On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 09:15:48 -0700 "R" <rhisiart at charter.net> writes:
> interesting woman
Charlotte Kates is a friend of Lou Godena and Adolfo Olaechea, indeed, she has been associated with Godena since her mid teens. BTW she was a member of the Scientologists for a short spell, which she describes on her web site: http://www.offlines.org/
>
> R
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Michael Pugliese
> To: lbo-talk
> Sent: Friday, July 18, 2003 7:00 AM
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Law Student With a History of Taking Left Turns
>
>
> <URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/18/nyregion/18PROF.html>
> July 18, 2003
> Law Student With a History of Taking Left Turns
> By CHRIS HEDGES
>
>
>
> NEWARK
> WHEN Charlotte L. Kates was in elementary school, she devoured a
> series of
> books on foreign countries. One nation, however, captured her
> imagination.
> She was in the family car on her way to a children's arts festival
> in
> Philadelphia, when, she said, the utopian vision of a communist
> society in
> the Soviet Union leapt off the pages and inspired her to be a
> revolutionary.
>
> She never looked back. As a law student at Rutgers University, and
> one of
> the leaders of New Jersey Solidarity, a pro-Palestinian student
> group, Ms.
> Kates has reserved space at Rutgers this October for the Third North
> American Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement.
> The
> gathering will draw hundreds of student activists from the United
> States
> and Canada, and they will converge on the New Brunswick campus, she
> said,
> to "organize against the Israeli occupation of Palestine."
>
> The forum has attracted the attention of state politicians,
> including Gov.
> James E. McGreevey and John O. Bennett, the Republican leader in the
> State
> Senate.
>
> Mr. Bennett sent a letter to the governor asking him to "prevent our
> prestigious and world-renowned university from hosting this
> abominable
> conference."
>
> The governor met with the Rutgers president, Richard L. McCormick,
> yesterday to discuss the conference, among other things. According
> to the
> governor's office, Mr. McGreevey left the meeting supporting Dr.
> McCormick's decision to let the conference take place.
>
> Ms. Kates also stirred up the campus in March when her organization
> reserved banner space for two weeks at the Douglass College Center.
> The
> banner read: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free."
>
> "It was a call for all land between the Jordanian River and the
> Mediterranean to be returned to the Palestinians," she said.
>
> Such a call also meant Israel would be wiped off the map. The Israel
> Action
> Committee of Rutgers organized a sit-in at the center demanding that
> the
> banner be removed. It was not.
>
> New Jersey Solidarity takes a hard line in its support of the
> Palestinians.
> Ms. Kates will not, for instance, condemn suicide bombings, saying
> "it is
> not our place in the United States to dictate the tactics
> Palestinian
> groups use in the liberation struggle."
>
> Seated in a small coffee shop near the Rutgers Law School on Monday,
> Ms.
> Kates, 23, recalled the book she was reading on that car trip to
> Philadelphia years ago. "The book quoted the 1917 revolutionary
> slogan:
> peace, land, bread and freedom," she said. "This idea hit me. I had
> to find
> out more about socialism."
>
>
> SHE began to read Lenin and Marx. She looked up the American
> Communist
> Party's local chapter in New Jersey, where she grew up. She rode her
> bike
> on Sunday afternoons to local party meetings. By age 13, she said,
> she had
> joined the party, paying monthly dues of 50 cents.
>
> "It is a workers party, so dues are paid on a sliding scale," she
> said. "I
> kept it from my parents. A year later, a clerk at the supermarket
> mentioned
> to my mother that she had seen me handing out copies of the
> communist
> newspaper the People's Weekly World at the Collingswood train
> station. The
> clerk wanted to know if my mother was also a communist."
>
> Her parents, although not pleased, allowed her to continue. Activism
> does
> not run in her family, but she is quick to add that "my parents are
> working
> class." Her brother, Benjamin Kates III, 16 years her senior, is a
> United
> States marshal in Texas. Her father, Benjamin Kates Jr., now
> retired, drove
> heavy equipment. Her mother, Carol, is a service representative in a
> bank.
>
> Her decision to "side with the oppressed, liberation movements and
> the
> working class" is one that has led her to butt heads repeatedly with
> authority. In the seventh grade, she agitated to loosen the dress
> code at
> her school and reduce the lunch fees. "It was called the `lunch
> costs too
> much campaign,' " she said.
>
> Later, she used a board, reserved for honors students to note
> important
> moments in history, to mark anniversaries like the protest on March
> 6,
> 1930, when a million Americans across the country marched for
> unemployment
> insurance.
>
> As an undergraduate at Rutgers in 2000, she helped organize a
> "people's
> convention" to run a radical slate for City Council in New
> Brunswick. The
> slate, which had three candidates, received 28 percent of the vote.
>
> Her small dorm room at Rutgers, which she shares with three other
> first-
> year law students, is decorated with the requisite picture of Che
> Guevara,
> a hero of the Cuban revolution, along with a poster of Nabil
> Salameh, a
> slain radical Palestinian leader.
>
> A poster on the wall reads: "Long Live the Proletarian Feminism of
> the
> Heroic Red Women Fighters of Peru." Without a moment's hesitation,
> she said
> her favorite book is "The State and Revolution" by Lenin.
>
> She has a weakness for Dr. Pepper. There was a case on her floor.
> And she
> makes room on her wall for prints by the artist Gustav Klimt.
>
> The day after being featured in an article in The New York Post this
> month
> with the headline "Rutgers gets `F' For Putting Anti-Semitism 101 on
> the
> Schedule," she lost her summer job as a customer service
> representative for
> an electronics company in Teaneck.
>
> "They told me it was because they were doing financial
> restructuring," she
> said, her signature red kaffiyeh draped around her shoulders, "but I
> have
> my doubts."
>
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy |
> Search
> | Corrections | Help | Back to Top -- Michael Pugliese
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!