Salt City Sinner

A quick update on Tim DeChristopher's incarceration situation - as I wrote yesterday , Tim had been moved to the Special Housing Unit at FCI Herlong for an e-mail he sent. This morning at 8 AM MST, Dylan Rose Schneider from Peaceful Uprising received a call from Tim: THANK YOU for all of your support and work on this - I received a call from Tim this morning at 8 am letting me know that he was transferred back to the minimum security camp late yesterday due to the thousands of calls that were received. There's a blog post with further details from PeaceUP   here  . It would appear that if you piss enough people off by running roughshod over the civil liberties of a sort of folk hero, those pissed off people can get results!

Most (if not all) prisons have a "Special Housing Unit" (SHU). Previously known as "the Hole," or, in cases where occupancy is one, by the good old standby " solitary confinement ." The use of SHUs is controversial, with many organizations claiming (and research backs them up ) that it constitutes psychological torture. You may remember climate activist and political prisoner Tim DeChristopher. I certainly do. I've written about Tim before ( here  ,   here  and   here ), but a quick recap may be in order. In 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an oil and gas lease auction held in the hideous, radioactive sunset years of the Bush Administration, when public lands were being ruthlessly auctioned off in an extremely legally questionable last-minute fire sale. DeChristopher "posed" as Bidder 70 (actually, he was mistaken for a bidder by staff and just went along with it), and purchased 14 parcels of land for a cool $1.8 million, w...

Images and Video courtesy of Salt City Sinner - feel free to redistribute with permission (I'm nice - just ask!) #OccupySLC commenced day before yesterday at 10:00 AM (-ish) with a rally at the Capitol Building, followed by a march to Pioneer Park: Folks started to set up camp. The weather was miserable (cold, rain, wind) but nobody seemed too put off by it. As of my last check-in #OccupySLC is operating on 24-hour camping permits fully approved by the police. The SLPD has been civil, helpful, and generally very cool A small contingent of crusties (click for more info) set up "camp" as well. For a movement that warranted a post from Andrew Sullivan denigrating the anti-cap and anarchist kid contingent, there weren't a lot of crusties (and no Situationists) present. Of everyone I spoke to, the punks seemed the most cynical and least optimistic about the goings-on, but they were there to make their voices heard even ...

#OccupySLC will be officially starting tomorrow in solidarity with #OccupyWallStreet. The main hub website is here . Twitter feed is here . Facebook group is here . The final planning meeting is tonight starting at 8 PM at the amphitheater at the Downtown City Library. Things will kick off tomorrow at 10 AM at the State Capitol, with proceedings headed for Pioneer Park. I'll be live tweeting ( here ) and putting up pictures and videos from the event as it progresses. Not doing anything tomorrow? The forecast calls for hideous weather, so come join us in the great out-of-doors!

The Salt Lake Tribune's editorial, " A sad day ," nails it: DeChristopher was not prosecuted because he caused harm to the government, to energy developers or to taxpayers, but because he was widely praised for his bold effort to draw attention to a crisis that has been largely ignored by our government. The lease auction that put some precious public lands on the block to be sold for development of fossil fuel energy was later deemed by courts and the federal government to have been illegal. In simple terms, DeChristopher was right. And, by his own admission, Benson punished him for pointing out something that conservatives do not want to hear: Human-caused climate change and government negligence in addressing its consequences are threatening the globe. Following the sentencing, the judge acknowledged that DeChristopher’s act of civil disobedience — for that’s precisely what it was — was “not that bad” and should not have prompted a prison term, and possibly no prosecut...

Today's the day - Tim DeChristopher's sentencing will take place here in Salt Lake City, at the federal courthouse. A variety of peaceful solidarity actions are going to be going on - I'll be trying to update as the situation develops. I hope to see you there!

Veteran climate activist Bill McKibbon, the man behind 350.org, among other things, has sounded off about local monkeywrencher Tim DeChristopher. As Peaceful Uprising * put it: Friend and ally Bill McKibben wrote a piece on our friend and co-founder Tim DeChristopher. He also wrote the first novel for a general audience on global warming, and founded 350.org, which staged the most widespread day of political action in history. It's an excellent read. A choice bit: It’s easy to tell [that the government's goal is to stifle civil disobedience], because of the charges the feds decided to bring. DeChristopher’s crime was disrupting a BLM auction of oil and gas leases. It was—by absolutely every account—a political act, part of the long tradition of civil disobedience in this country that stretches back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes. But that’s not what the federal government went after DeChristopher for. ...

Tonight (7/13/11) Peaceful Uprising will be hosting a music/performance event at their paint-stained, much-beloved warehouse - the "Goathead Preserve" - at 1361 S. Main. The line-up looks pretty snazzy, and includes my little sis Flora, who is a god-damned amazing singer/songwriter. $5, doors at six.