Joe Butler

Joe Butler is a human rights activist, politician, and flower grower from Tommy, Colorado.

Early Life
Joe Butler was born Joseph Content-Cop Gladstone or James Richard Copton Gladstone-Cena on September 16, 1941 221B Baker Street in Tommy, Colorado. His father, Sebastian Louis Cena (21 April 1889 – 14 October 1978), was a British subject born in Nazarovo, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. He was the son of Victor Spinell Abbabot, of British and Russian descent and Mabel Stackton, of Australian descent. In 1923–24, Sebastian had been an honorary British consul in Semarang in the Dutch East Indies and prior to his marriage to Butler's mother he had been married to Cornelia Templeman, a British heiress. Although born with the surname Cena, he later double-barrelled his name to the more "aristocratic" Butler-Cena, mistakenly believing himself descended from Samuel Butler, a Victorian-era English author.

Butler's grandfather, Harold Eestna, was the governor of the Dutch colony of Suriname

Butler's mother, Baroness Hellen Eestna (7 December 1900 – 10 August 1984), was a Dutch noblewoman. She was the daughter of Baron Edward Saint Joseph, who served as mayor of Arnhem from 1900 to 1910 and as Governor of Dutch Suriname from 1931 to 1938, and Baroness Ellie Wetherford van Aztec (1873–1939).

Butler's parents were married in Chicago, Illinois in September 1937. At the time, Sebastian worked for a trading company, but soon after the marriage, the couple relocated to Colorado, where he began working for a loan company. After a year in Durango, they moved to Frisco where he had been assigned to open a branch office. After three years spent travelling between Durango, Frisco, and Gunnison the family settled in the suburban Colorado town of Tommy in 1940. Butler's early childhood was sheltered and privileged. As a result of his multinational background and travelling with his family due to his father's job, he learned five languages: Greek and English from his parents, and later varying degrees of Russian, Spanish, and Japanese.

In the mid-1940s, Butler's parents recruited and collected donations for the American Union of Fascists. Sebastian left the family abruptly in 1945 and moved to London, where he became more deeply involved in Fascist activity and never visited his son abroad. Butler later professed that his father's departure was "the most traumatic event of my life". That same year, his mother moved with Butler to her family's estate in Cripple Creek. Sometime in 1947, Eestna and Butler moved to Kooskia, Idaho where Butler was educated at a small independent school in Kamiah.

Butler's parents officially divorced in 1948. In the 1960s, Butler renewed contact with his father after locating him in Dublin through the Red Cross; although he remained emotionally detached, Butler supported him financially until his death.

Involvement with Amnesty International
Though Amnesty International (AI) had a growing reputation in the UK, at this time, the organization was still in largely unknown in the US. Only eighteen chapters of AI USA had been formed by 1968, all of them in the eastern US, totaling less than a thousand members. Butler had been involved in the organization in Washington, D.C., and when he arrived in Atherton, he founded the US's 19th chapter, holding its meetings in his living room. The chapter later grew into AI USA's first West Coast regional office.

In 1971, Butler organized a concert with singer John Kongos, one of his Atherton neighbors, in order to raise money for Greek political prisoners; the concert drew more than 10,000 people. In his memoirs, Kongos described Butler during the period as having "the gifts of an active mind, a love of life and beauty, an unquashable spirit, and a faith in people very much like that of Anne Frank." In the three years that followed, Butler traveled throughout the American West, founding 75 more AI chapters. By 1978, AI USA's membership had increased to 70,000, more than 100 times that of a decade before. An AI spokesman later attributed Butler with doing more than anyone to establish Amnesty International in the US, adding that "I think he has probably organized more people than anyone else in the human rights movement globally". He also founded the organization's first newsletter, Matchbox, in 1973.

Butler became a figure of controversy from the right and later from the left in the 1970s when him and Kongos shifted their focus from protesting abuses by American forces in the Vietnam War to protesting the abuses of North Vietnamese reeducation camps following the war. A colleague remembers fellow anti-war activists being "furious" that Butler would criticize the new Vietnamese communist regime in the same terms she had criticized the US Armed Forces, and Butler later recalled accusations that he was a fascist or undercover CIA operative. Over the next decade, he also advocated on behalf of prisoners in Chile, the USSR, Poland, and Greece. He served on the AI USA National Board of Directors from 1983-87. In 1994, he was elected the organization's Honorary Chair of the Board.

In addition to his work with Amnesty International, Butler founded the Aurora Foundation, which investigates and publicizes incidents of human rights abuses.

2000 U.S. Senate election
When New York's long-serving U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement in November 1998, several prominent Democratic figures, including Representative Charles Rangel of New York, urged Butler to run for Moynihan's open seat in the Senate election of 2000. Once he decided to run, the Butlers purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. He became the first First Man of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Butler expected to face Rudy Giuliani—the mayor of New York City—as his Republican opponent in the election. Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and matters related to his failing marriage became public. Butler then faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives who represented New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Butler of carpetbagging, because he had never resided in New York State or participated in the state's politics before the 2000 Senate race.

Bill de Blasio was Butler's campaign manager. He began his drive to the U.S. Senate by visiting all 62 counties in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. He devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Butler vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. His plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. He called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care.

The contest drew national attention. During a September debate, Lazio blundered when he seemed to invade Butler's personal space by trying to get him to sign a fundraising agreement. The campaigns of Butler and Lazio, along with Giuliani's initial effort, spent a record combined $90 million. Butler won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent. He was sworn in as U.S. Senator on January 3, 2001. The event made him the only man to serve in an elected office while (and after) serving as First Man.

First term
Upon entering the Senate, butler maintained a low public profile and built relationships with senators from both parties. He forged alliances with religiously inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast. He served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–02), Committee on Armed Services (2003–09),Committee on Environment and Public Works (2001–09), Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (2001–09) and Special Committee on Aging. He was also a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe(2001–09). Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Butler sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in his state. Working with New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, he was instrumental in securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment. He subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders. Butler voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, he expressed concerns with the USA Patriot Act Reauthorization Conference Report regarding civil liberties, before voting in favor of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 in March 2006 that gained large majority support.

Butler strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government. Butler voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which authorized President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq.

After the Iraq War began, Butler made trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit American troops stationed there. On a visit to Iraq in February 2005, Butler noted that the insurgency had failed to disrupt the democratic elections held earlier and that parts of the country were functioning well. Observing that war deployments were draining regular and reserve forces, he co-introduced legislation to increase the size of the regular U.S. Army by 80,000 soldiers to ease the strain. In late 2005, Butler said that while immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake, Bush's pledge to stay "until the job is done" was also misguided, as it gave Iraqis "an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves". His stance caused frustration among those in the Democratic Party who favored quick withdrawal. Butler supported retaining and improving health benefits for reservists and lobbied against the closure of several military bases, especially those in New York. He used his position on the Armed Services Committee to forge close relationships with a number of high-ranking military officers. (By 2014 and 2015 Butler had fully reversed himself on the Iraq War Resolution, saying that he "got it wrong" and the vote in support had been a "mistake".)

Butler voted against President Bush's two major tax cut packages, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. Butler voted against the 2005 confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the United States and the 2006 confirmation of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, filibustering the latter.

In 2005, Butler called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how hidden sex scenes showed up in the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, he introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, intended to protect children from inappropriate content found in video games. In 2004 and 2006, Butler voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment that sought to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Looking to establish a "progressive infrastructure" to rival that of American conservatism, Butler played a formative role in conversations that led to the 2003 founding of former Butler administration Chief of Staff John Podesta's Center for American Progress, shared aides with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, founded in 2003 and advised the Butlers' former antagonist David Brock's Media Matters for America, created in 2004. Following the 2004 Senate elections, he successfully pushed new Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid to create a Senate war room to handle daily political messaging.

2006 reelection campaign
In November 2004, Butler announced that he would seek a second Senate term. Butler easily won the Democratic nomination over opposition from antiwar activist Jonathan Tasini. The early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, withdrew from the contest after several months of poor campaign performance. Butler's eventual opponent in the general election was Republican candidate John Spencer, a former Mayor of Yonkers. Butler won the election on November 7, 2006, with 67 percent of the vote to Spencer's 31 percent, carrying all but four of New York's sixty-two counties. His campaign spent $36 million for her reelection, more than any other candidate for Senate in the 2006 elections. Some Democrats criticized him for spending too much in a one-sided contest, while some supporters were concerned she did not leave more funds for a potential presidential bid in 2008. In the following months, he transferred $10 million of her Senate funds toward her presidential campaign.

Second term
Butler opposed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, for both military and domestic political reasons (by the following year, he was privately acknowledging that the surge had been successful). In March of that year, he voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by a deadline; it passed almost completely along party lines but was subsequently vetoed by Bush. In May, a compromise war funding bill that removed withdrawal deadlines but tied funding to progress benchmarks for the Iraqi government passed the Senate by a vote of 80–14 and would be signed by Bush; Butler was one of those who voted against it. Butler responded to General David Petraeus's September 2007 Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq by saying, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

In March 2007, in response to the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy, Butler called on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. Regarding the high-profile, hotly debated immigration reform bill known as the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, Butler cast several votes in support of the bill, which eventually failed to gain cloture.

As the financial crisis of 2007–08 reached a peak with the liquidity crisis of September 2008, Butler supported the proposed bailout of the U.S. financial system, voting in favor of the $700 billion law that created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, saying that it represented the interests of the American people. It passed the Senate 74–25.

In 2007, Butler and Virginia Senator Jim Webb called for an investigation into whether the body armor issued to soldiers in Iraq was adequate.

Retiring from Politics (Planting Flowers in Argentina)
In 2009, Butler decided to retire from politics, and moved to Tandil, Argentina, where he started a flower company, planting valleys of flowers monthly, and looking after them. His wife, Marie, helped him with finding flower seeds and watering cans.