand-in-hand with the war OF terror as the needs of empire dictated. Under the PATRIOT Act, thousands of people have had their phone, computer, or banking records turned over to the government's permanent database, or had their homes searched. Police forces have been increasingly militarized and political protest has often been brutally suppressed. Cruel laws that codify racial profiling and enforce discrimination have been passed.

A key part of this agenda has been from the onset the promotion of a culture of bigotry, and a theocratic approach to governance. The LGBT community and immigrants have been vilified and targeted under the banner of national unity and American Christian (white supremacist) "identity," as women's right to abortion and birth control was and still is first on the chopping block, as Bush demonstrated by re-imposing the “global gag rule” as his first presidential act. Since 2008, this aspect of the Bush program has not continued to be directed from the White House under an ostensibly "pro-choice" president, but the tradition of compromise followed by even worse compromise has continued to be followed by the so-called defenders of women's rights in the Democratic Party.

Since inception World Can't Wait has exposed the right-wing offensive against abortion rights and collaborated with others to organize clinic defense. In 2009 we produced a DVD and YouTube video "Abortion, Morality, and the Liberation of Women" featuring Dr. Susan Wicklund, author of This Common Secret, My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, and Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution Newspaper, which has been distributed in the hundreds to educators, students, and clinics around the country. Working closely with artist Heather Ault, we've brought a bold visual pro-abortion-rights presence to clinics under siege and the steps of power in Washington, DC.

The right to abortion cuts to the very heart of women's social role and most fundamental rights. As seen during the turmoil over healthcare reform within Congress over the past few years, this question is at the core of the most reactionary politics in this country. The ferocity of one's opposition to the right to abortion has become THE most important litmus test within the Republican Party, even as the most prominent abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, was gunned down in his own church in 2009 and clinics and doctors have been violently attacked across the country. Right-wing crowds organized supposedly for greater "personal freedom" as the Tea Party take opposition to abortion rights as a core value - all the while Democratic leaders still preach "common ground" as access to abortion is further and further restricted, and women who get abortions are shamed and stigmatized.

One out of three US women will have at least one abortion at some point in her life. Beyond that, access to birth control is also under fire, further exposing the nature of this anti-women agenda. Relying on politicians who cede the moral high ground along with real access has long proven itself to be a dead-end path. What we need is an outpouring of resistance to this assault on the humanity of women!

World Can't Wait was inspired from the outset by the message and work of Not In Our Name, which published the following Statement of Conscience, signed by thousands, in 2002:

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted by the United States government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do -- we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to RESIST the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral, and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world.

We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11, 2001. We too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage -- even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City, and, a generation ago, Vietnam. We too joined the anguished questioning of millions of Americans who asked why such a thing could happen.

But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of "good vs. evil" that was taken up by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression at home.

In our name, the Bush administration, with near unanimity from Congress, not only attacked Afghanistan but arrogated to itself and its allies the right to rain down military force anywhere and anytime. The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine, where Israeli tanks and bulldozers have left a terrible trail of death and destruction. The government now openly prepares to wage all-out war on Iraq - - a country which has no connection to the horror of September 11. What kind of world will this become if the U.S. government has a blank check to drop commandos, assassins, and bombs wherever it wants?

In our name, within the U.S., the government has created two classes of people: those to whom the basic rights of the U.S. legal system are at least promised, and those who now seem to have no rights at all. The government rounded up over 1,000 immigrants and detained them in secret and indefinitely. Hundreds have been deported and hundreds of others still languish today in prison. This smacks of the infamous concentration camps for Japanese-Americans in World War 2. For the first time in decades, immigration procedures single out certain nationalities for unequal treatment.

In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The President's spokesperson warns people to "watch what they say." Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act -- along with a host of similar measures on the state level -- gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised if at all by secret proceedings before secret courts.

In our name, the executive has steadily usurped the roles and functions of the other branches of government. Military tribunals with lax rules of evidence and no right to appeal to the regular courts are put in place by executive order. Groups are declared "terrorist" at the stroke of a presidential pen.

We must take the highest officers of the land seriously when they talk of a war that will last a generation and when they speak of a new domestic order. We are confronting a new openly imperial policy towards the world and a domestic policy that manufactures and manipulates fear to curtail rights.

There is a deadly trajectory to the events of the past months that must be seen for what it is and resisted. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist.

President Bush has declared: "you're either with us or against us." Here is our answer: We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not give up our right to question. We will not hand over our consciences in return for a hollow promise of safety. We say NOT IN OUR NAME. We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare. We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our solidarity in word and deed.

We who sign this statement call on all Americans to join together to rise to this challenge. We applaud and support the questioning and protest now going on, even as we recognize the need for much, much more to actually stop this juggernaut. We draw inspiration from the Israeli reservists who, at great personal risk, declare "there IS a limit" and refuse to serve in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

We also draw on the many examples of resistance and conscience from the past of the United States: from those who fought slavery with rebellions and the underground railroad, to those who defied the Vietnam war by refusing orders, resisting the draft, and standing in solidarity with resisters.

Let us not allow the watching world today to despair of our silence and our failure to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war and repression and rally others to do everything possible to stop it.

 *  *  *  *

A NEW Statement of Conscience - published January 2005:

In our name, the Bush government justifies the invasion and occupation of Iraq on false pretenses, raining down destruction, horror, and misery, bringing death to more than 100,000 Iraqis. It sends our youth to destroy entire cities for the sake of so-called democratic elections, while intimidating and disenfranchising thousands of African American and other voters at home.

In our name, the Bush government holds in contempt international law and world opinion. It carries out torture and detentions without trial around the world and proposes new assaults on our rights of privacy, speech and assembly at home. It strips the rights of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians in the U.S., denies them legal counsel, stigmatizes and holds them without cause. Thousands have been deported.

We must change the political reality of this country by mobilizing the tens of millions who know in their heads and hearts that the Bush regime’s “reality” is nothing but a nightmare for humanity. This will require creativity, mass actions and individual moments of courage. We must come together whenever we can, and we must act alone whenever we have to.

We draw inspiration from the soldiers who have refused to fight in this immoral war. We applaud the librarians who have refused to turn over lists of our reading, the high school students who have demanded to be taught evolution, those who brought to light torture by the U.S. military, and the massive protests that voiced international opposition to the war on Iraq. We affirm ordinary people undertaking extraordinary acts. We pledge to create community to back courageous acts of resistance. We stand with the people throughout the world who fight every day for the right to create their own future.

It is our responsibility to stop the Bush regime from carrying out this disastrous course. We believe history will judge us sharply should we fail to act decisively.