U.S. out of my living room: The case of Leslie James Pickering, the Earth Liberation Front Press Office, & Burning Books

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Submitted by T. Forsyth on Tue, 2014-11-11 11:41

On Tuesday, October 21, 2014, Leslie James Pickering from Buffalo, NY came to the Flying Squirrel Community Space to present on the FBI's intrusion into his personal life and business--Burning Books--since returning to Western New York. The event titled "U.S. out of my living room: The case of Leslie James Pickering, the Earth Liberation Front Press Office, & Burning Books" was organized by Enough Is Enough for its A People's History of the FBI film and discussion series. It was also apart of the Flying Squirrel Community Space's stop mass incarceration programming for the month of October.

U.S. out of my living room: The case of Leslie James Pickering

A decade after being under heavy federal surveillance for exercising free speech in support of the underground Earth Liberation Front, Leslie James Pickering discovered that his associates were being questioned by the FBI, the US Post Office is copying his incoming mail and he was put on a secret list for maximum security screening at airports. Not only that but a federal grand jury subpoena was issued for records on him, his family and his bookstore, Burning Books.

Leslie has launched an extensive legal and public campaign to resist this surveillance, which he believes is aimed to repress Burning Books and the surge of activism and awareness that the bookstore generates, as well as harass and intimidate the radical environmental movement. This multimedia presentation will open eyes to methods used by the federal government to repress activists and freedom struggles, and how they can be resisted.

For more information on his case, see: Artvoice (Buffalo's weekly): http://artvoice.com/issues/v12n14/week_in_review/usa_vs_pickering |
Buffalo News (Buffalo's daily): http://www.buffalonews.com/20130501/bookstore_owner_singled_out_for_his_radical_past.html | New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Statement from the Flying Squirrel collective on stop mass incarceration programming:

The Flying Squirrel Community Space joins in the call-out for a month of mobilizing against mass incarceration! We demand an end to mass incarceration, police terror, repression and the criminalization of a generation! Our month of action and education against mass incarceration is a scream against the societal effort to cover up, white out, ignore, neutralize and suppress the reality of the prison industrial complex. The PIC imprisons over 2.2 million people, and monitors another 8 million people through parole, probation, ankle monitoring, general surveillance and other measures of state control. If the prison population in the U.S. were put together in one city, it would be the 4^th largest city in the country.

We REFUSE to live in a society that has no better fate for millions of its people than segregation, harassment, brutalization, incarceration and outright murder at the hands of its enforcers—and we will not rest until this is STOPPED. We refuse to make our peace with this “new Jim Crow” – a social system which targets communities of color, immigrants and the undocumented, disabled people, youth, elders, transgender and queer people, women, the poor, the homeless, and others. This system of correctional control, injustice, and domination is nothing but a slow, structural genocide. We will not tolerate this. WE RESIST!