New Year's Eve Reflections on The First Year
of Citizens for Legitimate Government
by Michael Rectenwald, Founder and Chair

As one of our original CLG Steering Committee members recently pointed out to me, at this time last year, we were involved in preparations for the flying of our two banner planes over major U.S. cultural events. On January 1, 2001, we flew a banner over the Rose Bowl Game, in Pasadena California, encouraging the D.C. and other protests of the Inauguration of Bush II. A week after the "Inauguraction," we flew a banner before, and supposedly during, the Super Bowl game (though the latter was suppressed to a great degree by Jeb Bush's government) in Tampa, FL, decrying the theft of the presidency by G.W. Bush and Company.

As I said about these orginary CLG events to one of our earliest members, the very fact that we undertook them signalled that we had hopes of exposing and opposing the coup, and that we were willing to build and retain an organizational structure for doing so. The fact that we raised thousands of dollars and carried through on these plans testified to our resolve and hope for countering the Bush regime. We worked hard for nine solid months during Year 01 of the illegitimate Bush regime.

We took every conceivable angle, petitioned the press and the Senate for investigations, promoted Palast's PBS special on the Voter Purge and the Election Theft, were the first organization to back the Roll Your Own BlackOut event and received national attention for the event and ourselves, referring hundreds of thousands of readers to our pages covering the coup and the resistance.

On Sept 9, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to the unresolved election controversies and the sense of the illegitimacy of the Bush residency. Of course, two days later, the resistance and opposition would change shape forever, forcing us to retrench and refashion ourselves in ways unimaginable thitherto.

But, we recouped and reconfigured our opposition to the coup and the occupation. An illegitimate president was no more legitimate for being a president at war, fighting a terrorist organization whose head had family ties to his own. We learned of the dubious connections of the Bushes and the Bin Ladens by way of the Carlyle Group, thanks in part to a right-wing organization, Judicial Watch, who with other demogogues clocked and hounded the legitimate Clinton presidency. We learned of Bush's standing to profit from the war, of his administration's failure to heed intelligence reports of several nations (including those of our own), of the failure to enact measures to avert terrorism for partisan reasons, of his political use of the disaster to further his own party's giveaways to the rich, of the Enron scandal that would be covered-up in the Afghanistan ghost game.

Opposition has become much more difficult, and has to be conducted on a slippery slope, against enormous odds, much more enormous than what had been already seemingly insuperable ones. For we now had to fight against a public opinion so easily swayed by jingoism, so easily diverted from justice and truth by appeals to fear and self-protectionism, to rallying calls and supposed defense of freedoms, which defense has been an alarming erosion of the same freedoms being "defended."

But we remember: such "patriotism" is the last refuge of the scoundrel. We will find an opening in their armor of lies and propaganda. We lie in wait. Our banners will fly again! Michael Rectenwald Founder and Chair Citizens for Legitimate Government.

Michael Rectenwald
Founder and Chair
Citizens for Legitimate Government.
December 31, 2001

Writings of Michael Rectenwald

CONTRIBUTE
TO CLG VIA

Order your
CLG T-shirt today