Bizarro Smear Campaign: Candidate Gregg Weiss Accused of Scientology, Anarchy in West Palm Beach Commission Race (PHOTO)

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Anita Mitchell" anitatmg@gmail.com
Date: February 22, 2013, 12:33:01 AM EST
To: "anita mitchell" anitatmg@gmail.com
Subject: Social Ecology WPB Commission Candidate's Degree. Please read on.

We need to keep Shanon Materio on the City Commission. Please vote March 12th and ask your friends to join you. The information below speaks for itself. We don't need this kind of philosophy governing our City. Thanks for taking the time to read the information. Please share this with your friends so that our voters are informed. Be sure to make your voice count on March 12th and cast your vote for Shanon!!! Thanks so much. Anita

PS.
In addition to the information below I have just learned that Mr. Weiss is a "Scientology Minister." A picture is a thousand words. Please continue to read the information below this picture.

Here is Gregg Weiss in a "Scientology Volunteer Minister" T-shirt.

Gregg Weiss claims to have received a degree in Social Ecology from University of California-Irvine. Having never heard of Social Ecology, we researched and this is some of what we found. Most, if not all of it, is rather disturbing.

Overview
So you're a budding anarchist who wants a college degree, a violent "Earth Liberation Front" extremist craving the legitimacy that a Master's degree would bring, or maybe just a good old-fashioned socialist with horizons that need broadening. Where can you turn? The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), self-described as "both an educational and an
activist organization," is waiting for you.

What They Say

• We must free ourselves of 'internalized capitalism': the belief that capitalism is 'natural,' inevitable, unstoppable.

• We offer our perspectives as social anarchists in hopes of radicalizing the content of this conversation.

• I (Murray Bookchin) broke with the Communists, because of their Popular Front line - I was on the extreme Left.

• Rethinking Nonviolence: Arguing for the Legitimacy of Armed Struggle

• It is crucial that the debate continue to push beyond the limits of what can be documented scientifically.

Click here: Institute for Social Ecology Background, Funding, and Controversies

Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 - July 30, 2006) was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

In the essay "What is Social Ecology?" Bookchin summarizes the meaning of social ecology as follows:

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it.

To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today--apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

Libertarian municipalism

Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way: "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality -- the city, town, and village -- where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy." In 1980 Bookchin used the term "libertarian municipalism", to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities. Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers--the municipal confederations and the nation-state--cannot coexist. Its supporters--Communalists--believe it to be the means to achieve a rational society, and its structure becomes the organization of society.

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