WILPF Baltimore and Tucson Branches Remember Pat Birnie
Pat BirnieAs reported by Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) U.S.:
By Marliese Diaz
Former Chair, Baltimore Branch
May 2020
Baltimore and Arizona lost another extraordinary WILPF member on April 15, 2020, Pat Birnie. Pat turned 90 last September 2.
Through the 1980s and until she moved first to Florida and then to Arizona in 1993, Pat’s activism took her to protest at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Lab located between Baltimore and D.C.
We would get those reports at branch meetings and hear her stories of going to General Electric board meetings and taking on the stockholders about GE’s investments in weapons contracts. She owned some stock in GE and Pat took that issue seriously, as we learned firsthand.
A longer bio will be printed in the next issue of Peace & Freedom. Here is one remembrance of Pat from Felice Cohen-Joppa:
Pat Birnie, Presente! My friend Pat, a longtime and tireless peace and anti-nuclear activist, died on April 15 at age 90. Pat and Betty Schroeder, her friend and partner in crime (literally and figuratively, with both women arrested occasionally at protests, including with other Raging Grannies at a Military Recruiting Center!), moved to Tucson in 1994.
It was with Pat and Betty that Jack and I started monthly peace vigils at Davis Monthan Air Force Base and Raytheon Missile Systems more than 20 years ago, which continue to this day. We did A LOT of organizing and protesting together! Together with others, including Jim and Lucille Burkholder, we spent many months organizing multiple events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Pat, a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was a very kind and caring person. When Jack had surgery after breaking his arm in a bicycle accident, she and Betty came over to deliver a big box of groceries and make sure he was okay. Betty died in 2009, and Pat later moved to Maryland to be near her family, leaving some very big shoes to fill in the Tucson activist community.
For many years, Pat dedicated herself to working for a nuclear-free future, and I am deeply grateful for her vision, for her persistence and for the way she inspired and invited so many people to join her.
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Fermi 2 on the Lake Erie shore in Frenchtown Township, Monroe County, MIPat asked Beyond Nuclear to serve as her proxy at the G.E. annual shareholders meeting held at the Renaissance Center (GM's current HQ) in Detroit a year after Fukushima began. This enabled us to confront CEO Geoffrey Immelt -- at the shareholders' microphone -- about the nuclear catastrophe his reactor design had caused. The meeting took place on April 25th, 2012, the eve of Chernobyl's 26th annual commemoration.
We were joined that day by allies such as Michael Keegan of Don't Waste Michigan and Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes -- to whom Pat had also given shareholder proxy -- as well as Vic Macks of Michigan Stop the Bombs Campaign, in that effort.
Keegan's "cauldron of culpability" speech so rattled Immelt, that the G.E. CEO felt the need to end the meeting by saying "And for the record, we are not liable."
G.E. is not liable for Fukushima, nor for anything that goes wrong with G.E. reactor designs at Fermi, Immelt meant, responding to Keegan's allegation.
See the press release issued on April 26, 2012 (Chernobyl's 26th annual commemoration, the day after the G.E. shareholders meeting) by Beyond Nuclear and Pat Birnie of G.E. Stockholders Alliance, after the confrontation with Immelt.
Also see a backgrounder and press release issued on April 23, 2012, in the days leading up to the G.E. annual shareholders meeting, which focused on the dangerously old Fermi 2 reactor, 35 miles south of Detroit in Monroe County, MI, as well as the proposed new Fermi 3 reactor.
(Fermi's Unit 1 suffered a partial core meltdown on October 5, 1966, as documented in John G. Fuller's iconic 1975 book We Almost Lost Detroit, and a song by Gil Scott Heron of the same title.)
Fermi 2 is a GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, identical in design to the melted down Fukushima reactors, only super-sized: Fermi 2 is nearly as large as Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 and 2 put together.
Fermi 3 would have been a G.E.-Hitachi "Economically Simplified" BWR, but Beyond Nuclear, Don't Waste MI, and others, represented by attorney Terry Lodge of Toledo, OH, have fought it to a standstill. Ground has never been broken -- yet. Ongoing vigilance is required to make sure it never is.