Friday, November 30, 2007

1.) From leading hippie to businessman extraordinaire. And yet, not so vast.

[Jerry] Rubin began to demonstrate on behalf of various left-wing causes after dropping out of Berkeley. ... Rubin organized the VDC (Vietnam Day Committee), led some of the first protests against the war in Vietnam, and was a cofounder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) with Abbie Hoffman, and Pigasus, the pig who would be president. He played an instrumental role in the disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Along with seven others (Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, John Froines, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, and Tom Hayden; Bobby Seale was part of the original group, but his case wound up being tried separately), Rubin was put on trial for conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot.

Julius Hoffman was the presiding judge. The defendants were commonly referred to as the "Chicago Seven" (after Seale's exclusion). The defendants turned the courtroom into a circus and although five of the seven remaining defendants were found guilty of inciting a riot, the convictions were later overturned on appeal.


-- now and then --

After the Vietnam War ended, Rubin became politically more moderate and became an entrepreneur and businessman. He was an early investor in Apple Computer.

In the 1980s he embarked on a debating tour with Abbie Hoffman entitled "Yippie versus Yuppie." Rubin's pitch in the debates was that activism was hard work, that abuse of drugs, sex and private property had made the counter-culture "a scary society in itself," and that "wealth creation is the real American revolution—what we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rubin

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2.) In November 1986 Hoffman was arrested along with fourteen others, including Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The charges stemmed from a protest against the Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment on the UMass campus. Since the university's policy limited campus recruitment to law-abiding organizations, Hoffman asserted in his defense the CIA's lawbreaking activities.

In three days of testimony, more than a dozen defense witnesses, including Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey Clark, and former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, described the CIA's role in more than two decades of covert, illegal and often violent activities. In his closing argument, Hoffman, acting as his own attorney, placed his actions within the best tradition of American civil disobedience.

On April 15, 1987, the jury found Hoffman and the other defendants not guilty.


from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman#Back_to_visibility

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3.) Oddly (or not) there is an updated and online version of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book called Steal This Wiki:
http://www.stealthiswiki.org/





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