Solidarity's webzine offers frequent dispatches on the politics, culture, activism and theory of the day. It's interactive blogging for activists who are socialists and socialists who are activists. What are you waiting for? Join in the conversation!
February 7, 2012
by Dan La Botz
Dan La Botz speaking about what the Occupy movement has accomplished, the Democrats and the role of the left at the Open University of the Left on January 28, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois.
February 6, 2012
by Steve Horn
Discontent with the political system as a whole is rising, as seen clearly through the lens of struggles around the world and right here at home, via the ongoing Occupy movement. Numerous figures have speculated and are continuing to speculate as to what the electoral strategy, if any, will be for the Occupy movement, come the 2012 election cycle.
February 5, 2012
by Brooke Beloso
This is a short dispatch from Occupy the Superbowl this weekend in Indianapolis.
Spirits were high at the Super Bowl Hyatt
picket line yesterday, where over 400 of us from Indianapolis,
Detroit, and Chicago rallied with UNITE-HERE in solidarity with Hyatt workers. Workers have been fighting for collective bargaining rights, OSHA compliance, and a living wage with benefits. The $1,000/night room rate for Super Bowl weekend makes blatant the hypocrisy of the Hyatt's refusal to treat workers...
February 2, 2012
by Zhang Kai
The Aggravating Crisis Cannot be Solved
Even with Wen Jiabao's Push for Political Reform
February 2, 2012
Solidarity Political Committee
Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) is not the typical politician. He says what he thinks and lets the chips fall where they may. He’s against the war in Afghanistan and against any U.S. invasion of Iran. He points out that U.S. policy in the Middle East “has only intensified strife and conflict” and “U.S. tax dollars have militarized the entire region.”
Paul was one of the few congresspeople to vote against the PATRIOT Act. He’s also against NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. Paul...
January 20, 2012
by Josep Maria Antentas & Esther Vivas
We will save the markets, not the climate. That is how we can summarize the outcome of the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) which took place in Durban, South Africa between 28 November and 10 December 2011. There is a striking contrast between the rapid response by governments and international institutions at the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007-08 in bailing out private banks with public money and the complete...
January 19, 2012
by Warren Davis
The Labor Working Group (LWG) is one of the most influential components of Occupy Philly. From time to time, there are calls in the Occupy movement for a more explicit and defined "program" or set of demands. The following was submitted to the widely-subscribed LWG e-mail list in response to some recent calls for a program, especially as the LWG discusses its next steps and taking its work to a new level. The author is one of the conveners of the OP LWG.
After hearing the discussion at the last...
January 17, 2012
by Matt
Monday, Martin Luther King Day, saw the ninth annual MLK Day Rally and March in Detroit. Hundreds packed into the historic Central United Methodist Church to celebrate King and reaffirm the movements commitment to social justice.
The theme for this year's rally was "the Struggle for Jobs, Peace and Economic Justice"; a special recognition, along with a standing ovation, was bestowed on Occupy Detroit for their contribution. In addition, SNCC's female freedom fighters were honored. A panel by the...
January 16th, 2012
by Paul Fudder
"Prosecute the Cabal!" With millions of on strike and crowds singing Solidarity Forever, Occupy Nigeria has shut down the most populous country in Africa. Here in New York, the diaspora is rallying in support as well, and on Saturday, Jan. 14, I went to the second rally at the Nigerian Embassy and the UN this week. Though big labor actions might be more common in Nigerian than in the US, folks are saying this one feels different. Maybe it's the wave of protest against neoliberalism around the...
December 18, 2011
by Kathy Kelly
NATO/G8 meetings are scheduled to take place from May 19-21 next year in Chicago. Plans are ramping up everywhere. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen exulted over bringing NATO and the G8 to Chicago, and Clinton promised to call Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and convey Rasmussen's glowing opinion that Chicago, built upon diversity and determination, shares values that underpin NATO. Activists on the ground, envisioning a different kind of Chicago, and...
January 6, 2012
by Esther Vivas
"A woman, desperate to get the best offers in the Wal-Mart sale, discharged pepper-spray at people in order to drive them away from the items she wanted.” This could be a scene from a Pedro Almodovar film had it not been witnessed in real life. On the November 25, 2011 such a story appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
With that in mind, we could suggest that the large shopping centers, especially during sales, place prominent warning signs, parodying the Health Authorities’: "Consuming...
January 3, 2012
by Matt Siegfried
Tommy McKearney was born in 1952 to a family with a long tradition in the Irish republican movement and raised in Moy, County Tyrone in the north of Ireland. When the insurrection against the Orange State and British rule broke out in the early 1970s Tommy, like so many of his generation and background, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Tommy became a leading member of the IRA in his native Tyrone in the 1970s. The McKearney family paid a terrible price in the war; three of Tommy's...
From the Ad Hoc Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revolution in New York City. See original appeal and list of endorsers here.
In recent days, protesters demanding civilian rule in Egypt have again been murdered, maimed and tortured by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Interior Security Forces (ISF).
The conspiracy, being brutally implemented in Egypt, is part of a global conspiracy to suffocate mass movements for socio-economic justice and is being done with direct...
December 24, 2011
by Ryan
As I write this, hundreds of thousands are ready to gift Amazon-bought items to friends and relatives for the holidays. While CEO Jeff Bezos had a part in creating this retail powerhouse, he's no jolly, gift-bestowing Santa. To the workers who move millions of products through the Amazon logistics chain day and night, he's more like the Krampus, pursuing and punishing the "bad children" who fail to meet insanely high production rates with write-ups and layoffs, often in that order.
Dec 21, 2011
A statement from the LGBTQ Caucus of the Coalition Against the NATO / G8 War & Poverty Agenda
Next May, 2012 Chicago will host two huge, international summits as leaders of the NATO military alliance and the "G8," a forum consisting of representatives from eight of the largest industrial economies, will gather here.
The G8 has led the charge for government give-aways to corporations, including banks, and attacks on working people's living standards. G8 members currently include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia. These countries...
December 16, 2011
by Barry Eidlin
With a few days to think through Monday's West Coast Port Shutdown, I would say that the action was successful overall, although not as inspiring as the November 2 action (a high bar, admittedly). I was there in the evening, and the mood was good. I got to hear ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman's message of solidarity, which was heartening, although it still leaves unresolved the issue of how Occupy can and should relate to labor. But that is for another post.
My main concern here has to do...
December 16, 2011
by Mark Naison
Many people in the media complain that Occupy Wall Street has no leaders and no goals. While Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs around the nation have certainly not developed “leaders” who articulate its goals to the media or negotiate with public officials, it has already registered a formidable list of accomplishments for a movement this young.
The evictions of Occupy protesters by law enforcement authorities using helicopters, tear gas, pepper spray, bulldozers and rubber bullets and...
December 4, 2011
Dave Duhalde and Dan La Botz
Below is a debate between David Duhalde of the Democratic Socialists of America and Dan La Botz of Solidarity that was first published on the website Talking Union.
Where is the Beef? An open letter to Dan La Botz on DSA and the Democrats
Dear Dan,
What gives?
As a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I am puzzled and disheartened by your criticisms of our organization in your article “Occupy the Democratic Party? No Way!” This article, first published on New Politics, has gone...
November 23, 2011
by Erin
The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement was railroaded last night in the South Korean National Assembly by the right-wing ruling Grand National Party.
We have already covered the neoliberal, imperialist and anti-working class nature of the FTA. It is really a sweeping structural adjustment program that will challenge labor unions and social movements that have been disoriented for years by key defeats, splits in the labor movement and in left political parties, and the intransigence of the now...
November 20, 2011
Statement by the Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt)
You will pay the price … killers of the revolutionaries!
The revolutionaries have returned to Tahrir Square. Once again it is filled with the young people who are impatient to bring the killers of the revolutionaries in January to justice, and to see the realisation of freedom and social justice. The military courts have stolen years upon years of their lives. They have lost their eyes to sniper fire on the orders of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and their henchmen in the Ministry of...
November 22, 2011
by Dan La Botz
At a moment when Occupy faces severe police repression and cold weather, and as we are both extending our movement to the streets and rethinking our future, various pressures are beginning to build with the objective of taking our movement into the Democratic Party. While our movement so far has remained politically independent and non-partisan, newspaper articles and commentaries suggest that the Occupy movement should give up its "utopian" demands for a different and better society and its...
November 17, 2011
Activists Embedded in #Occupy
Stephanie, New York City 7:35
Is amazing. "don't be afraid." "we are winning." support CWA Verizon workers. Occupy the Earth, and more.
Stephanie, New York City 7:30
Singing "Happy Birthday Occupy" on bridge.
Stephanie, New York City 7:00
The light show projected onto the Verizon building is amazing. "Don't be afraid." "We are winning." Support CWA Verizon workers.
November 16, 2011
by Mazin Qumsiyeh
On November 16, five Palestinians took part in a Freedom Ride in the occupied territories. Boarding a bus in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, the riders stayed on the vehicle as it went through one apartheid checkpoint and were eventually dragged off the bus by police. Modeled on the Freedom Ride tactic used by African American and white activists in the U.S. South during the 1960s, the Palestinian riders confronted Zionist colonial and apartheid settlement practices.
This piece was originally...
November 10, 2011
Students of UC Berkeley
[This letter is reposted from the Reclaim UC blog.]
Dear Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor Breslauer, and Vice Chancellor LeGrande,
You should all resign—now.
On Tuesday, you sent a message to students informing us that we would not be allowed to set up encampments or occupy campus buildings. You quoted a passage from the student code of conduct that prohibits “[a]ny activities such as pulling fire alarms, occupying buildings, setting up encampments, graffiti, or other...
November 11, 2011
by Kate
The roots and precursors of the current #occupy movement are many; too many to trace here. But one clear antecedent of the “occupy” meme itself is the brief, but militant, student movement in New York City in 2009, when antiwar/anti-imperialist students at the New School and NYU staged take-overs of campus buildings, demanding disclosure of war-related research and the resignation of President Bob Kerry, declaring “Occupy Everything, Now!”
At the time, my take on the movement was...
November 10, 2011
by Michael McCarthy
This is an amazing video of last night's protest at Sotheby's in support of the workers who are locked out there. (I don't know who made it - but well done, whoever you are!) For those of us that go to union rallies it may seem a bit peculiar. Most rallies these days lack the kind of passion and militancy that you will see if you watch it. The typical union picket mostly consists of walking in a tightly fenced in circle and chanting a few things. While that is better than no union picket at all,...
November 9, 2011
by Adam Hefty
Last Wednesday, Nov. 2, Oakland saw perhaps the most massive and militant day of action of the Occupy movement so far. Subsequently, big debates have opened up in Oakland and within the Occupy movement, online, at General Assemblies, and amongst friends and family over the success of the strike and where the movement should go from here.
Let's start from some points of probable agreement. Conservative estimates in the mainstream media suggest a turnout of 5000-7500; activists involved estimate...
November 8, 2011
by Matt
The crisis in Greece leaps from one crumbling precipice to another. The situation changes from hour to hour. This week's attempted capitalist coup, where all of the capitalist parties are to unite in government to prevent the Greek people from having a possibility of rejecting the savage austerity about to be imposed, shows just how unstable Greek society has become. A crisis of legitimacy has engulfed all of the traditional parties and organizations.
The Greek working class is inspiringly...
November 2, 2011
by Isaac Steiner
On November 2, tens of thousands of people participated in the first U.S. general strike in 65 years as parts of Oakland were shut down in solidarity with the Occupy movement. Protestors were spurred to action by the brutal repression and attempted eviction of the Occupy Oakland encampment the previous week, and quickly mobilized to retake the space and escalate the struggle.
The night before: much of Occupy Oakland was quiet on Tuesday night as activists busied themselves finishing the plans,...
November 2, 2011
by Isaac Steiner
Image: Cristy C. Road
11:45 PM
Some Final Thoughts
November 2, 2011
by Johanna Brenner
A picture in the New York Times of a family sleep-over night at Occupy Wall Street has got me going. A white family—mom, dad, three little kids—had driven in from Exeter, PA to join the protest. In the picture they had two signs. One, partially hidden, seems to be saying something negative about corporate personhood and money in politics. The other, fully visible, says, ”My momma ain’t on welfare but your bank is.” So what’s wrong with this picture? And what can the Occupy Together...
October 31, 2011
by Mike Davis
Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?
John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic alien invasion. In one of the film’s brilliant early scenes, a huge third-world shantytown is reflected across the Hollywood Freeway in the sinister mirror-glass of Bunker...
October 27, 2011
by Matt
Public spaces all over the country are currently being occupied by a new generation seeking a sovereignty over the course of their nation. However, that nation remains, for many, an occupying nation; the birthrights claimed in central parks around the country a right whose basis lies in the the historic denial of another's.
On November 20th, 1969 over seventy people organized by the San Francisco-based Indians of All Tribes set out to occupy Alcatraz Island. Only fourteen made it through the...
October 25, 2011
by Jason Stanley
On October 15, over one thousand Montrealers rallied to support Occupy Wall Street and the quickly globalizing Occupy movement. That night, activists erected some 50 tents in Square Victoria, a small public space in the heart of the city’s business district, at the foot of the Stock Exchange Tower, the city’s World Trade Center, and the historic Bank of Canada building. Activists quickly renamed the square the ‘Place du Peuple’ (the People’s Plaza), remade the Square’s towering...
October 25, 2011
by Alan Sears
This article was originally published by New Socialist, the webzine of the New Socialist Group in English Canada.
The Occupy Wall Street movement and the mobilizations of the "indignant" in Europe have sparked solidarity actions in many places around the world. October 15, 2011 was a massive day of action that included over 60 marches in Spain, a huge demonstration of over 100,000 in Rome and Occupy actions in cities and towns across North America and in many other places.
Madison, Wisconsin...
October 23, 2011
by Stephanie Luce
The author posted earlier reflections on our Webzine about Occupy Wall Street here.
There is a debate going on about whether Occupy Wall Street should adopt a list of demands. A number of people I know and respect have supported the Demands Working Group in New York and have called for the General Assembly to adopt their list. The draft lists include great demands--there is nothing I’ve seen that I don’t agree with, and I’ve worked hard for some of those demands for much of my life. So I...
October 20, 2011
by Ryan
Just five years ago, the state of Georgia allowed undocumented residents to receive the same tuition subsidies (a waiver for "in-state tuition") that any other state resident would receive to pursue a degree at a public university. While it was never easy for undocumented residents to afford even the reduced tuition (to say nothing about the cost of books, fees, and time off from work), it has now become almost impossible to attend school after a series of recent decisions by the Georgia Board...
10/19/11
This continues parts one and two of on the ground reports from rank and file Solidarity members regarding their observations, experiences and impressions of the Occupy Together actions from around the country.
Occupy Wall Street is a people powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan's Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major...
October 14, 2011
by Jase Short
This document was produced in consultation with fellow socialists involved in the Occupy effort here in Nashville. It is based on our observations of problems that have emerged in our organizing efforts in Tennessee. The intent of this is to provide some grounding in our work and to start a broader conversation about how socialists ought to orient themselves to the Occupy movement generally speaking.
October 11, 2011
If there was any doubt just one week ago, it is now abundantly clear that the Occupy Wall St. movement is not an isolated phenomenon. It has reached towns large and small and has proven to resonate with individuals from a variety of backgrounds – from the politicized 'usual suspects' to those previously reluctant to participate in any such demonstration – who are recognizing the criminality driving the financial services industry and connecting their concerns to a broader anti-capitalist...
October 11, 2011
This continues part one of on the ground reports from rank and file Solidarity members regarding their observations, experiences and impressions of the Occupy Together actions from around the country. Contributors in part two take a few different approaches to their reports, writing personal narratives, journalistic reflections and accounts about how OWS events have impacted their longstanding activism.
Boston, Massachusetts
Karin B
Occupy Boston was first conceived on Tuesday September 27, and...
October 10, 2011
by Dianne Feeley
Three “free trade” agreements (FTAs) were due to be signed into law before the summer congressional recess; now they are scheduled to sail through Congress within the next month. All are harmful to the people who live in the countries involved—whether the United States, Colombia, Panama or South Korea.
Since free trade agreements are unpopular, Washington has dropped its strategy of having a NAFTA-type agreement that ties regions together, instead pursuing trade agreements one by one. From...
October 10, 2011
by Zoltán Grossman
This story imagines a parallel universe in which Native Americans have conquered and settled Europe. Part of the point is that Native Americans would not have done to Europeans what Europeans actually did to Native Americans. The main point is (as Sherman Alexie says) to "turn it around," in order to expose cultural double standards. Versions of this piece were published in 1992 in Akwesasne Notes, News From Indian Country, Report on the Americas, and other periodicals. "Wanblee Johnson is a...
October 9, 2011
by Allen Ruff
Supposedly winding down, the open-ended war in Afghanistan continues. These past few months witnessed the highest levels of US war casualties since the invasion began 10 years ago. Initially driven from power, a resurgent Taliban has continued to mount its resistance to the US-led invader occupation as the conflict expands into Pakistan. Iraq, in the meantime, has remained far from pacified as US military leaders openly speak of a troop presence on the ground twenty years from now.
The initial...
October 7, 2011
by Dan La Botz
The Occupy Wall Street protest now involves thousands and similar protests are taking place in dozens of cities and towns across the country. But why here in Cincinnati?
Cincinnati is a microcosm of the country. Thousands of Cincinnatians face high unemployment, live in poverty, or lack of health insurance, while a handful of multimillionaires live in luxury on the salaries paid by the national and multinational corporations headquartered here. Like the rest of America we in the 99% watch our...
October 7, 2011
by Stephanie Luce
Picking up where we left off?
It was a strange feeling to be in Zuccotti Park (once called Liberty Plaza Park), right next to Ground Zero. I was with thousands of people listening to speeches through the “people’s microphone.” The crowd looked so similar to those of the late 1990s/early 2000s “anti-globalization” movement - and we used that method for communicating then too. Things had gone poorly in April 2000, when most of the big unions decided to lobby at the Capitol against...
October 5, 2011
by Matt
Here is a collection of signs seen at various Occupy demos around the country. What does your sign say?
October 3, 2011
by Erin
This started as a quick reply to an overseas friend on Facebook about the possibilities contained in Occupy Wall Street, after I wrote a note on where organizational help was needed. After making some observations about some organizational and logistical aspects of OWS, I wanted to turn to the politics. The editors asked me to adapt my piece for the website.
October 3, 2011
by Dan La Botz
Workers in Brazil—in heavy industry, services, the public sector, and agriculture—are involved in a series of strikes and mass protests such as the country hasn’t seen in decades. . Driving the new labor upsurge is the strength of the country’s economy, the powerful position of unions in the society, and the rising inflation. In 2007 and 2008, Brazil’s economy grew at a rate of 5%, and though in the depths of the crisis in 2009 it shrunk by .02%, last year the economy grew again at a...
October 3, 2011
by a Solidarity Member in New York
I'm a public sector worker in health care in NYC, and for the past week most of my coworkers and activist networks have been talking about “Occupy Wall St.” (OWS) constantly. There's definitely a buzz, and it extends beyond the 'usual suspects' of New York's progressive / left scene. I went down to OWS on Thursday evening (while the 'grievances' were being debated... see below) and again on Saturday, towards the end of the attempt to march across the...
September 30, 2011
by Susan
The other day I watched the YouTube video of a 21 year old U.S. airman stationed in Germany come out to his dad on the phone, soon after the repeal of DADT was official. As someone who has also said the words “Dad, I’m gay” with trepidation, I couldn’t help but feel for the young man. At the same time, as a socialist and antiwar activist, I am unwilling to take on the celebratory mood embraced by much of the LGBTQ community these past few weeks.
The campaign for the repeal of DADT has...
September 29, 2011
by Jane Slaughter
Sixty years ago Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman in Baltimore, unknowingly donated a scraping from her cervical tumor to Johns Hopkins University. She died of aggressive cancer soon after--but her cells lived on. For years scientists had tried to get human cells to multiply in a test tube, and time after time, the cultures had died. For reasons that are still unknown, Lacks’s cancer cells were the first to keep growing, and they are still growing today. “Like guinea pigs and mice,”...
September 28, 2011
by Evan Rohar
Recently International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) rank-and-filers in Washington state have made headlines. The marine terminal operator EGT is trying to use Operating Engineers Local 307, a black sheep operation expelled from the Oregon building trades council for previous raids, to run its state-of-the-art, $200 million grain facility in the port of Longview, WA. ILWU members responded by blocking trains, tearing down fences to occupy the terminal, and dumping thousands pounds of...
September 27, 2011
by Dayne Goodwin
September 26, 2011
by Isaac Steiner
On Sunday, the Bronx based hip hop trio Rebel Diaz released this haunting dedication to Troy Davis, who was killed days before by the state of Georgia--and to the movement that fought for his freedom. Formed during the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006, Rebel Diaz is known for their dedication to both art and activism which come together in the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective community center in the South Bronx.
September 26, 2011
by Eskandar
This past Friday, an Orange County court found ten students guilty of, as one article put it, "being mean to Israeli ambassador" Michael Oren. Their prosecution constitutes an attack on Muslims and all people of conscience, and will have serious implications for Islamophobia, freedom of speech, and the future of Palestine solidarity activism. Because of all that is at stake, the students and their community are not taking this attack lying down, but are struggling to appeal the verdict and turn...
by Theresa El-Amin
All of the prayers for Troy Davis have been answered. And the answer is: “Troy Davis is a martyr in the struggle to end the death penalty in Georgia.”
As a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I will do all that I can to honor Troy and the millions around the world who worked to save his life. Troy Davis understood that he is not the first innocent man to be killed at the hands of the state. His last words forgave his killers. Can DA Chisolm and the...
Howie Hawkins made the following statement at his announcement on September 14 that he is running as the Green Party candidate for 4th District Common Councilor in Syracuse:
We chose this location at the corner of South Salina and Colvin streets to announce my candidacy for 4th District Councilor because it demonstrates how the government is shutting down services and failing to meet the needs of this community.
Public Services Are Closing Down
Look across the street. That post office, the...
Growing from a handful of students in early July to almost half a million people last week, the protests for "social justice" in Israel appear to have established a new front in the global resistance to neoliberalism. Like any region of the capitalist world, Israelis have seen rising costs of housing, transportation, and childcare. From professionals to the working poor, salaries and wages have been declining as the top one percent continues to become incredibly wealthy. The picture by now is an...
“This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.” -Troy Davis
The hypocrisy of the United States was on full display late Wednesday night, "International Peace Day," as the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia should proceed with the execution of Troy Davis. His body was strapped to a...
Hundreds of people gathered on short notice beneath the gold dome of the Georgia capitol in the final hours before Troy Davis was executed. Davis was killed on September 21 at 11:08 PM, charged with killing a Savannah police officer twenty years ago. His case was a symbol of the inherent injustice of the death penalty and galvanized the outrage of thousands. Read more here and here.
Although Davis has been killed, the movement continues. Check Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty,...
This letter from Troy Davis was written some weeks ago. More recently, he has had all his possessions taken away, including writing utensils, and is subjected to around-the-clock observation. There is still time to act to save his life: calling Chatham County DA Larry Chisolm at 912-652-7308 and Judge Penny Freesemann at 912-652-7252 to ask them to remove the death warrant.
To All:
I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I...
Today, the day before Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection, Georgia Senate Democratic Whip Vincent Fort and Southern Center for Human Rights Executive Director Sara Totonchi have issued a joint statement calling upon the individuals charged with carrying out the execution to refuse to participate in the killing of a possibly innocent man.
Davis is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, September 21 at 7:00pm at Georgia Diagnostics & Classifications Prison in...
The contracts between the Big Three corporations and the United Auto Workers (UAW) expired at midnight September 14 but were extended as negotiations continued. The official union strategy had been to target General Motors as the lead. As union and company signed off on various issues, these were then taken to Chrysler and accepted, or modified. In the final hours, the UAW negotiating team huddled with GM.
Workers at General Motors' Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant listen as officials of the...
A Statement by the Solidarity Political Committee
On September 23, 2011 the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization intend to take an appeal for statehood recognition to the United Nations Security Council. When that is rejected – as it will be, since the Obama Administration has promised to veto it – the PA is expected to turn to the General Assembly, where there’s no great-power veto, for “non-member observer state” status which will give it access to UN...
By Carl Finamore
"People Wasn't Made to Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder, and Justice in Chicago"
Joe Allen, Haymarket Press, published July 2011
“People Wasn’t Made to Burn,” by journalist Joe Allen, reads like a lively, creative work of fiction with its abundance of larger-than-life characters and a seemingly over-dramatized back story of shocking events awaiting one Black family escaping southern rural poverty and landing amidst northern urban racism. The story includes corruption,...
Over the coming few days hundreds of thousands of workers will exercise their right to strike and organise sit-ins, in defiance of all attempts to intimidate them and prevent them from exercising these rights, such as the law criminalising strikes and protests. The 22,000 textile workers of Misr Spinning in Mahalla have shown that this law does not frighten them, and it will not prevent the strike that they have set for 10 September demanding a new rate for the minimum wage, a 200% rise in...
Ohio's working people—both those with jobs, the unemployed and their families—are under attack as they have not been for decades. And this is not just in Ohio. From Wisconsin to Florida, from California to New York, employers, the media and politicians are working 24/7 to lower our wages, reduce our benefits, postpone our retirement, cut social services such as health and education, and in many other ways large and small to take away hard-won gains from working people in order to increase...
by Manuel Larrabure and Carlos Torchia
Perhaps the greatest challenge for the radical left today is to articulate a politics that decisively breaks with the disastrous experiences of many 20th century socialisms. This is a difficult task that requires self-reflection, active questioning, and openness to new expressions of struggle by the always complex and fluid global working-classes. Making this task even the more difficult is that neoliberalism has destroyed or co-opted traditional forms of...
On Friday, September 2, in Ottawa, Illinois, on the site of the old Radium Dial plant a life-sized bronze statue of a young woman holding a flower in one hand and a paint brush in the other was unveiled. She is the symbol of the Radium Girls, the women workers in the watch and clock factories that dotted this area in the 1920s through 1940s. Their job was to paint those glow-in-the dark dials so popular in the day. To do this, management told them to shape a sharp point by licking the brushes...
By Bushra Khaliq, August 5, 2011
The floodwaters that ravaged the southern parts of Pakistan in the summer of 2010 have long receded. Gone are the makeshift tent camps on roadsides, however the revival of normal life still remains a challenge. Thousands continue a daily struggle to support their families and re-establish livelihoods. As a new monsoon season is in full swing, last year’s trauma and economic pain still linger. While last year’s victims struggle to recover, others now worry...
Equal Time radio podcast:45,000 Verizon workers have been forced out on strike by a corporation intent on outsourcing their jobs, cutting their health care and pension benefits, and working conditions despite earning record profits.
Verizon striker Pam Galpern and strike supporter Peter Spitzform explain what's at stake and why the strike can become the starting point not only for a general mobilization against runaway corporate power’s attacks on jobs, wages, health care, social programs and...
Nigel Cole, director of Made in Dagenham, commented in the Socialist Worker, "I hope that people come out of the film thinking, maybe we don’t need to be pushed around, maybe we can stand up for ourselves."
Last year's release may have been perfect timing for us here in the US: the intensifying attacks on the public sector, declining union density and limited (if inspiring) fight backs, made it a good moment to reflect on accomplishments of workers movements and on collective action generally....
In a bid to win the Latino vote, President Obama announces plan to stall the deportation of some.
Today, the Obama Administration will once again attempt to hide that they are deporting DREAM Act-eligible youth and our families. The Obama Administration has attempted time after time to win our support with token appeasement. Coming just weeks after the June 17 Morton Memo, which still has not been implemented, it remains to be seen whether this change will provide actual relief for youth and our...
This speech was given by Paul McLennan from Atlanta Public Sector Alliance (APSA) at Living Walls: The City Speaks.
LIVING WALLS: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR
I want to first thank Living Walls for the opportunity to engage in this dialogue. There needs to be more conversation taking place in Atlanta between artists and political activists, especially about this topic of what is happening to our public space and our public institutions. We will need to continue to have these discussions in...
The Pakistani Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL) was privatized in 2005 and with Etsalat obtaining 26% shares along with management rights. Since then PTCL has shed more than 50,000 workers. Last year, when workers organized a national protest to demand a wage increase, Etsalat suspended 600. Although most were subsequently reinstated, 83 leaders were terminated.
On the 1st of August PTCL workers set up a protest camp in Lahore to demand their reinstatement. On the 5th of August 400 trade...
Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game
Rob Ruck
Beacon Press, 273 pp.
Perhaps it's fitting that I first heard about Raceball just before unfurling a banner at Atlanta Braves' Turner Field that read "Immigrants Rights Are Civil Rights." It was Civil Rights Day at the ballpark and several Negro Leagues veterans were taking the field to receive honors in front of thousands of fans. It was also the day after Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed HB 87, a bill targeting...
By Dan La Botz
Javier Batiz, the great Mexican rock-and-roll guitarist, played and sang last week in a concert that embodied and gave voice to everything that is most wonderful about Tijuana and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Batiz, who since he was thirteen played in the bars and nightclubs of Tijuana, performed this time with the Baja California Orchestra (OBC) before a sell-out crowd of 1,100 in the auditorium of Tijuana’s Center of Musical Arts in a concert that sometimes contrasted,...
ATLANTA - Tens of thousands of protesters gathered at the Georgia Capitol on July 2 and marched through downtown in opposition to the newly enacted Georgia House Bill 87.
The demonstration, organized by the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights with the participation of over 60 other community-based immigration groups throughout the southeast, is part of a recent string of events put on by activists in an effort to push back against the increasing crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Earlier...
I ignored the Slutwalk in Toronto. It only caught my attention when my friends and fellow activists started debating the nature of the walk. The critiques began immediately - that this was yet another white feminist project excluding women of color. There were articles written about the leadership's colorblindness and charges that the only reason the media was reporting it was because scantly-clad white women were involved. My initial thoughts were to sympathize with demonstrators while...
Like any radical, progressive or socialist, I celebrated New York State's (NYS) legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward full legal equality for LGBT people. All the while, remembering that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act excludes married gays and lesbians from the federal benefits that come with marriage.
However, the way in which same-sex marriage legislation was won in NYS leads me to rethink my political assessment of the issue. For a number of years, I have disagreed with many...
The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor:
Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
By Steve Early
In the three months since the Budget Repair Bill was signed, activists in Wisconsin have been looking for whatever they can do to keep things going and to refuse to let the austerity agenda proceed unhindered. Undoubtedly, important coalitions and actions have come together to attempt to keep the protest energy together, but its been difficult for these things to really take hold in the face of at least two major institutional endeavors: the first has been the recalls (the timeframe to collect...
There is no doubt about it. The wind that has electrified the Arab world in recent months, the spirit of the repeated protests in Greece or the student struggles in Britain and Italy, the mobilizations against Sarkozy in France... has come to the Spanish State.
by Josep María Antentas and Esther Vivas
These videos were created by Sandra Ezquerra, who wrote an article on women in the Spanish economy for Against the Current. She included the following note:
I am sending you the link to a little video I just made on the mass concentrations and campings going on in dozens of cities in Spain. The one in the video is on my city, Barcelona, but there are many more in other places and the ones in Madrid is much bigger. Thousands are getting together to say stop the crisis, stop a system that exploits...
The Progressive Student Alliance (PSA) of Georgia State University is deeply troubled by the allegations made on WSBTV on May 24, 2011 regarding a Freedom of Information Act request made by the PSA. The request concerns GILEE, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program, housed at Georgia State University, which is a police exchange program between Georgia police officers and the Israeli police.
In WSBTV’s coverage of the request, Attorney General Sam Olens stated that the...
by Frann Michael
A recent episode of National Geographic's TV series Taboo featured a profile of Stanley Thornton, a 30-year-old "adult baby, " in California, who wears diapers and onesies, drinks from a bottle, and sleeps in a giant crib.
Stanley Thornton
Recently BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Bill Fletcher wrote a very strange column. It polemicizes against unnamed, unquoted "progressives" who have "written off" not just Obama but those who gave him critical support in 2008, like Fletcher.
According to Fletcher, these nameless, quoteless progressives won't make racism, epitomized by the racist assault to keep Obama from being re-elected, central to what they are saying heading into the 2012 elections. This even though next year's...
IT SHOULD COME as no real surprise that president Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East said so little. Nor is it unexpected that the major media played it as if it were a major event. There are two sets of observations to be made on the president’s remarks, first on the Arab Uprising as a whole and second on the Israel-Palestine crisis.
Back in June 2009, president Obama’s address in Cairo to the Muslim world stimulated genuine public excitement from North Africa to South Asia. Two...
Why home-based women workers need social protection urgently
By Bushra Khaliq
April 26, 2011
The neoliberalization of the late 1980s resulted in the increasing informalization and casualization of the Pakistani labor market, spawning a growth in home-based work almost exclusively performed by women and, frequently, their children. This informal sector consists of small units producing goods or services. Its activities are characterized by low levels of capital and skill, with little access to...
By Joaquín Bustelo
MABLETON, GA -- About 100 students --overwhelmingly Latinos-- walked out of classes this afternoon at Pebblebrook High School in this Atlanta suburb.
"As undocumented youth we can no longer be afraid of those who stand against us, instead we need show them we will fight back. We need to take a stand because if we do not do it no one else will” said Dulce Guerrero, a graduating senior.
Guerrero was one of several students who addressed a rally in front of the school, some...
[The following statement was released May 13 by Adelina Nicholls, Executive Director of GLAHR]
The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, the state’s leading grass roots immigrant rights organization, condemns Gov. Nathan Deal’s decision to sign HB 87 into law.
This action is not only an insult to the Latino community and other immigrants, but is also an exercise in cheap political pandering that will cost our state dearly.
GLAHR is advising the Latino community not to panic. This is not...
Graduate workers across the University of California have voted to transform their union. The Academic Workers for a Democratic Union slate swept all 10 executive board positions and nearly 60 percent of Joint Council positions in United Auto Workers Local 2865. The local is the largest graduate worker union in the country and the largest UAW local in the West, representing 12,000 academic student workers at nine UC campuses.
AWDU ran a hard-fought campaign against the incumbent leadership,...
The heroic resistance of Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apache is one of the most potent legends in North America. Caught in the crosshairs of the United States' expansionist ambitions into their land, Geronimo led a small group of less than two hundred. For over a year, they evaded the efforts of one-quarter of the U.S. Army to wipe them out. His surrender in 1886 was one of the final episodes in centuries of U.S. wars of conquest and extermination against the indigenous tribes of North America....
May 4th was the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when a dozen interracial riders, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), challenged segregation in bus accommodations across the Deep South. They were determined to use non-violent direct action to implement a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared segregated restaurants and waiting rooms at interstate transportation terminals. The ride, like an earlier one in 1947 CORE had undertaken in the Upper South, was composed...
ATLANTA-Some 2,000-3,000 people rallied in front of the state capitol here to celebrate May Day and denounce HB 87, a Georgia bill that goes even further than the infamous Arizona SB 1070.
The bill, currently awaiting the Governor's signature, is even worse that Arizona's SB 1070 in that it make it a crime punishable by 15 years in prison to get a job using false identity documents. It also criminalizes the transportation or harboring of undocumented people, as well as encouraging or helping...
Hundreds of people rallied last week to protest the brutal beating of Chrissy Lee Polis, a transgender woman from Baltimore’s working-class eastern suburbs, at a local McDonald’s. Polis was attacked by two teenagers when she tried to use the restroom. The prolonged, merciless assault was photographed by a McDonald’s employee; several other employees stood around watching and did nothing to help. An older woman tried to intervene but was punched in the face, and the beating did not stop...
After twenty-odd hours of blaring announcements, everybody in the TV-watching parts of the world must now know that Osama bin Laden was recently killed by U.S. forces in a "compound deep inside of Pakistan". So, the al-Qaeda leader is dead at the hands of covert U.S. intervention in the mountains of Central Asia. If that sounds a little bit familiar, it's because his political career began thirty years ago with covert U.S. intervention in the mountains of Central Asia. In retrospect, the...
By Tessa Echeverria and Andrew Sernatinger
On a cold January day in Wisconsin, the two of us sat over a couple of cups of coffee and started talking, like many others, about what was happening in the world and remarked on the chain of revolts across Europe and North Africa. We got up to leave and passed a copy of January's Economist magazine, the cover reading "The Battle Ahead, Confronting the Public Sector Unions." We crossed East Washington Avenue, a long stretch of vacant manufacturing...
Today we lost one of the best. An irreplaceable loss. Hazel Dickens gave voice, her own inimitable voice, to working people and especially the miners and hill folk of her native Appalachia. A partisan of the class war, a fierce working class feminist and a link of steel in the chain, she will remain a voice of the workers and her community for as long as there are ears to hear and voices to sing. Still, it is a heartbreaking loss and a sad thought to know she will not sing again, she has passed...
Ten years ago, after the police killing of a teenager named Timothy Thomas, Cincinnati erupted in what some called vicious riots and others a righteous rebellion. The uprising over a string of police killings of black men made Cincinnati the subject of a national discussion that took place from the pages of the NAACP’s The Crisis and The New York Times to NPR and Nightline. Cincinnati became synonymous in the public mind with racism and bigotry and the reputation lived on for years. Living...
As uprisings, revolutions and protests continue to radiate from the Tunisian and Egyptian epicenters, we ought to pause to take a look at the peculiar situation of Afghanistan. “Peculiar” in what sense, however? Peculiar in the character of the protests? Peculiar due to the military occupation and warlord-ization of the country under the occupation authority? Or peculiar due to its religious justifications?
Of Qu'rans and Military Occupations of Muslim Countries
Toward the end of last month,...
The Libyan revolution began as did most revolutions in the Arab world, with protests against a cruel dictator. The protests grew large by mid-February and were especially large in Tripoli.[i] What quickly distinguished Libya from the rest of the Arab world was the brutality of the dictator’s counter attack and the response of the protesters.
By early March the democratic protest movement had transformed into a civil war. Exactly how and why this happened is still not entirely clear. Muammar...
Georgia Students for Public Higher Education (GSPHE) was a bit late in starting to mobilize against cuts to the state's HOPE scholarship, which helped nearly one million students attend college since its creation in 1993. The state House had already passed SB326 when we arrived on the scene. Activists were completely surprised by the sudden emergence of this bill, and how fast it was flying through the Georgia Assembly. Most elected Democrats voted in favor of the cuts. Only 22 out of 63 voted...
The recent social upheaval in Wisconsin, where during the last month hundreds of thousands of workers, students, retirees, and people without a job descended on the Capitol building in Madison to protest Governor Scott Walker's overt union-busting legislation, has for many progressives been one of the most exciting moments in recent United States history. A breathtaking display of solidarity was demonstrated by individuals from a variety of backgrounds – in addition to the public sector union...
The video of this speech by Mohammad Abdollahi of Dreamactivist.org gave me goosebumps. This coming weekend, undocumented youth from around the country will gather in Atlanta to plan a structure for the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a new network that was formed by activists who, in fighting for the DREAM Act, engaged in daring direct actions last year. Thanks to Adam K for the video.
My name is Mohammad. I am undocumented. I am queer. And I am no longer afraid.
I can't think of a better...
I've spent much of the past month in Wisconsin participating in the historic working class upsurge there. On Sunday, I delivered a summary of some observations on the struggle to a meeting of the Chicago branch of Solidarity and captured a video of the presentation. You can also download an mp3 if you'd like.
I feel obligated to warn that this probably isn't the most dynamic talk you'll have ever heard since it was intended to fill in information and start a conversation. Any excitement will be...
This article was written by Micah Uetricht for Gaper's Block.
The idea is simple: young people getting together in front of cameras and onlookers and telling their stories.
Stories about their lives, their dreams, their fears–which all end with one phrase:
“Undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.”
All photos by Sarah Jane Rhee.
by Daniel Tanuro
Once again the evidence shows that nuclear technology can never be 100% secure. The risks are so frightening that the conclusion is obvious: it is imperative to abandon nuclear energy, and to do so as quickly as possible. This is the first lesson of Fukushima, one which raises absolutely fundamentamental social and political questions, requiring a real social debate about an alternative to the capitalist model of infinite growth.
What has happened is entirely predictable: yet...
Is this the end or the beginning?In light of the events of the last month, as much as those of the last few days, it is time to reflect. The passing of a slightly revised version of the “Budget Repair Bill” requires that we do so for what we are calling our movement has been based largely, arguably entirely, on killing that bill. Republicans are unmoved by demonstrations and any other call for them to carry through the will of the people. It is a testament to the strength of the movement...
How did the idea of helping plan an International Women’s Day (IWD) march come about?
Kate: We had a Solidarity meeting on Sunday March 6. I brought the idea to hold a rally on Tuesday, International Women’s Day. Tessa, Rebecca, Colin, and myself got together decided to throw something together and make something happen. This IWD was particularly special because it was the 100th anniversary of its first celebration. This year is also the 100-year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire....
Wednesday morning we were all preparing for a compromise. The media blew up with stories that Scott Walker was willing to keep collective bargaining in place in exchange for the return of the fourteen Democrats and the passage of the rest of the bill, and activists on the ground scrambled looking for ways to strengthen their coalition and resist a compromise that could remove organized labor from the fight in order to conquer the rest of the working class.
The odd thing was that Wednesday...
Download this statement!
Walker is cutting $1.25 billion from state and local government. The budget gets rid of 17,418 jobs from the University of Wisconsin. It cuts $749.9 million from public primary and secondary education. And women are at the center of the crisis.
Women make up 56% of state government workers
Women make up 58% of municipal workers
Women in government jobs tend to work as teachers, social workers, administrative assistants and secretaries.
Wisconsin is one of the lowest...
A quick note on process: I want to point out that the analysis and reporting that I've been doing has been the result of many collective discussions and debates with my comrades, members of Solidarity as well as fellow travelers. Mistakes or misjudgments are my own, and times where I feel like I've been off is because I haven't been able to work through the situation collectively. Givin' credit where credit's due!
Let's start with a recap of last week before getting into where we are now. A week...
This is a message from the World March of Women, an organization that exists in many countries in Latin America and Europe:
We have started 2011 with hope and revolution in our hearts and minds, as we support the struggle for self-determination and participatory democracy in northern Africa and the Arab world. The peoples of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Syria have demonstrated that mass uprisings of women and men do have the power to topple governments and...
I've been meaning to share this video for many months, ever since watching it for the first time myself at a public screening in Atlanta at the end of the summer. Wildcat at Mead documents an overlooked moment of history: a militant, unauthorized strike at a cardboard plant on the west side of Atlanta. The movie was produced by and features cadre of the October League (OL), a marxist-leninist organization who counted among its membership several plant workers who came to be important leaders in...
Michael Moore spoke at the big weekend rally in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. A vido of his speech and his blog post that it's roughly based on are below.
Mike is one of the great popularizers of working class politics in the United States today. I remember watching his show, TV Nation (on Fox!) in middle school as an early step in my introduction to working class and radical politics. Growing up in Georgia, with its tiny segment of unionized workers, organized labor seemed distant and the...
ONTARIO'S 'DAYS OF ACTION': CITYWIDE POLITICAL STRIKES
by Dan La Botz
[In 1995-1998, unions in Ontario embarked on a series of eleven one-day
citywide strikes against the policies of the Conservative provincial government.
This article, published originally in The Troublemakers Handbook details the labor-community coalitions they put together;
the cross-picketing they did of each other's workplaces; and a deal of
practical advice for mounting huge strikes and demonstrations.]
Unlike most...
After police, Union reps and Democrats convinced the 50 or so people remaining in the Capitol to end their occupation last night, the most highly visible and sustained direct action against the Walker/Fitzgerald/Koch regime came to an end. As it turned out, those occupying the Capitol since February 14 were there with the tacit consent of the Department of Administration and the Capitol Police. Until Judge Albert's decision came down yesterday, not a single order was issued to remove people from...
These remarks were delivered to a recent meeting of the Solidarity National Committee to introduce a discussion on the Egyptian labor movement.
Egyptian labor confronts neoliberalism
This presentation could go back centuries because Egyptian labor history is so rich. I’m going to do a quick run through of some points which relate to the current labor uprisings. In a certain sense, what’s been going on with the Egyptian workers movement over the past month or so is a reaction to developments...
By Dan La Botz
The new American workers movement, which has developed so rapidly in the last couple of months in the struggle against rightwing legislative proposals to abolish public employee unions, suddenly finds itself at a crossroads. Madison, Wisconsin, where rank-and-file workers, community members, and social movement activists converged to create the new movement, remains the center of the struggle. In Ohio, which faces similar legislation, unions have also gone into motion, while...
Court is still in session and access to the capitol is restricted for the fourth consecutive day. About eighty people continue the sit-in inside the capitol, for hope that the combination of popular pressure and favorable judicial order will force the DOA and police to step aside and let the occupation of the capitol resume in full; if they leave, their understanding is that the capitol will be unrecoverable for the movement.
The resolve of people inside is nothing short of heroic. Many of the...
An extremely important development in the unfolding struggle in Wisconsin has been the presence of military veterans in the protests - especially given the early threats of Governor Scott Walker to call in the national guard. This week, Iraq Veterans Against the War has joined the struggle in an organized way, releasing a statement and calling on its members to join the occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol:
Their statement calls on all military service members to resist mobilization against...
Judge Moeser ruled that the Department of Administration (DOA) could not limit access to the capitol building and granted the restraining order demanded by protesters (I think legal counsel was acquired by WEAC and AFSCME Council 24?). Nonetheless, the entrance to the capitol Tuesday was penned in with guard rails to keep protesters in single file, orange plastic fencing enclosing the lawn and a line of police guarding the doors. Around 80 people have stayed in the capitol, and the DOA's...
Download this statement!
We’ve occupied the capitol for more than two weeks and our presence—as workers and as members of this community—has delayed the vote in the Assembly and stopped the vote in the Senate. Without us, legislation would have already passed to crush public sector unions and allow our schools and community services to deteriorate.
What has been the atmosphere of Madison over the last several days?
Colin: On Saturday, the crowd was the largest that I’ve seen yet. The energy was really high and it was incredible to see. The conservative estimate was 70,000 people, while Democracy Now reported 100,000 people. It was incredible to see that many people braving the cold and I can assure you that it was cold. It was incredible to see all the different unions represented in that crowd, from steelworkers to teachers to...
The big news this weekend is about cops in the capitol. Friday, most people know, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association said that they would refuse orders to clear out the capitol and instead sleep in to keep the occupation going. Unfortunately, there are three different groups of police working inside the capitol and the WPPA statement is speaking for the city cops here. That leaves the Capitol Police and the State Patrol (Capitol Police actually have their offices in the basement of...
Dan La Botz
February 26, 2011
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, what is emerging across the United States is the most significant upsurge of the labor movement in a very long time. What has begun in Wisconsin is rapidly spreading to other states—even some southern states, traditionally vacuums of labor activity.
Its pretty clear that we are in an all out class war here and everyone seems to know it. Organized labor all across the United States knows it, they're sending people here and looking at what to do at home; non-union workers know it and they're moving forward their demands and tactics (like today's occupation of the GOP office by ADAPT disability activists); and obviously, Walker, the Legislature, the Koch Brothers and the entire capitalist class knows it and they're out for a complete crushing...
What does organizing on the ground look like?
Adam: We have been having regular Solidarity meetings, which are the best meetings I have ever attended. We have been asking ourselves what we are trying to do and how we can radicalize the agenda and talking points. Obviously a lot of union leaders and people in general are ready to give concessions right away, but we are trying to say Scott Walker gave tax breaks to businesses and now they are trying to give the debt onto the people, and stressing...
Dismissal & Decertification of Teachers’ Union Leadership: 11 FMPR Executive Members Are Sanctioned
“We Will Not Be Intimidated”
By Hugo J. Delgado-Martí, Bandera Roja - 2/21/11
The strategic and tactical assessments of the situation have shifted a few times since this started last week--our goals and objectives have had to change with the developments here, the idea of what is possible and what a win means. Its all changed and changed again. When we arrived at what seemed like a kind of stalemate over the weekend, both sides were digging in and preparing to deal huge blows: Walker and the Legislature were expected to press the police and push the bill; workers had the...
Without a doubt, today is going to decide the course of the struggle. The last two and a half days have been a pause, with folks moving into position for Tuesday while guarding their backs in case of any unexpected developments. Rumors of strikes have come and gone depending on what the collective sense is of who's in the lead and what the balance of forces is. The anxiety into Monday was in looking for some maneuvers or developments that would put one side in front of the other, a step forward...
We're into the fifth day now and its starting to take its toll--I'm pretty worn so hopefully this report is holding the standard. The capitol square has temporarily depopulated to the point that it almost looks like a normal business day--of course its Sunday and most people don't do business with KILL THE BILL placards and "I am MTI" pins. The local newspapers are saying that the small turnout today is because of the bad weather (it's grossly cold and wet) and that shows the resolve of...
First Interview:
How have you participated in the protests?
Connor: I’ve been commuting these last several days to Madison. As I student at UW-Milwaukee, I’ve missed a week of class. Except for today [Sunday 2/20], I’ve been in and out of Milwaukee everyday since Tuesday, commuting to Madison to participate in the protests. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at UW-Milwaukee organized a walkout on Thursday, numbering in the thousands, which pretty much shut down the campus. The...
Download this statement!
Wisconsin! in one week, tens of thousands of workers and their families have made history. In the face of the most aggressive anti-worker bill in modern history, teachers, janitors, clerks, plumbers, steelworkers, teamsters and many more have stood together above party lines and pushed union leaders and politicians where they weren’t willing to go. Rank-and-file workers, students and grassroots activists have led the way and the establishment has only moved because we...
One thing this week has become infamous for is the spread of rumors, and Friday night ended with a scare that a fleet of Tea Party buses were on their way to counter-protest with Sarah Palin at the head. WEAC members passed out flyers Friday afternoon briefing demonstrators on what to expect and how to conduct themselves, but apart from overworked activists and a few union bureaucrats, the crowd seemed unbothered by the right wing threat. Of course when a little more than a thousand tea party...
Another update from Andrew in Madison.
* * * * *
Thursday night ended with lots of energy and momentum as Democratic senators fled the state to break quorum and block a vote, and Friday seems to be a difficult and contradictory day. Public schools remain closed and thousands of UW students walked out today to join workers at the capitol, so there remains important grassroots energy but the situation is changing quickly.
This is a report from a Madison comrade, Andrew, who has been heavily involved with the protests there. He makes great observations on the culture of the protests, how such movements are organized, contradictions between the labor bureaucracy and rank-and-file workers, and all kinds of other stuff you definitely won't learn about in the mainstream media. This was written late Thursday, February 17.
* * * * *
First, I think we're all shocked at what's happening here. There's obviously been a...
By Dan La Botz
Thousands of workers demonstrated at the state capital in Madison, Wisconsin on Feb. 15 and 16 to protest plans by that state’s Republican Governor Scott Walker to take away the state workers’ union rights. Walker, cleverly attempted to divide the public workers by excluding police and firefighters from his anti-union law, and the media have worked to divide public employees against private sector workers. Yet, both firemen and private sector workers showed up at the...
Victor M. Rodriguez
"The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico." -- José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City
Translator’s note. Mainstream historians typically focus on the human cost of revolution in the form of violence, terror, lost lives, economic disorganization, the rise of dictatorships, etc. In this piece, Marxist economist Ernest Mandel describes the far greater costs to humanity of a revolution that did not succeed.
The “Human Cost” of Revolutions that Never Happened
Ernest Mandel
The Mubarak regime—sans the former President himself—has entered into its “Greatest Hits” phase, offering up figures who have been a dominant fixture in elite politics since Hosni Mubarak's ascendancy to the Presidency three decades ago, albeit repackaged and remastered with minor concessions to the revolutionary movement that is rocking not only Egypt, but the entire region with its new style of Arab nationalism.
This spirit of 2011 represents an Arab nationalism from below, built on...
Since the beginning of February Live Action has released several videos shot at different Planned Parenthood clinics. The sting operation seems designed to reveal that the organization is not complying with federal legislation. They claim to show Planned Parenthood staff offering advice to those in sex trafficking of teenagers. Planned Parenthood responded by announcing it is retraining staff, but it also claims the videos have been doctored.
Meanwhile U.S. Rep Mike Pence (R-IN),proposed denying...
One thing is clear from the events of the last 18 days: the power of the people is now back on the world stage in a dramatic fashion.
What has transpired in Egypt is nothing less than the largest popular revolution in the last 30 years. Two weeks of demonstrations and mass actions put the authority of Hosni Mubarak on its last legs, and 2 days of strikes finished the job. Masses of working class people have participated in the protests, swelling the ranks in the streets, but once the...
As the front page article on this website states it would be silly to predict where this is headed, with so much still in motion. For example, in the process of completing this blog entry, rumors that Hosni Mubarak was about to step down were dashed - for the time being - with an enraging speech stating exactly the opposite.
And like most inspired observers and supporters of this popular outpouring, I am far from an expert on Egyptian politics or history. I've been playing catch-up in an effort...
This report came in from Atef Said, who wrote about Egypt's long labor history for Against the Current in September 2009. There he concluded with predictions of exactly the kind of converging political and labor struggles that are now rocking the country as we can see in Al Jazeera's live coverage.
A Few Things the American and Western Publics should KNOW About the Egyptian Revolution
That’s how Milton Rogovin explained why the subjects of his acclaimed photographs were the working people in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, in West Virginia, Kentucky and all over the world. He died last week at his home in Buffalo at 101 years of age. Up until the last weeks of his life, he never missed the Women in Black vigils against the war every Saturday.
A member of the Communist Party who was witch-hunted out of his optometry business (he refused to testify to HUAC), Rogovin took...
Review of David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011)
By Charlie Post
In late 2007, over twenty years of global economic growth came to a screeching halt. A financial panic began in the sub-prime mortgage market, leading to the bankruptcy (Goldman Sachs) and near bankruptcy (AIG, GM) of major financial and industrial corporations. While capitalist state bailouts for corporations deemed “too large to fail” stemmed the tide of...
Mike F. (NY) has translated this statement from the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party), our French comrades, on the Tunisian Revolution:
STATEMENT FROM THE NPA (January 26, 2011);
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ONGOING REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA.
One after the other, the pitiful declarations of members of the Fillon government, from Alliot-Marie to Lemaire and including Sarkozy, have shown that they do not understand the reasons for the revolt of the Tunisian people.
Their explanations try to camouflage their...
The events unfolding in Tunisia before our very eyes constitute a sharp break in world events, albeit a break that has emerged from years of grinding contradictions that have now come to a head. These events represent a break from US-backed “color revolutions,” feigned revolutionary upsurges by reactionary Islamists masquerading as harbingers of progress, and forms of reformist and guerilla-style revolutionary elitism. Popular self-organization from below has scored a victory that—although...
Working in the Mountain Justice movement as a socialist has had its trying moments. The movement was established in 2005 by a coalition of local Appalachians effected by the worst excesses of the coal industry and a much younger layer of environmentalist activists from outside the region itself. On one wing of the movement, there is a hard core dedicated to tactics of direct action and non-violent civil disobedience while, on the other, is a NGO-ized section of more bureaucratic organizations...
Without going into too much detail about Tunisia’s situation, let us make clear one thing:
The regime has not fallen, it is still in power–though it is in a precarious position.
“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.”
- Albert Einstein
MANY PROGRESSIVES VOTED for Barack Obama hoping that we would see national leadership that would greatly differ from that of his predecessor, George
W. Bush. It has been over two years since that historic election and many progressives across the nation are asking, Where's the change?
For some of us our questions began last year after the idea of Medicare For All/Single Payer healthcare was taken...
Wounded Knee, December 29th, 1890 is full of meaning. Not just for the Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota who were victims and perished in their hundreds, but for the course of imperial America. Its violence an echo of the violence that was the settlement of this country. The expropriation of the land from Native Americans necessarily involved a genocidal struggle, something evident very early in the history of Europeans on this continent. That genocidal war was also bound up with an economy based...
Press Release….Press Release….Press Release….Press Release….Press Release….
For More Information Contact: Dan La Botz at: 513-600-9405 or DanLaBotz@gmail.com
SOCIALIST CANDIDATE’S BACKERS FOUND NEW ORGANIZATION
“OUTRAGED POLITICIANS ARE claiming that the release of government information is the criminal equivalent of terrorism and puts innocent people's lives at risk. Many of those same politicians authorized the modern equivalent of carpet bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, the sacrifice of thousands of lives of soldiers and civilians and drone assaults on civilian areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Their anger at a document dump, no matter how extensive, is more than a little...
by Wes Strong
Close to two hundred gathered at San Francisco State University on October 30th to discuss and plan future actions in the struggle to defend public education. Activists set forward an action plan, established a set of demands for the movement, and established a continuations committee to help build for future conferences and actions. Many see the results of the conference as a step forward, providing more clarity to the struggle and beginning to answer some questions that should...
The editors of Against the Current initiated a petition addressed to the Indian Ambassador in Washington DC and the High Commissioner of India in Ottawa, Canada. It requested that a ban on Dr. Richard Shapiro be lifted and charges dropped against Angana Chatterji and Zahir-ud-Din. The latter two are co-founders and co-conveners of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir. They have been charged with writing to incite against the Indian...
“The Socialist Party campaign for the U.S. Senate in Ohio was a great success. We won more than 25,000 votes for socialism in Ohio,” said Dan La Botz the 65-year old school teacher, writer and activist and the party’s candidate for Senator. "We didn't win in traditional terms, but this was not a traditional campaign. The corporate parties want working people to wake up think about politics only on election day, and then they want them to go back to sleep. This campaign was about creating...
I think this interview with Farooq Tariq of the Labour Party Pakistan is a clear explanation on how the left is reaching out to those who have been affected by the floods, providing concrete aid and building a political campaign to cancel the odious debt.
*****
“The floods have revealed the real nature of poverty in Pakistan”
22 October by Stéphanie Jacquemont
An interview with Farooq Tariq, member of CADTM Pakistan, Labour Relief Campaign (LRC) and spokeperson for Labour Party Pakistan...
Harlem Hospital workers rallied today to stop proposed cuts in the number of doctors on staff. A few hundred people came out to a rally across the street from the hospital, one of New York City's 11 public hospitals and one of the few health care options for the uninsured.
The Doctors Council SEIU, which represents physicians at Harlem, called the demonstration in protest of a layoffs as the hospital ends its affiliation with Columbia University Medical Center. For the past 60 years, CUMC has...
While workplace resistance to the tsunami of attacks on our living standards, pensions, healthcare, social security, and our social wage in general is near an all time low as measured by recent U.S. strike activity, our French brothers and sisters are demonstrating a different way.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of a center-right party, campaigned promising to put more money in people's pockets, to cut taxes, and make France more competitive. Eighteen months ago Sarkozy seemed...
Frequently asked questions about whether or not to vote for the Democrats or to support a Socialist, Green or progressive independent candidate.
Dan La Botz is the Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. He is a member of both the Socialist Party and of Solidarity. He is one of the organizers of the Socialist Contingent for the October 2 rally in Washington. (See DanLaBotz.com, follow him on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.)
Question: You are a progressive activist running as the...
I don't know whether to call it a rash or not, but the recent reporting of the suicides of young gay men should certainly raise alarm bells. I would be interested to know if this was a cluster or just an average that is finding the light of day because of the higher profile of some of these tragedies. In any case, it stands in stark contrast to the popular version that official Hollywood, the mainstream Gay movement and the current administration currently pedal where gays are widely accepted...
Hopefully, tens of thousands of working people will descend on Washington, DC on Saturday, October 2nd. The unions, civil rights, immigrant, women’s and LGBT organizations that have built this demonstration to counter the “Tea Party” and the right’s program of new wars abroad and attacks on unions, immigrants, people of color, women and queer folks at home.
In 2008, most of us in the labor, civil rights, anti-war and immigrant rights movements celebrated the election of the first...
The Great Recession has no doubt punctured US celebration of the unregulated market, generated anger at wealth disparities and shock at the loss of the American Dream. Yet three decades of conservative dominance and political drift to the right have taken their toll.
With the cooptation and/or destruction of vehicles for working-class resistance (especially unions, civil rights and community-based organizations), most working-class families are not engaged in collective action but instead...
We March for Jobs, Peace, Justice and the Socialist Alternative That Can Win Them
Hundreds of thousands of Americans organized by labor and civil rights organizations will gather in Washington, D.C. on October 2 to demand a change in the direction that our nation is heading. We are proud to join this march to demand jobs, to demand an end to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan now, and to demand a society that is fairer, more equal and more just. We believe it important to be in the...
[ This morning, the FBI conducted raids at the homes of activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, Michigan and North Carolina. These provocations, under the guise of "anti-terrorism", appear to target leaders of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which publishes the Fight Back! newspaper and website. The articles below - from Twin Cities IndyMedia and Fight Back! News - give some picture of the unfolding story. As details and opportunities for solidarity and defense become clear, please post or...
Friday, September 24 is day ten of an sit-in at the Whittier Elementary School field house in southwest Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Residents of the predominantly Mexican, working class neighborhood have a long history of struggling for their rights. Like many of those struggles, this occupation came to a head after many years of organizing and fighting. Parents at Whittier Elementary school first got organized in 2003 and have been working to improve their school ever since.
In addition to...
There likely has been no issue more debated by the left and anti-war progressives in the last months than the Dream Act. The act would allow conditional residency and a path to legalization for thousands of young people - including thousands of current students - who arrived in the US before the age of 16 and complete two years of higher education or military service. Although there has been organizing around the issue for years, it wasn't until relatively recently (the past two years) that the...
Here's something to listen to if you're not close enough to protest the bigoted "Burn a Koran Day" publicity stunt proposed by Gainsville, FL pastor Terry Jones.
Yusuf Islam was an international pop star under his previous name, Cat Stevens. After converting to Islam in the 1970s, he decided to escape from the world of commercial music. (In fact, his choice of the name "Yusuf" refers to the Story of Joseph, who was bought and sold in the marketplace). His conversion coincided with the growing...
In advance of the October 2 demonstration called jointly by the NAACP, AFL-CIO and others (more on the complexities of that later), I found this video of the great Nina Simone with her song "Go Limp" - a love song to the movement:
Oh Daughter, dear Daughter,
take warning from me
and don't you go marching
with the N-A-A-C-P.
For they'll rock you and roll you
and shove you into bed.
And if they steal your nuclear secret
you'll wish you were dead.
(refrain:)
Singin too roo li, too roo li, too roo...
As a person of the left, a partisan of the working class and an anti-imperialist about the only positive thing I can say about Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara is that my feelings of, well something bordering on hate, is that those feelings are shared by millions around the world (and some with an intensity that makes mine pale and unsure by comparison). Perhaps hate is the wrong word, I despise Blair. His schmaltzy English sentimentality, his zealous faith only a convert knows, his bag of lawyers...
People who attended the US Social Forum in Detroit this past June may have heard Bushra Khaliq, General Secretary of the Women Workers Help Line, speak on the situation of working women in Pakistan. The majority work within their homes; jobbers come around to pick up their work. So often they do not know what company they are producing for or who else might be working for the company. At the US Social Forum she was able to meet with precarious workers here.
Bushra Khaliq wrote a brief report on...
New York Times: Glenn Beck Leads Religious Rally at Lincoln Memorial
I watched / listened to most of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally while doing laundry and cleaning the house. The cheesiness of the voice-overs and unevenness of the speeches lend themselves to easy mockery, but the far right's ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC yesterday means that this is no laughing matter.
First, on the media coverage of the event: I'm struck by the extent to which the...
As many of you are no doubt aware, the Republican and Democratic parties have long fought to exclude third party and independent candidates from participating in electoral debates. In Ohio, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Lee Fisher and Republican Rob Portman recently announced that they will be scheduling a series of debates between only themselves, excluding the two other contenders for the office, Dan La Botz (Socialist Party) and Eric Deaton (Constitution Party). Both La Botz and...
A statement by the Solidarity student working group
An unprecedented assault on public education is underway. State governments are slashing public school and university budgets, while the White House and Congress push school competition, firing teachers and privatization as a “solution” to the crisis of funding. But students and teachers are fighting back—most visibly in California, but also at schools across the nation. The movement will likely grow as more and more states cut education...
Hi, I'm Dan La Botz, the Socialist Party candidate for U.S. senate. I've been thinking about this guy Steve Slater that you've all been hearing about, from Jet Blue. People say he "snapped" on that airline. I think a lot of us are ready to snap. I think it's giving expression to the way people are feeling about what's happening to our society.
Think about working in the airline industry. Riding a plane used to be kind of fun. But the companies have made the planes so crowded, and the class...
This report and appeal, sent out by Farooq Tariq from the Labour Party Pakistan gives you some idea of what is occuring in Pakistan. Please respond to the appeal!
On 30 July in Moscow without being presented any charges the activists of anti-facist movement Maxim Solopov and Alexei Gascarov got arrested. Maxim and Alexei were known as public figures of the growing youth movement against the Nazis’ violence, which in recent years has done much to reveal the ties of state structures police and the ultra-rights in Russia.
Their arrest followed a series of dramatic events which took place in July, around the destruction of forest in Himki near...
At Colombia's request an extraordinary session of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) was convened on July 22 to hear accusations from outgoing president Álvaro Uribe that there are "1,500 guerrillas and dozens of encampments of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Venezuela." With both groups labeled "terrorist" organizations by Bogotá and Washington this escalation of tension as Uribe leaves...
Last friday there was a march and rally outside the Mets - Diamond Backs game at CitiField in Queens, NYC. The NYPD forced the rally to confine itself to a small pen across the street from the stadium, behind a fence and under a subway platform. As a result, the rally itself was almost totally unnoticeable for fans getting off of the train and going directly into the stadium (let alone if you parked in the lot right next to the stadium); could see or even hear the few hundred people gathered at...
Hundreds of hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 1, and their supporters confronted the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago today, July 22. In front of this glitzy hotel, some dimwit in management had placed a sign thanking the Hyatt employees for helping them win the Chicago Workplace Excellence Award. Just a few weeks ago, these very same employees walked off the job to protest horrendous working conditions.
Outside in the streets, workers and their supporters were laying their bodies on the...
This article was written by a friend of mine, Michael Steven Smith. He is the co-host of the WBAI radio show "Law and Disorder" and sits on the Board of The Center for Constitutional Rights.
At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.--Karl Marx
Lynne Stewart is a friend. She used to practice law in New York City. I still do. I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July l9th for her re-sentencing. The Judge John Koetl buried her...
Howie Hawkins - Green for Governor
Media Release
http://www.howiehawkins.org - http://www.gpny.org
For Immediate Release: July 15, 2010
For More Info: Howie Hawkins, 315 425-1019
Mark Dunlea, 518 860-3725
Hawkins Opposes Increased Jail Time for Lawyer Lynne Stewart, calls it an Attempt to Intimidate Lawyers Representing Unpopular Clients
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor, harshly condemned the increased jail time ordered for civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart, calling it an...
Today, food production in the United States and in the world is dominated by a handful of corporations that put their profits above the hunger, the health, and the well-being of America’s and the globe’s population. Tyson, Kraft, Pepsico, Nestle, Conagra, and Anheuser-Busch are generally at the top of the list, though in virtually every area of food production, a small number of corporations control what is grown and what we eat. The food industry, of course, meshes with the banks and with...
(Article authored by lifetime Tennessee resident and local MT Solidarity branch member Jase Short)
For the past month, xenophobic and anti-Muslim forces have stirred up controversy around a proposed mosque outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Considering the Bible Belt location and context of two major wars against majority-Muslim countries, opponents have drawn from some of the most right wing and backwards elements of the region's culture. But local activists have drawn on other traditions: the...
Check out this great video from Pittsburgh activist and YouTube commentator Jasiri X:
A few months ago, Tim Wise wrote a widely circulated article called, "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black " which challenged America to take a close look at the hypocrisy of the Right Wing. Now, a Pittsburgh rapper is accepting his challenge in true Hip Hop form. Jasiri X has released a video called "What if the Tea Party was Black." The Hip Hop artist says that he got the idea when Paradise,a member of the...
Two rebellious Brazilian union federations are attempting to unite. They seek an alternative to a union federation, the CUT, that has given in to the bosses, the government and the neoliberal agenda.
At the end of June, near Sao Paulo, the two dissident union federations held a Congress or “Conclat” of 3,100 delegates who were elected earlier by 15,000 delegates to 900 assemblies representing nearly 3 million workers. A bank worker delegate explained that in general “Each assembly...
This review is written by Barry Sheppard, a longtime friend and comrade of Peter Camejo.
North Star
By Peter Camejo
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010, $15 paper.
This book by Peter Camejo, who was an important figure in the radicalization of “The Sixties” and beyond -- up to his untimely death in 2008 -- should be read by veterans of the socialist movement and wider social causes. It also should be read by new activists thirsty for understanding of previous struggles in order to better...
Mustansar Randhawa -- a well-known organizer of power loom workers across three Punjab districts in Pakistan: Faisalabad, Jhang and Toba Tek Singh -- and his brother were shot to death July 6th. They were killed by hired gangsters who sought them out at the Labour Quomi Movement office and killed in cold blood.
Please sign on to the urgent action put out by the Asian Human Rights Commission. It details the situation of the power loom workers, whose bosses feel they can intimidate the work force...
Our city in central Tennessee has become the latest battleground in the struggle against Islamophobia.
A short time ago, an area that had been zoned for a church right outside the city limits of Murfreesboro (home to Middle Tennessee State University, Tennessee's largest undergraduate university) was acquired by the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in order to construct a larger community center complete with a space for worship as well as athletic facilities. If constructed, the enlarged Islamic...
Inspired by Ms. Alghanee's life and work, Greens reaffirm support for reparations for the descendents of slaves
WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders, mourning the recent death of Njere Akosua Aminah Alghanee ('Sister Courage'), national co-chair of National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), reaffirmed the party's dedication to reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.
On June 24, Njere Alghanee had just returned from the US Social Forum...
The Group of 20 Nations Summit in Toronto was marked by incredible divisions within the summit and outside, amongst the demonstrators. Since there is ample analysis of what went on within the summit available to us all, I will try and briefly report back on my experience in the lead up to the large Saturday march, the march itself and immediately afterwards. I attended the march, which was also the largest of the week’s actions, with two comrades from the Middle Tennessee branch of Solidarity...
After a number of delays, the jury in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who killed Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland in January 2009, is scheduled to begin its deliberations over again today, in Los Angeles.
The case has collective resonance because of a long history of systematic disregard for and collective punishment directed at Black and Brown communities in the East Bay by various police agencies. This is the underlying question to which we must...
As someone who worked on aspects of organizing the US Social Forum in Detroit, I found the actual event innovative and inspiring. It's difficult for any one person to provide an overview of the USSF 2010 because one could have no more than sampled the more than 1,000 workshops, half a dozen demonstrations, three plenaries, nearly 20 Detroit tours and about two dozen 4-hour People's Movement Assemblies that took place over the five days.
What impressed me the most was the creative, cooperative...
The US Social Forum left me feeling, more than anything else, overwhelmed and confused. I don’t mean to be overly negative—of course, it was also inspiring to see so many radicals come together and to feel the energy that was present. But I was really struck the urgency of several questions for the left, none of which I have answers to.
Oliver Stone's new documentary about Latin America's leftward political shift and its growing independence from Washington is being lambasted by the media. This shouldn't come as a surprise as Stone calls out the mainstream media in his new film South of the Border for its mostly one-sided, distorted coverage of the region's political leaders—most significantly Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez .
In an interview with CBS about his new film Stone remarked about America's obsession with empire,...
Part 3 in a three-part series on the UPR Student Strike of 2010. Part 1 and Part 2 were both originally published on la más mínima diferencia/the slightest difference.
On June 21, 62 days into what was initially a 48-hour occupation of the flagship campus at Río Piedras, the University of Puerto Rico’s first-ever National Student Assembly put an end to what had now become the first-ever system-wide strike in the institution’s history. The nearly 3,000 students from all 11 campuses of the...
When addressing the important question of scale--"how big or broad do we really need to be in order to start calling some shots in a meaningful way"--some of us on the left are fond of approvingly paraphrasing Lenin's idea that "politics is millions." ["Politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions."]
This is a truism that few would contest, but it's also a good reminder of the real mammoth task at hand. Before we can realize the "another world"...
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Afro-Caribbean intellectual and revolutionary Walter Rodney. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was killed by a car bomb planted by an agent of the authoritarian and nominally "socialist" Forbes Burnham regime in Guyana--a regime he had mounted critical opposition against through the Working People's Alliance. Rodney was the author of several groundbreaking books and pamphlets, most notably How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
If you're unfamiliar with...
I wrote this after watching more youtube vidos of speeches from today's Gaza demos than I probably should have...
The current situation has again raised the issue of Israel’s legitimacy and the power of its American lobby. Here are some thoughts in response to some of those issues. And again, they are thoughts not meant as a full analysis.
The Israeli lobby obviously exists. AIPAC and the ADL being the most prominent examples. They have huge resources and influence. You cross them in bourgeois...
What are the international implications of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla? Ziyaad Lunat, an activist for Palestinian rights and Outreach Coordinator for the Gaza Freedom March, provides his comments below.
Ryan: Could you describe the present situation regarding the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla?
Ziyaad Lunat: Israel illegally attacked the six-boat flotilla carrying 700 human rights activists from 40 countries in international waters on its way to deliver badly...
In the past, my blues writings for Against the Current and the Webzine have tended to be obituaries. Here's a discussion of a great soul/blues singer, though, who's very much alive--Cyril Neville. This essay below is an expanded version of a CD review that appeared in the June 3, 2010 issue of the online Blues Blast magazine, which can be accessed at www.TheBluesBlast.com--GF
Cyril Neville
The Essential Cyril Neville
1994-2007
MC Records
11 tracks
Total time: 57:13
www.myspace.com/cyrilneville
The workers at Honda have electrified the world with their determination and solidarity in their strike against the multinational company. On May 17 the strike began at Foshan City, Guangdong Province when more than 1,800 workers held a general assembly, formulated their demands and elected representatives. Eighty percent of the workers are student interns from technical schools. They are not protected by the labor law nor do they have any social insurance.
Honda management, like many other auto...
In response to the belligerent attacks on the civilian aid ship headed for Gaza early Monday morning, the local BDS organization in Atlanta, Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia, called for an emergency protest in front of the Israeli consulate. Over 100 people answered the call, from local BDS activists to high school students and members of other socialist organizations. Many of these demonstrators were Palestinian and a few were Jewish.
The majority of the outreach for the demonstration...
By David Camfield and Daniel Serge
for New Socialist Group in Canada
Deficits are the difference between what governments spend and what they take in. Governments often claim deficits are the fault of social spending that's too high. But in fact deficits always grow when capitalist economic activity slows down or contracts because tax revenue falls while state spending rises.
The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has caused deficits to grow. States have had to spend around $20 trillion...
Early Monday morning, Israeli military forces attacked the six-vessel Gaza Freedom Flotilla, killing nearly twenty civilians on board the Mavi Marmara. The Flotilla had been organized to carry 10,000 tons of desperately needed humanitarian supplies to Gaza, which has been under siege since January 2009. Electronic Intifada has an article about the assault. The Real News Network has produced this video:
More at The Real News
In response, protests are being held worldwide to stand against Israel's...
by Danielle Sabaï
On Wednesday May 19th, the government of Abhisit Vejjajiva finally launched an assault on the Red Shirt camp in the neighbourhood of Rachaprasong. Television stations from around the world broadcast brutal images of assault tanks destroying the bamboo and tyre barricades and soldiers armed with rifles firing live ammunition at demonstrators. The disproportion between the images of war and the faces of the demonstrators, mostly peasants and urban works, is striking.
The media...
by Danielle Sabaï
This article was written on Sunday, 17th May. Since then, and despite repeated requests of the leaders of the UDD to negotiate a truce, the government of Abhisit Vejjajiva has sent armour-plated tanks to "clean up” the district occupied by more than 5000 demonstrators, men, women and children. The government of Abhisit decided to use force to stay in power. Armour-plated tanks and live ammunition against mainly unarmed demonstrators! Already several deaths have been...
by José A. Laguarta Ramírez
Images: JCR, RBS, Indymediapr
Video: Diálogo Digital
As the sun rose on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, two hundred students, mostly masked, some brandishing makeshift shields of wood and plastic traffic drums, approached the main vehicular access gate to the University of Puerto Rico’s historic Río Piedras campus, and chained it shut.
Thus began the ongoing campus occupation, which has now spread to all 11 campuses of the UPR system, becoming the first ever...
The decision of the Puerto Rican government, under governor Luis Fortuño, to proceed with its plan of mass firing public employees and spending cuts to public education is a major social and economic error that will only serve to deepen the current crisis in Puerto Rico. The government’s plan aims to boost the privatization process of the basic services on the island. This will directly affect thousands of Puerto Ricans and will hit the marginalized sectors of society the hardest. There are...
Rhonda Copelon, a human rights lawyer, died on May 6, 2010, after battling ovarian cancer for four years. Her pathbreaking work, according to Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the CUNY School of Law, “ altred the bedrock of how U.S. courts treat international human rights abuses.”
In the late 1970s, using the Alien Tort Claims Act, a little known federal statue from 1789, Copeland and Peter Weiss, both lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, brought a civil suit for a family in Paraguay...
The case of the Mississippi Scott Sisters, Jamie and Gladys who are now in their sixteenth year of an unjust and racist incarceration, is beginning to reach a wider audience and is inspiring bold actions in support of their struggle for freedom and justice, all the more urgent in light of the criminal medical neglect of Jamie Scott's end-stage kidney disease by the Mississippi Department of Corrections and particularly its head, Commissioner Christopher Epps, who is well aware of Jamie's...
While the post-modern assertion that all things were only relevant to themselves, and therefore categories were false and constraining, has been given a good battering by the post-post Cold War world, there remains a real aversion to thinking about systems with their laws and categories. The thing about categories is that they are not fixed (at certain times they are necessarily arbitrary), nor are the elements characterized by them. They, like everything, are part of processes in motion. Beyond...
In the late 1960s, as a graduate student at San Francisco State I worked with others to set up the first women's study class and to demand a School of Ethnic Studies. Over 800 were arrested in the course of the 1968-69 strike and expelled. I take pride in the fact I played a minor role in the development of ethnic and women's studies classes in schools and universities across the country.
On the 20th anniversary of the student strike at S.F. State, speech professor Hank McGuckin explained how he...
Readers will pardon the delay in delivering part 2 of Notes on a Disaster (read part one here). Two weeks is a long time in many disasters; however in this one it isn't. Not only does oil continue to gush, unchecked, from the ocean floor, but we are going to be living with this spill for a long, long time.
The first drops of oil on the Louisiana shore
Before I get into the meat of this post, what have we learned in the last few weeks?
I came across this video today, narrated by an environmental investigator in Alabama named John Wathen:
At mile 87, ground zero. My first view of the sight was one of tremendous impact. I'll never forget the scene. These are not small boats. While standing at a dock looking at them, they look like large ships. They're dwarfed in comparison to what I see on the horizon. Nothing but a red mass of floating goo - that could have been prevented, and should have been prevented...
We counted thirty...
This year, Hampshire College’s annual reproductive justice conference --held from April 9 to 11-- seemed to come at a ripe moment. Just two weeks earlier, President Obama had signed an executive order affirming that the new health insurance exchanges would have to conform to the existing rule prohibiting federal funding from being used for abortion. Feminists -- from those who had advocated compromise to others who were continuing to fight for single payer -- were debating the worth of the...
Due to huge debts, the Greek government (led by social democratic coalition PASOK) has fallen under supervision the International Monetary Fund and the European Union - and seeks to impose historically severe austerity measures on the working class. In response, Greek workers mounted a huge general strike on May 5. Savas Michael-Matsas of the EEK (Revolutionary Workers Party) sent in this photo and report:
As the Greek Parliament prepares to vote for the IMF/EU program of draconian measures,...
Whew, what a week. Last Tuesday, April 27, I intended to rush home from an exhilarating 12-hour protest at the Broadview Detention Center and write about it here. After a vigil of more than 150 people, 75 of us had spent the night talking, dancing, and picketing before an unassuming brick building in suburban Chicago. This is a place used to process captive, undocumented workers - the five vanfulls that night are just a handful from more than one thousand immigrants who are deported each day. In...
The May 1st rally in defense of immigrant rights in Los Angeles was one of the largest, but Nativo Vigil Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), was unable to deliver his speech -- apparently he was viewed as too militant.
MAPA is an organization that has most recently focused on the right of all immigrants to have driver's licenses. The denial of licenses to undocumented immigrants is an attempt to drive them into the shadows, but it is also a safety issue for...
by Jan Malewski
Braving the bullets of the forces of repression, thousands of demonstrators seized the “White House”, seat of the central authorities and the presidency on April 7, Bichkek, in Kyrgyzstan.
The demonstrators, first gathering to protest against the arrest of oppositionists, were attacked by the forces of repression and replied immediately with stones, charging the police squads who had fired on them, disarming them and overcoming the trucks and armoured vehicles of the police,...
Today, May 5, is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo, the holiday celebrated by Americans that recognizes the victory over the French colonialist army by a rag-tag army of Mexican peasants in 1862, in the Mexican state of Puebla--truly a people's victory.
But May 5 is Karl Marx's birthday as well; Marx was born on this date in 1818 in Trier, Germany. Marx's family had a long lineage of rabbis, but Karl's father converted to Lutheranism the year before his birth--a comon "assimilationist" strategy...
I was prompted to reflect back forty years ago today on the anniversary of the Kent State Massacre of May 4, 1970.
36 anticapitalist groups plan European solidarity with Greek struggle
1. The global economic crisis continues. Massive amounts of money have been injected into the financial system – $14 trillion in bailouts in the United States, Britain, and the eurozone, $1.4 trillion new bank loans in China last year – in an effort to restabilize the world economy. But it remains an open question whether or not these efforts will be enough to produce a sustainable recovery. Growth remains very sluggish in...
From the Tea Party to the Coffee Party, How Political Parties Grow the Grass and Mow the Lawn
Dan La Botz
May 3, 2010
There are moments in history when driven by economic and social conditions, by war, or by political problems, grassroots groups spring up from below, among rank-and-file workers or people in local urban or rural communities. Usually the Democratic Party has succeeded in gathering up such movements, domesticating them, and gathering them into its fold and making them part of its...
Vermonters from all across the state converged on the statehouse on May 1st in a demonstration to show that Vermont can be the first state in the nation to recognize healthcare as a human right, providing it as a public good by implementing a single-payer, universal healthcare system.
Over a thousand people marched from the Montpelier City Hall down to the capital building accompanied by drums, dancers, puppets, baloons and signs supporting universal healthcare while chanting "hey, hey what do...
Like many people in South Louisiana, I have been utterly overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster represented by the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. To witness another catastrophe of this scale, less than five years after post-Katrina levee failures, is almost too much to comprehend. There is a tendency to block it out; to think that this really can't be happening. But it is.
A boat travels through the Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
News accounts will talk of leaked memos, of containment...
Clayton County, a working-class, mainly immigrant and African-American suburb just south of Atlanta, is the latest victim of neoliberalism. Last year, the Clayton County Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 to shut down C-TRAN, the county's bus service, which had been around for almost a decade. In response, Atlanta Jobs with Justice started mobilizing riders last October, but there was not enough time to develop a large and strong enough movement to push back the cuts.
Besides the lack of time,...
—José A. Laguarta Ramírez
Member, Puerto Rican Association of University Professors (APPU)
Over 3,000 assembled students at the main campus of the University of Puerto Rico, at Río Piedras, on Tuesday, April 13, voted overwhelmingly in favor of a tentative 48-hour campus occupation the following week, to be followed by a full-fledged “indefinite strike” if the administration refused to negotiate in good faith.
The occupation began on Wednesday, April 21, and became a strike at midnight...
Check out this blog post from Eskandar about the first performance of DAM, a Palestinian hip-hop group, in Atlanta! As someone who was involved in the efforts to bring them here from apartheid Israel, I can say all the frustrations with visa denial were worth it in the end. Music like DAM's is an indispensable weapon in the struggle!
[Article originally posted over at The Ruh of Brown Folks, a blog worth following!]
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DAM, Palestine’s first hip hop crew,...
This is a story of a small urban California island community of 72,000 that turned back a multi-billion dollar global Wall Street hedge fund and their developer front company SunCal from a massive takeover of 700 acres of a contaminated landfill former naval air base in the San Francisco Bay.
By Dan La Botz, Ohio Socialist Party Canadidate for the U.S. Senate
Alex M. Triantafilou, head of the Republican Party in Hamilton County, Ohio, posted a video recently attacking Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) as “The Enemy.” The video shows Maxine Waters questioning Shell Oil President John Hofmeister about the supposed benefits of permitting oil companies to expand their drilling. During the course of the discussion, Waters started to talk about “socializing” the oil...
George W. Bush was the keynote speaker at the anti-abortion Celebration of Life Event at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 15, 2010. While 4,000 "pro-lifers" paid $30-$70 apiece to hear him speak, George W.'s visit was also greeted by a sprited group of around 20 protestors opposing his anti-women's rights stance, along with noting his nefarious activities in launching the war against Iraq and his general lying to the U.S. and world publics about what he was up to.
The...
This 92-minute documentary retells the story of how a brilliant policy analyst learned that the war he supported and justified was a fraud. Even those who remember the publishing of the Pentagon Papers may not realize how deeply embedded Daniel Ellsberg was in the story itself. He was on duty at the Pentagon August 4, 1964 when calls came in that a U.S. ship had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin - and he was there when a subsequent message arrived indicating that such an attack didn't happen....
Here's another great piece written on the current situation in Haiti, by Kali Akuno of Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
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"Confronting the Occupation: Haiti, Neo-liberalism, and the US Occupation"
Written by Kali Akuno
National Organizer, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The three-month marker for the earthquake that devastated Haiti is now upon us. The significance of this marker is not one determined by the Haitian people, but rather by the enemies of the Haitian people...
by Tassos Anastassiadis and Andreas Sartzekis
As we write this article, every effort is being made in the Greek media to turn people’s attention not to the urgency of a massive and ongoing mobilization, but to the tense atmosphere of the discussions within the European Union about whether Greece “deserves” or not to be helped, and to what extent recourse to the IMF can be acceptable.
This discussion is certainly not without interest, for at least two reasons: it makes it possible to see...
The Vermont Workers Center/ Jobs with Justice (VWC ) grew out of a grassroots livable wage campaign in central Vermont. Since 1998, when the VWC was started, we’ve organized support for union contract and right-to-organize campaigns at over one hundred workplaces across the state.
Two years ago, based on the growing need for systemic healthcare reform reflected in calls to our workers’ rights hotline, discussions with our members and affiliates, and in increasingly difficult collective...
This leaflet was handed out at a Hispanic Roundtable Candidate Forum in Cleveland, OH.
¡Empleos Ya!
Necesitamos empleo y lo necesitamos ahora. Ohio es número cinco en la nación en desempleo. La proporción oficial de desempleo es 10.9 por ciento. En realidad aproxima a 17 por ciento. Toda la gente de Ohio debe tener trabajo.
La comunidad hispana ha sido duramente golpeada. La gente latina ha perdido trabajos en la construcción, la manufactura y en los servicios. Mientras la proporción de...
The following was received in an email from Ezili Dantò (Marguerite Laurent), the text of which can be found on her blog.
US/Euro pillage masking as humanitarian aid by Ezili Dantò
Here is an good example of what real helps looks like (Statement of Cuban Foreign Minister at UN Donors Meeting on Haiti
http://bit.ly/b3ZHJa.
Below we post the Haiti-Cuba proposal for building health care in Haiti that considers the needs of the poorest of the poor in Haiti and is without the unseemly large budget...
A just released video from the internet news agency WikiLeaks shows gun-sight footage of Iraqi civilians being mowed down from a US Apache helicopter during the summer of 2007. Those killed included two Reuters reporters, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Reuters' attempts to probe the military were met with responses that the reporters were part of a “hostile force."
WikiLeaks' footage, titled “Collateral Murder,” clearly shows a group armed only with cameras. As one of the victims...
On March 31, I spotted a few billboards reading "Black Children are BEAUTIFUL" in downtown Atlanta. Underneath the still-drying wheat paste, the signs' original message was not so uplifting: Black Children are an Endangered Species.
Over the past couple months, these provocative billboards have been sprouting up in Atlanta neighborhoods. Featuring a fearful-looking African American child juxtaposed with the disquieting statement, the billboards are part of a campaign sponsored by an...
Six trade unionists in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were targeted and murdered in the first month and a half of 2010. The Spring 2010 USLEAP newsletter provides an excellent summary summary:
Violence Against Trade Unionists Rises throughout Central America in 2010
The civil wars that tormented Central America ended with the 1996 signing of the Peace Accords in Guatemala, but a new spiral of violence is once again claiming the lives of trade unionists throughout the region. Between January...
News reports have revealed that Pope Benedict XVI appears to have been directly involved in the cover up of priests’ sexual abuse of children. What should be clear is that the Pope’s action is entirely consistent with the religious and political philosophy that he has promoted for decades within the Church. The Pope believes that he and the Roman Catholic hierarchy stand not only above the Church and its members, but also above the world’s governments and their laws.
Order these eye-catching buttons to spread the demand for social and economic justice. If you don't have paypal, email us!
Brown and black buttons demand: "Bring all the Troops Home Now!" Wear one everywhere to start a conversation about why US occupation can never be a force for liberation, and people's needs should come before the massive military budget.
Quantity
1 button & shipping $1.50
5 buttons & shipping $5.50
10 buttons & shipping $8.00
20 buttons & shipping $12.00
I thought this article, written by my friend Justin Jeffre for The Cincinnati Beacon is a fascinating article about the African American debate over Obama....
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PBS Radio and TV host Tavis Smiley has sparked controversy in the black community by criticizing the first Black President with what he calls “tough love.” Smiley reminds us of the tough line Dr. King drew against the war in Vietnam—a move that angered the LBJ administration, the media and...
By Gregory Flannery
The further left one’s politics goes, the more argumentative is the company he keeps. Thus while many progressives in Cincinnati might agree with Dan La Botz’s policy views, he is not necessarily every local activist’s favorite.
That won’t faze La Botz, who brings an unusual combination of political scholarship and organizing experience to the Ohio race for U.S. Senate. A veteran of union campaigns, anti-war movements and the ongoing struggle against racism, La Botz...
Around 200,000 immigrants, workers, and family members packed the National Mall on Sunday, March 21 to demand immigration reform. At least doubling organizers' goal, the mass of people, which recalled huge rallies and marches across the country in 2006, was one of the largest demonstrations since Obama's inauguration. We held signs and chanted: Obama, no dejes la reforma pa' mañana - Obama, don't put off reform until tomorrow.
Today, March 25th, is a "day of blogging" to support justice for the Jamie and Gladys Scott, two wrongfully imprisoned sisters in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. There are two central issues at stake with this important case.
Most immediately, the life of Jamie Scott is being endangered due to the prison's ongoing and cruel medical negligence. She is being denied the urgent medical care she needs for both malfunctioning kidneys and she has an infection that has spread throughout...
Of all the miserable aspects of the healthcare bill – the lack of a public option, the exclusion of undocumented immigrants, and lack of real insurance company regulation – the anti-abortion provision is near the top of the list.
On Sunday the White House released the text of an
executive order reaffirming the bill’s consistency with the Hyde Amendment. Hyde, passed in 1976, prohibits federal funding for abortion, thereby preventing Medicaid recipients from accessing this essential...
It's official. Georgia has now joined the many other states experiencing an upsurge of student activism against budget cuts threatening the very nature of public higher education. On March 15, over 500 students from across the state rallied at the Capitol to demand that profound cuts, including an up to 50% fee hike and up to 4,000 layoffs of campus workers, be utterly abandoned and that new taxes be instituted to fund the public sector. From Dalton and Carrolton, to Savannah and Valdosta,...
On March 15, Georgia Students for Public Higher Education sponsored a state-wide demonstration at the capitol in downtown Atlanta. GSPHE was formed at Georgia State University in Fall 2009 to fight a $200 fee increase for university students. In March legislators announced plans for massive tuition and fee increases, as well as furloughs and layoffs of campus staff and faculty.
An organization called Irish Queers protested the St Patrick's Day Parade - which bans gay groups - yesterday in New York City. Despite the illegality of anti-gay discrimination, the NYPD, FDNY and public officials like Mayor Bloomberg participate in the parade. Irish Queers is pursuing a civil rights lawsuit.
The protest was covered by Europe's Pink News and was mentioned in WNYC's parade coverage.
Last summer, I started working at an after-school program but was fired after only six months. Because I was not fired 'for cause' (failure to meet expectations, inappropriate behavior, etc.), - which is possible because there is no union contract - I was eligible for unemployment benefits. But because there's no union contract, they could fire me without any cause. The director later confirmed to a co-worker that I was fired for participating in discussions about her management policies....
The 2010 convention of Labor Campaign for Single Payer at the National Labor College, in Washington DC, showed a high level of commitment by the group to move ahead with the campaign for national s
As the new year began, four students began a 1,500 mile walk from Miami to Washington, DC.
Out of the Shadows and Into the Streets!
Much like its storied sibling, International Labor Day (May 1), International Women's Day often gets short shrift in the United
POR LA LIBERTAD A LOS PRESOS POLITICOS DE CAMPECHE, MEXICO
México está viviendo un nuevo proceso de militarización y represión hacia los movimientos sociales y de oposición al gobierno
I recently attended an event at Bluestockings organized by the Rock Dove Collective, which coordinates a network of radical health practitioners who
Labor Party Pakistan: Women's struggle for Economic justice & social protection will continue
In the yet-to-be written guide to badass feminist entertainment, the classic 1954 movie Salt of the Earth belongs right next to classic rap trio Salt-N-Pepa (any takers on that article?)
The earthquake that took place in Haiti on 12 January 2010 affected the entire country but hit the capital city Port-au-Prince and the neighboring region especially hard.
Yesterday’s NY Times article
about the US Marines’ “female engagement teams” was a good reminder that, despite the war’s
I’m writing this while recovering from a good, long, and successful day on the picket lines at UC Santa Cruz, where, over the course of the day, more than a thousand students, workers, and teachers
Dan La Botz is a member of Solidarity and of the Socialist Party USA running for Ohio Senate. The interview below originally appeared in Columbus Examiner.
Find out more, donate or get involved in the campaign at DanLaBotz.com
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Dan La Botz, 64, a native of Chicago who lives with his wife and children in Cincinnati and teaches Spanish at a local elementary school, has his own reasoned view of socialism and reasons for entering the race.
La Botz said he's running...
Dan La Botz, Ohio Socialist Candidate for U.S.
It seems to be an average day in the bustling
Only a month and a half after a powerful earthquake laid waste to Haiti, the most oppressed country in the western hemisphere, Chile, supposedly Latin America's ‘most advanced,’ was hit by a even s
By Eskandar and Ryan
The Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) kicked off the first day of Israeli Apartheid Week on Monday by packing a l
Dan La Botz, Ohio Socialist Candidate for U.S. Senate, Calls for Immediate U.S.
Alabama has one of the highest union densities in the south, and a rich tradition of labor militanc
Hundreds of members of the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) are running as candidates in the upcoming French regional elections where they will speak for the party's platform of revolutionary anti-ca
In case you didn't see, national planners of the US Social Forum will be hosting informational call-in sessions every Tuesday (in english) and Thursday (in spanish) for the month of March (numbe
This page, which we'll continue updating from time to time, is an attempt to aggregate sources of information that will help you keep up with what's happening in California university struggles.
When occupations, strikes, and major protests are in progress, the best way to follow them from afar is often through Twitter or Facebook. If you're on twitter, you can follow the following lists:
ca-education-struggle list - maintained by a (G)SOC supporter
cacrisis list, maintained by Angus Johnston, a...
Twenty years ago the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua was brought to an end with the election of Violeta Chamorro, whose campaign had been largely funded by Washington.
Earlier this month, the first National Tea Party Convention took place in Nashville, Tennessee.
Turning luxury condos into truly affordable housing. Undocumented immigrants voting. Living wage economic development.
For decades, he revolted against the Spanish crown.
A February forum in Chicago memorialized the French radical philosopher and political leader, Daniel Bensaïd, who died in January 2010.
In 1921, Blair Mountain, West Virginia became a flash point for the class struggle that raged in the southern coalfields.
Late Sunday night, like millions of other people, I found myself basking in the brilliance of the historic New Orleans Saints Super Bowl victory.
Howie Hawkins, a longtime Socialist Party member, Green Party leader and friend of Solidarity recen
Many of the global criticisms of last month's Climate Change talks in Copenhagen have sarcastically noted that not much more than hot air emerged from the meeting . It turns out that's true.
Did anybody watching Obama's state of the union address catch the part where he rolled out comprehensive immigration reform? To save you the trouble of re-reading the transcript: no.
Sinners and Saints... New Orleans Redemption Found?
Almost everyone in Louisiana- including myself- is excited about the Saints making it to the Super Bowl. No.
Below is a piece written for the emerging movement against fee hikes and budget cuts at Georgia State University in Atlanta. This version has been modified for the Solidarity webzine.
Howard Zinn died today at age 87.
In Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago, slumlords get a spot on the city's top planning board - while their tenants get thrown ou
In California today, we are facing an onslaught of austerity capitalism in the form of privatization / private accumulation, funding cuts, and neoliberal prioritization that effects public goods in
Shortly after the 1973 Supreme Court decision that overturned the laws outlawing abortion I attended a workshop in which one of the lawyers who successfully argued the case outlined how the right w
Rape. Murder. Corruption. Environmental contamination. Impunity. These are just some of the charges and incidents that have plagued Canadian mining operations abroad for years.
Tom Condit, a long time socialist in the San Francisco Bay Area, died January 9 at age 72.
by Kim Redigan
[Kim Redigan is a member of Michigan Peace Team and participated in MPT’s delegation on the Gaza Freedom March in December.
Russia Today: Now joining us now live from New York to talk about the relief response is Glen Ford.
A qualitative leap in organizing, a large African presence
Hundreds of immigrants from the Cincinnati area, most of them African and Latino, filled the Hartwell Community Center
The January 12th 7.0 earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti is a disaster of unimaginable proportions that has likely left tens of thousands dead and many more without adequate medical care,
Following the November 4 passage of Referendum 1, which banned same-sex marriages in Maine, activist Ryan Conrad of Maine Video Activists Network i
Este articulo fue publicado por Viento Sur, en número 107, diciembre 2009.
En septiembre pas
François Sabado
Daniel left us today, Tuesday the 12th of January 2010.
In September 2008, some 8,000 people — from social movements and churches, and from labor and the left — marched through Pittsburgh to protest the meeting of the finance ministers of the G-20.
Willie Mitchell, multi-faceted veteran of Memphis soul, who served as musician, long-time producer and executive at Hi Records, and talent deveoper, died recently.
The Copenhagen conference failed to produce anything remotely resembling a solution to the climate crisis, but it also failed from the perspective of the US ruling class.
When I was in college in the 1950s, I read everything I could on the death penalty -- including Albert Camus’ essay -- and decided the barbaric practice needed to be eliminated.
For decades United Auto Workers (UAW) members at the Detroit Three – GM, Ford and Chrysler – were alleged to be narrowing their goals.
On December 26, Dennis Brutus, world-renowned South African poet and anti-Apartheid fighter, who spent time in Robben Isl
I live in Indianapolis, where I am currently active in the Indiana Socialist Fellowship.
On December 16, Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, was arrested by the Israeli police.
NOTE: Kali Akuno's video and transcript is halfway down the page.
BRUCE DIXON, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report
On December 15, the Atlanta branch of Solidarity hosted "Atlanta's Post-Election Reflection: What's Next?" Featured speakers, from Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,
I became interested in history from the “bottom-up” when I was in high school.
[This is the third of a three-section remembrance of the youth radicalization of the 1960s.
[This article by Terry Conway and Thomas Eisler originally appeared in International Viewpoint.]
[This is the second of a three-section remembrance of the youth radicalization of the 1960s. Read part one here.]
As the Copenhagen talks draw to a close, several things remain clear.
On October 24th, students, workers, faculty, and staff of California schools gathered in a statewide meeting to decide the future of their move
Four decades after the zenith of the youth radicalization of the 1960s, 1969, a veritable cornucopia of books penned by the now-aging veterans of that radicalization is pouring forth in full flood.
The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), continues its fight for its members’ jobs and for the union itself, but now, two months since President Felipe Calderón’s liquidation of the state-owned
California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the
People before Profits! In the United States, the motto can be seen on signs at protests or health care rallies, though it is a plea historically ignored by lawmakers in Washington.
If a lie is repeated enough times and in enough places, some will believe the lie is the truth. That’s the strategy the leaders of the Honduran coup are employing.
The rise, fall, and rise again of union reformers is a familiar story line in American labor.
[The following document was circulated in November by a number of Mexican labor organizations, social movements, and political organizations, sometimes in the form of a petition.
Tens of thousands of Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) members, their families, other union members, peasant organizations, social movement activists and students engaged in a symbolic “taking
Darfur just may be the tip of the melting iceberg.
This past Thursday the IRS auctioned off a large land parcel owned by th
This was released as a leaflet by the Oakland branch of Solidarity.
Forty years ago, Chicago police murdered Fred Hampton as he slept in his bedroom with his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, 8 months pregnant. He was only 21 years old.
Going Back to Cali’
Lessons to learn from California Student Strikes and Occupations
Last weekend thousands gathered in Fort Benning to protest the School of the Americas.
The Eleventh Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance is being observed in about 150 localities around the world this week, commemorating more than 160 transgender or gender-different people who have
Building on more modest actions one month ago, California's statewide public university system has exploded in protest as thousands of students rally against outrageous tuition hikes.
There’s a glimmer – a very faint glimmer – of hope arising from recent developments in Palestine.
On November 18, 2009 defense attorney Lynne Stewart's conviction on five charges of conspiracy, providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity and making false statements was affir
If you were a member of the House of Representatives voting on the House health care reform bill, then Saturday night the 7th of November was your chance to show appreciation to your sponsors.
The judgments about the Obama administration one year on by people such as Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation (www.thenation.com
The battle over health care reform has engaged most of the progressive activist forces in the country, including unionized workers in the “labor for single payer” movement, with the left lining
Over the past month, there have been 132 people arrested (and hundreds more in supporting protests) in 20 cities around the country, all demanding a single-payer healthcare system, or Medicare for
We await the Obama administration’s decision to follow one escalation in Afghanistan with another.
“Rethink Afghanistan” has been widely toured by peace activists in the English-speaking world around the anniversary of the 2001 inv
It seems doubly ironic that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has given its 2009 award to Barack Obama -- just a few months after Arizona State University declined to award him the customary, symboli
The October 5, 2009 issue of Time magazine has a 10-page Special Report on Detroit, titled “Notown.” But it’s the same old story--blaming the workers for wanting to better their lives and spe
I drove from Tennessee to Pittsburgh for the G-20 events with a group of seven folks from Knoxville and Murfreesboro, including five Solidarity members (myself and Karen and Leslie P.
Open Letter to the Movement from
CT Students Against the War
Keep Jeff Bartos Free! Support the IVAW! Defend Free Speech!
Keep checking the Solidarity website in the coming days for reports and analysis of the G-20 protests, as well as news regarding any next steps
"Hey, Red Dog: Bored with Grandmothers?" Those words, scribbled with marker on a makeshift sign, lingered above a crowd mostly confused by their meaning.
This was originally published in Labor Notes magazine.
While most are busy analyzing the healthcare speech delivered to Congress days ago—a final push to promote the public option reform and put to rest challenges from the left and right—this piece
Here's a video of Nancy Fraser, who teaches at New York's New School. She's placing 2nd wave feminism within the larger political context of its historical moment.
“You know why we’re not going to quit? Because we’re one, we’re one unit. We’re tired of being beaten; we’re tired of being oppressed.” --Attica inmate, 1971
What principle should guide our thinking as we approach the health care debate?
This morning, I woke up to several friends’ Facebook statuses or posted links telling me that Van Jones, Obama’s Green Jobs “czar” (I need to make an aside here, to say how thoroughly I det
Since the announcement several months ago that the G20 was coming to Pittsburgh, local activists have been busy organizing local opposition to not only the policies of the G20, but the very existen
The August 21, 2009 news that the U.S.
The US Left has a few different tasks in regards to situations of national political importance; among them are 1) putting out our politics about the situation, including a critique of the current
Anyone who’s been to a supermarket within the past couple of years is undoubtedly familiar with the horrible phenomenon of “self-checkout” machines.
In my years living in Georgia I’ve only lived in the 4th district, and attended town halls thrown by both Cynthia Mckinney and Hank Johnson.
How should the left relate to Obama? A response to Linda Burnham
Charlie Post*
In these days of incessant scare mongering around 'the obesity epidemic', I have been wanting to write about how I experience fat activism.
The June 28 issue of the Sunday New York Times magazine had a long article, “GM, Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class.” The article recounted the story of an African-American
The June 24th New York Times reported that, in yet another effort to apply a “market based philosophy” to the problems of the poor, NYC's Bloomberg administration would seek to decrease funding
Most of the labor news we hear about these days involves rank-and-file struggles with union bureaucrats or with business management, and sometimes both at the same time.
By Cyril Mychalejko
Philly IMC
The cold-blooded murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller on May 31st sent shockwaves across the United States.
On June 8, Reverend Edward Pinkney’s case was brought before the Third District Court of Appeals in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tim Holloway, who has represented Rev.
When Atlanta Housing Authority bulldozers ripped into Bowen Homes in early July, they destroyed more than the 950 units of public housing on the city’s west side.
This past weekend, I flew to Sacramento for an interview with the Argentine Discovery Channel. They're doing a documentary on César Chávez, about whom I wrote a biography.
Jamie and Gladys Scott: Wrongfully Convicted
I was happy to see the new front page on global warming.
On the heels of the recent success of the Viva Palestina: Lifeline from Britain to Gaza medical aid convoy of over 100 vehicles headed by British Minister of
Sent from comrades in Malcolm X Grassroots Movement:
Transforming Ward 2, Jackson, and the South
The California Supreme Court decided to uphold Proposition 8 as a legal amendment to the s
This month, two Korean men under heat from the law have made the news by taking their own lives, against a backdrop of social unease and anti-government feeling.
This past April, I had the privilege to participate in a brief campaign to defend workplace rights here in the Andean city of Mérida, Venezuela where I currently live.
The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble resulted in a wave of foreclosures around the country.
Written by Erica Thompson
www.UpsideDownWorld.org
Written by Erica Thompson - www.UpsideDownWorld.org
Recently I visited a friend’s house and saw a photo of a little girl with those super-short bangs that were popular when I was young.
Troy Davis has spent nearly two decades on Georgia's Death Row, convicted of a 1989 murder on nothing but testimony.
On May Day, Vermont’s state capitol rocked to chants of “Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
I just came across a post on one of my favorite feminist blogs, www.feministing.com, discussing how the New Hampshire state legislature
I think it's noteworthy that once again Brazil's Lula government is running interference for U.S.
Thinking forward to an auspicious May 1st this year.
Irish and British workers have been occupying Visteon auto parts plants since March 31 and April 1 respectively.
I paste below an anonymous obituary of Franklin Rosemont.
On March 21st over 200 labor activists and organizers -- about 70 percent rank-and-file members of labor unions -- packed Labor Notes’ Troublemakers School in New York City.
There is some minor celebration occurring on the U.S.
A lot of socialists have a yen for science fiction. I mean, apart from the fact that we are often geeks anyway, science fiction almost always tries to imagine an alternate future.
I wasn't sure what to think when I came across a tourist website advertising the "NYC Rainbow Pilgrimage," a City effort to market NYC as a gay tourist destinatio
I have followed with excitement the recent student occupations at two private colleges here in New York: February
After my cartoons on the Employee Free Choice Act and support for the Stella D'Oro strikers
“We Need MARTA, Seven Days a Week!”
While the US banking elite takes advantage of the crisis to further consolidate their economic control and wealth - with little more than a whimper from workers - social unrest around the world points to the kind of struggle that is possible and necessary. To gain a proper understanding of the possibilities that have opened up, it's necessary to paint in broad strokes, as John Bellamy Foster did in a February interview:
The sudden fall of the governments in Iceland and Latvia as a result of...
[this was mailed from Jason Netek]
In our times, it is rare that art and politics come together well.
When the meltdown of the sub-prime mortgage market last Fall began to spread to major banks, investment houses and insurance companies, the Bush administration responded with massive bailouts the f
Israel has historically been the largest recipient of U.S. military aid.
This morning I heard the news that the installed president of Afghanistan is backing a law that would legalize rap
Durban, South Africa, has since my first visit reminded me--and not only me -- of California. They both have great surfing, beautiful beaches,an amazing climate and a laid-back vibe.
No one can tell you that capitalism is working, and after several decades of global neoliberalism (a brand of de-regulated hyper-capitalism spawned in the mid-1970s to secure the continuing rule of
Tariq Ali, the author of three books on Pakistan--most recently, THE DUEL, Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, gave several talks at the University of Michigan Flint in March 2009.
The Employee Free Choice Act is a crucial piece of legislation that is currently in Congress.
On March 17 RedStar504 posted an article, "Victory in El Salvador: an inspirational sign along the path", on the March 15 Salvadoran presidentia
The conservative spin-machine is running at full throttle in its attempt to thwart the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and potentially related-pro-worker legislation.
Late Sunday March 15, I listened to an English language radio broadcast from San Salvador, hopeful.
One part of the military machine that facilitated the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza this January has released a new offensive product.
Yesterday there was a memorial for Steffie Brooks, a long-time activist and revolutionary, and member of Solidarity in NYC.
I am finishing a Masters in Social Work in New York, and have been very involved in student organizing at my school.
A couple of years ago, when General Musharraf was running Pakistan, he sacked the judiciary because he was afraid of its independent rulings and thought his election itself might be ruled illegal.
On March 5th tens of thousands of New Yorkers packed City Hall for a rally called by One New York – a coalition of the major labor unions and community groups – to oppose Governor Paterson’s
Just a few months ago, the idea of getting together with nearly 100 people for an all day strategy discussion on any progressive issue in Atlanta would have seemed wildly optimistic.
March 8 is celebrated around the world as International Women's Day, but IWD is not very well known or celebrated in the country of its birth.
Since I wrote the first essay for this webzine (see “Spatiality and Working Class Solidarity”), I have been preoccupied with how workers can
Check out this YouTube click of an American army officer [transcribed below] as he harangues an Iraqi police patrol, telling them they're "acting like a bunch of fucking women".
Here are a few "talking points" for activists in response to Barack Obama's speech last week [NYTimes link to transcrip
I’ll leave the task of detailed dissections of Obama’s applause-heavy and content-light State of the Union address to others.
"Sisters, brothers, guests, friends and we'd be fooling ourselves if there are no enemies here..." Today, February 21, I’ve been thinking (even more than usual) how history might have developed i
From Take Back NYU!:
NYU administration thuggishly breaks occupation
Continuous updates on Twitter: http://twitter.com/takebacknyu
Emily Jacir, a Palestinian American who lives in New York and Ramallah, has won the Hugo Boss Prize of 2008. This award is given to support significant achievements in contemporary art.
On February 18, a group of NYU students calling themselves "Take Back NYU" occupied the Kimmel building on the south side of Washington Square.
This is a comic I made in support of the Stella D'Oro strike for my union newsletter.(For more information on the strike, click here.) You can c
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to see a friend and comrade, badly weakened by a terminal illness, for the first time in several months. Not much older than my own mother, S.
[This is a talk I gave in Durban, South Africa a few days ago....]
A couple of dozen striking Stella D’Oro workers and their allies braved the freezing rain to rally in front of Fairway supermarket on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Wednesday Jan. 28th.
I first came to REALLY hate our Democratic senior senator from New York, Charles Schumer, for his ugly and belligerent conduct during the Waco hearings, where he berated Waco survivors as fools and li
This is a moment when it’s hard to remember why art matters, let alone art that highlights the voices of those who – knowingly or not -- perpetrate oppression.
New Yorkers Respond to Israel's Attacks on Gaza
Nearly a thousand protesters flooded Rockefeller Center in Manhattan on December 28th in response to the Israeli attacks against Gaza.
The controversy around Barak Obama's unfortunate selection of Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation has focused primarily on his public gay bashing and support for California's Proposition 8, an
It is Christmas time, but there is little holiday cheer at the Stella D’Oro cookie factory in the Bronx.
On day eight of the unrest triggered by the police killing of 15-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, police officers in Augusta, Georgia f
On December 16, New York State Governor Patterson proposed a total of $9 billion of spending cuts and regressive tax and fee hikes.
Malik Rahim, the Green Party Candidate for the 2nd Louisiana Congressional District, did not win in the election held December 6, 2008.
Here's some updates on the heroic and inspiring occupation of the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago.
This afternoon, Troy Davis defense lawyers presented arguments to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals - the latest stage in a dramatic tug-of-war between the state of Georgia and broad public opinion
The factory occupation by 200 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, Illinois, recalls one of the most storied moments in American history, when thousands of Depression-era workers took ove
The left tends to analyze the world with broad strokes, looking at the action (or inaction) of our class in the thousands and millions.
On Thursday November 20, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York (MTA) met to discuss budget cuts.
There are protests in dozens of cities across the United States against the California state Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage.
I teach in a working class suburb, not too far from Oakland, whose political character is very, very different from that in the city itself.
The Puerto Rican Federation of Teachers (FMPR) has done the near-impossible: solidly defeating one of the world’s most powerful labor organizations in an election for representation of Puerto Ric
(There will be a post-election interview with Howie Hawkins on Solidarity Webzine.
When last seen on the picket-line, Puerto Rican teachers were fighting their way through police barricades to appeal to fellow workers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at its
This morning's "funeral for justice" ended with joyful laughter and hugs as local activists celebrated the second stay of execution for Troy Davis in two months.
Understanding and Responding to the Economic Crisis: Some Talking Points (version 2.0)
On October 10th the Radical Film and Lecture Series organized a talk by Rosa Clemente, the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party, Hip Hop activist, independent journalist and community or
Troy Davis, the innocent man on Georgia's Death Row, is safe for now. A grassroots movement and international awareness has brought the case to the halls of the US Supreme Court.
SOME TALKING POINTS ON THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
By Kate Griffiths and Isaac Steiner
The era of the United States as a “the world’s only superpower” is ending.
The United States economy has not been this bad since the Great Depression. The rulers of the US hoped to retain global power militarily, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the country’s raw economic superiority slipped. But these wars cannot be won: opposition among the occupied populations, and growing dissent within the...
It has been a turbulent week on Wall Street, and I’m not just talking about stock prices.
In various ways, millions of people are registering their rejection of the proposed $700-billion-plus bailout plan to temporarily save capitalism.
I was on a panel discussion about the antiwar movement at Wayne State University. Panelists were discussion a special Spring/Summer 2008 issue of WIN, the War Resister's League's magazine.
I met with Troy on Death Row Saturday night. He was very hopeful, but cautiously so. I asked him, "Troy, how old are you?" He said "I'm thirty-nine. I'll be forty on my next birthday.
Call and response chants of "I am: Troy Davis! We are: Troy Davis" and "Innocence: Matters!
It has been a dramatic moment on Wall Street; first Bear-Sterns and then Lehman Bros. went bankrupt.
Every night, CNN’s Lou Dobbs harangues the American public with overblown concerns regarding illegal immigration, linking the alleged “crisis” of undocumented immigration to all things terrib
On August 25, ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) conducted one of the single largest immigration raids in the country at Howard Industries just outside of Laurel, MS.
A great voice of love, memory and vigilant solidarity has passed. It's hard to imagine more like Darwish arriving in these cold times.
For years, I've taught sociology at a community college in New York City. I'm always looking for current examples to illustrate how class, race and gender work in contemporary capitalist socities.
Outside the Pepsi Center, protesters gathered during the DNC to protest the war, capitalism and to march for immigrant rights in numerous events throughout the week.
Because the Democrats had the gall to schedule their convention on the ideal week for riding bikes along Lake Michigan, I neglected to keep up with excitement. Was there any excitement?
The Dark Knight is the pre-eminent summer action-superhero blockbuster of 2008, and will probably soon become the second grossing film of all time, behind
Three years after the floodwaters of the Hurricane Katrina subsided, the people of New Orleans voters are plagued by barriers to voting, misinformation and disenfranchisement .
After reading an article in the NY Times and subsequent googling, I discovered a proliferation of local org
When we present revolutionary ideas, is it just the content that matters, or the form, as well? If the form matters, should it reflect popular styles, or should we constantly push boundaries?
Blue Vinyl (2002) http://www.bluevinyl.org/ , by Judith Helfand and Daniel B.
This is an article I wrote for a local Bronx freebie paper, the Norwood News.
Role of Private Equity Worries Tenant Advocates
In the last two installments of Mp3 Spotlight we have looked at the work of individual musicians who have put their creative energies towards building social movements.
Thousands of Koreans have been protesting the importation U.S. beef by gathering in vigils almost every night for the last two months.
I’ve been compiling a list of various extralegal activities one can get away with in the United States if his/her skin lacks melanin.(I think maybe I should maybe shift to things that whites cannot
When I joined Solidarity, the first thing everyone asked was “what brought you here?” “How did you become a radical?” This question is crucial for activists because it’s part of the overall
The name Ashok Kumar rings a few bells: the field hockey star who helped win the 1974 World Cup? The famous Bollywood star who played the main character of India’s first soap opera?
[A Talk by Tim Schermerhorn at the Black Workers Caucus in the Black Workers Track of the 2008 Labor Notes Conference, where a Black Workers Network was formed.]
To have a real chance of making real fightback strategies, we must have at least a fundamental understanding of the forces arrayed against us, and how they operate. An essential component of this process is demystifying words such as neoliberalism. One of the reasons for this encrypted terminology is to send a message to common people,...
Cornelius Cardew lived a singular life in modern music. He helped give birth to electronic music in the 1950’s, connected the U.S. and European musical avant-gardes, and pushed the limits of improvised music with groups such as AMM. From the mid 1950’s through the early 1970’s Cardew burned like a comet, redefining experimental music and earning legend status. But when his commitment to Marxist politics intensified he left it all behind to create “people’s liberation music”....
While there are people who pursue powerful positions in society or in a group in order to dominate others, there are also those who identify themselves with dominant groups or the ideology of the group and submit themselves to the opinions of strong authority figures. One of the characteristics of them is to show a “blind faith” toward their “ingroup” to which they belong and hostility toward “outgroups.” Besides, they seldom show sympathy (or often show hostility) toward minorities...
Last night, Barack Obama's presidential campaign achieved the number of Democratic delegates needed to win the nomination at the Party's convention in Denver this August.
As the boys say, "unless you've been living under a rock" you know that the
COMMENTS ON FRSO, WHICH WAY IS LEFT?
[This contribution was originally presented to a November 18, 2007 joint meeting of Solidarity, Freedom Road Socialist Organization/OSCL and an independent study group of activists interested in revolutionary organization]
After an 87-day strike that started in the depths of a snowy and blistery winter and ended in late spring, the UAW workers at five American Axle plants in Michigan and New York voted to accept a deeply concessionary contract and return to work. Wages will be reduced by $5-7 an hour along with freezing pensions, outlawing the right to strike during the life of the contract under any circumstance, and gutting the old contract. Why did the strikers, after shutting down more than 30 GM assembly...
The following appeared in the Solidarity discussion bulletin after a Solidarity National Committee discussion of 'Which Way is Left?' [WWIL] and a joint meeting in NYC between Solidarity, Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad [FRSO or FRSO/OSCL], and the New York Study Group - a discussion of radical community activists in the city who are interested in revolutionary organization.
I had a “romantic” dream about Detroit when driving to the city for my summer job last year. If anyone has been in Detroit, he or she would know that there are many abandoned buildings. Abandoned, of course, does not mean devoid of “legal” and “private” owners. Nevertheless, what if we socialists, workers, and homeless people were to physically occupy abandoned buildings and use them as our offices, homes, and conference places, and eventually make the city into a “socialist...
The recent Solidarity front page on the cyclone in Southeast Asia (borrowed from International Viewpoint) is in line with my own reflections on the politics of aid in the wake of 'natural' disasters.
The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice – I had no alternative. – Paul Robeson
I want to kick off this ongoing series on the webzine with a look at a seminal political artist. Christy Moore is a powerful vocalist, song interpreter, and a passionately political person and performer. To many he may be simply a folksinger, but Christy Moore is a voice for the voiceless.
Almost two years ago, I met somebody at a club, and when he told me what he did for a living, I nearly dropped my frou-frou drink. I think it was a tequila sunrise. That or a margarita. Something brightly colored and with a lot of sugar.
At long last, Atlanta Jobs with Justice has released their excellent study and plan for regional transit centered on the needs of riders and workers. You can download the report from Atlanta JwJ's website or download it directly here. The study is the project of years of research and organizing with the Transit Riders Union - a group of transit-dependent riders and disabled riders - and workers in our transit system, MARTA, who are represented by Amalgamated Transit Union 732. This is in our...
“Radical Blogging Is The Main Trend In Our World Today”
Let’s focus on two trends in radical blogs, both based on Marxism. One is the emergence of a web of prolific Maoist/Marxist-Leninist blogs in the United States. The other is the world of Marxist blogs emanating from English-speaking western Europe. I will start this entry with a look at the Maoist-inspired blogs.
(The arduous pace of the school, and it's work and social demands, means that I have not been able to keep up with my journal on a daily basis. Thus, I apologize for the partial summaries below; some of the fun, wacky, informal conversations are also left out, as I had to reconstruct some days from my notes. - John)
I will attempt to write daily notes on the 3-week Global Justice School (Amsterdam, NE March 28-April 19) organized by the International Institute for Research and Education. I miss my comrades – and the start of the baseball season! – but it is a great experience being here.
I didn't want all the burgeoning Solidarity bloggers or our loyal fans to miss the Carnival of Socialism up at stroppyblog. The previous Carnival was here--definitely worth a look. You should also note that there is an upcoming Carnival of Socialism to which you can and should submit your best work! Do so at Practically Insurgent.
The “crisis of the Left” is usually referred to the disarray of movements, its weakened political and social power, the effects of demise of bureaucratic “really existing socialism”, and the neoliberal offensive. It remains our responsibility to seriously interrogate these conditions, study our world, and chart strategies for a new socialist project.
I'm trying to figure out whether I think Elliot Spitzer actually did anything that we should call "corrupt." I'm sure he broke his marital vows, quite repeatedly it seems, and I get what the folks are saying that Silda shouldn't have stood by her man, literally, and looked crushed - she should have issued a statement dumping his ass. Then, at the same time, I feel like that kind of decision is between her and her God and her shrink and so forth and giving a feminist seal of...
Heavy storms and tornadoes ripped through downtown Atlanta and surrounding neighborhoods of Cabbagetown, East Atlanta, and Vine City last weekend. Media coverage following the storm conformed to the usual clichés: the twisters “sounded like freight trains” and their aftermath resembled a “war zone.” I can’t totally discredit either of these. I do live across the street from a freight line, wasn’t right across the street from the tornados, but I’m not too concerned with what they...
Has anyone noticed how Obama and Clinton have been rushing to outdo each other in "rejecting and denouncing" controversial figures associated with their campaigns? First it was Obama, with Farrakhan. I was disappointed to see Obama "reject and denounce" Farrakhan himself - rather than rejecting and denouncing his anti-Semitic statements, which are worthy of being rejected. But I figured it was par for the course. Farrakhan has always been a lightning rod of presidential...
Friday it was announced that New York State government’s bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will bail out Wall Street big-shot bankers at Bear Stearns. Perhaps fittingly, Lee Bollinger, the Columbia University President who’s behind one of the biggest land-grabs in the city, is on the Board of Directors of this bank.
Indian shipyard workers accuse their employer of human trafficking and forced labor; Guest Worker organizing continues in Mississippi and Louisiana
by Robert Caldwell & Damien Ramos
A lot of my friends have recently had or are about to have babies. It’s been something of a learning experience for me, in some very practical ways.
For example, I learned all about competing sleep theories from a friend with a bedtime-adverse 20-month-old. She and her husband spent considerable time developing a method that is a middle ground between letting the child cry indefinitely and rocking him to sleep every time he wakes up (which is every 2 hours). Other things I learned are that new...
Susan Faludi, author of Backlash and Stiffed, has with her latest offering, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America, drawn upon her previous insights into the causes and consequences of the anti-feminist backlash of the last three decades and applied them to period following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
April 5 2012
Confession: I am a major Law & Order (L&O) junkie. I just can’t get enough of new episodes and reruns (including episodes I have seen at least a dozen time) of the original L&O. L&O Criminal Intent comes in a close second (although I have never gotten the hang of L&O Special Victims Unit). As a friend and comrade who shares my obsession put it, “It’s got cops and lawyers — what more can you ask from a mainstream TV show?”
Book Review: Laura Pulido’s Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest.
“Subaltern” groups, according to Pulido, are those which are subordinated socially, politically, culturally, and institutionally as well as economically. For example, Mexican agricultural workers occupy the lowest position within the division of the labor, lack political rights and legal protections, and face language barriers.
Book Review: David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.
Pellow’s Garbage Wars examines the history of the environmental struggles over the means and locations of the disposal of solid waste in Chicago and discusses the problems of “environmental racism.”
The genuises at The Onion understand well Freud's discovery of how jokes reveal a side of truth and reality that we, for one reason or another, are unwilling to admit to ourselves up front. Thus the recent article "GM Introduces New 2008 Line Of Layoffs."
Mike Huckabee is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Though he’s still in the race, Republican insiders have started endorsing John McCain by the droves. This includes many Republican leaders who don’t like McCain much (criticizing his “liberal” stances on immigration, tax cuts, and campaign finance), and some who have a lot of affinities with Huckabee’s base, such as Oliver North. Pundits who have been very critical of McCain,...
March 10 2012
Hey Lovers and Fighters –
Continuing my tendency to tail respond to the writing of the fine folks over at FRSO/OSCL, some of this is influenced by a west coast Freedom Road comrade, Claire. You can read her article from last year here. Another Oakland (Solidarity) comrade made me promise I’d write some stuff on love and sex and relationships if she reposted something of hers from a few years ago on polyamory. So: here you go, sister!
*Title taken from James Baldwin essay by that title (1984)
By the time I graduated high school, I saw that the rural area of Pennsylvania I grew up as the epitome of racism…and homophobia. Not much room for liberal “we-love-diversity”. I left there hating the whole area: it was dead, backward, close-minded, bigoted and all that. Arriving in New York for college, I thought I was in heaven, a far as “lets-all-get-along” diversity goes. That lasted about one subway ride, and I soon...
February 16 2012
Looking backward: The following piece is from almost five years ago, and my own views continue to evolve. Sometimes I feel like they devolve. However, I think that the subject is worth Left discussion and commentary, because, as my friend A. says, why don't lefties fucking GET personal politics? We can rag on "social conservatives", but often our own views come off as some kind of queasily tolerant personal-as-political Not In My Back Yard. So I am posting this, and will rebut it in the...
From Jan. 11 through Jan. 13 Solidarity held a socialist feminist retreat that brought together a multi-generational group of 60 activists to discuss work, gender and heteronormativity. There were lots of great discussions, both organized and informal.
What does it mean to read with a child? How, as materialists, do we talk with our kids?
Lucy
Monday evening I called to chat with my friend, "Alice", who works at a university hospital, and asked how she celebrated the holiday:
Alice: "uh, by working."
Kate G: "Working? Seriously? They don't give you the day off?"
January 6 2012
Hello out there in internet land!
Some of you may have noticed that we're knee deep in the so-called "political season." Yes, that's right, that’s when us ordinary folks are invited into debates about the issues of the day. Does this mean Warren Buffet’s attempts to stabilize the bond market house of cards? The US Navy’s clumsy attempt to manufacture a threat from Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz (through which almost all the world’s petroleum reaches market? Nope, it’s a...
Patriarchy has existed for thousands of years, but the process of separation between public and private spheres in capitalism imposed new kinds of gender roles between husbands and wives in Western Europe by the middle of the 19th century: While a husband became the sole breadwinner in the public sphere, his wife took the task of the reproduction process in the private sphere. These separate roles became more rigidly reinforced by the ideology of the “cult of domesticity,” which was...
Last summer, I traveled to South Africa to do some academic research related to health care. To keep myself busy and record my experience, I kept up a private blog for family and friends. Now that Solidarity has its own weblog(!), I'm sharing some of these old posts. I intend to follow up with some more current analysis on South Africa and the themes my trip got me thinking about. This post, is a description of my experience at the SANPAD conference in Durban on June 26th-30th, 2007.
For the...
Last summer, I traveled to South Africa to do some academic research related to health care. To keep myself busy and record my experience, I kept up a private blog for family and friends. Now that Solidarity has its own weblog(!), I'm sharing some of these old posts. I intend to follow up with some more current analysis on South Africa and the themes my trip got me thinking about. This first post is a book review...
Liberation movements in the United States lost a brave and vibrant participant in the death of Bob Kohler, a leading figure of the American Gay Liberation Movement.
Bob Kohler, 1926-2007Bob lived dozens of lives in his 81 years on the planet. Although Bob was best known as an early leader of the Gay Liberation Front he was also a talent representative for mostly Black artists in the early 1960’s, a vintage clothing store owner, World War II veteran, a talented and empathetic listener, bath...
...'till, as Otis Redding told us, "your well runs dry." Water crisis, often predicted to be one of the 21st century’s political flashpoints, has arrived in the southeastern United States. Over the past two years, the entire region has experienced a record-setting drought.
A friend who knows a lot about how and why the criminal justice system works in the United States put it into context for a group of folks a few weeks ago. Paul says we assume that prison conditions are bad, the issue is the number of people who will be subjected to them. Mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented social experiment of the modern American era, made more effective because there is no centralized plan. And there's no natural force to stop or contain it.
Jaime Paglia (creator of Eureka), Rob Kutner (writer for The Daily Show), and Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) at the Writers Guild of America Rally in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass., on Friday, December 14th, 2007. Photo from Brad Searles
Last Friday there was a rally by striking writers in Boston. Joss Whedon, the Creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the big names at the event. A friend of mine asked me if I had ever seen the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
So... I’ve been mulling over my reaction to this book by Michael Albert, Parecon. Friends on a blogging engine, LiveJournal, directed my attention toward it. I read it with very close attention. Herewith is my response, finally.
Image from New Orleans IndyMedia
I just learned--too late--that the Ohio labor movement lost a great leader at the end of 2006 in Tom Mooney. In fact he died a little over a year ago today.
What I didn't know is that Tom started out as a '60s radical at Antioch College and worked on a ton of public and collective education projects, then rose through the ranks of the union. He ended up head of OFT/AFT in Columbus, OH, and I knew him through labor-coalition work. He died much too young, at 52, of a heart attack.
Many geographers since the 1960s have studied impacts of “spatiality” in working class solidarity. Simply put, every society in a certain historical period has its own particular ways of creating, arranging, and rearranging social and physical spaces, and the processes and the outcomes of spatial arrangements affect workers’ ways of looking at the world, social relations, and their own lives.
I met a woman a few weeks ago who has been working on a voting-rights project in The Bronx for several years now. She said that 48 of 50 states strip felons of voting rights and that 5 million potential voters are legally denied that basic right.
On Nov. 10th several hundred community members met at historic St. Mary’s Church in Harlem and marched through the public housing complex chanting “Harlem: Not For Sale!” and “Public Housing: Not For Sale!” to Columbia University’s main campus. There, students joined them to protest what some are calling “Hurricane Columbia”, a reference to the struggles against gentrification and population removal in New Orleans. For over four and a half...
When I broach the subject of race with my college freshmen in their introduction to composition class, I often do so through the medium of sports. What does it mean, I ask, that NBA players are now required to wear suits and ties when they sit on the bench? And why is it that, when African-American youth Genarlow Wilson was released from prison after serving two years for having consensual oral sex with another teenager, it was ESPN that offered the most extensive, in-depth article in the...
Like Christmas, the US bourgeois electoral cycle seems to start earlier every time around. The scripted, stage-managed debates, the empty moralisms and focus-group politics, competition for Oprah’s endorsement – yep, there must be a national election soon. Besides recognizing the increasingly vapid terms of political debate at the national stage and entertainment spectacle of it all, there are important shifts and realignments already surfacing.
Public Enemy's newest album.So, when I first heard plans for this Solidarity blog at our 2006 convention, I wanted to do a review of New Whirl Order (2005) and Rebirth of a Nation (2006,) and compare them to Flavor of Love. Since then, How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People who Sold Their Soul? (2007) has been released. Flavor of Love had a second season, and spinoffs I Love New York and Charmed School gained widespread attention.
I live in Crown Heights, which is a mostly West Indian and African American neighborhood in Brooklyn. I've been there for two years, and like most black neighborhoods in New York, the cops are pretty much a constant presence.
Recently the New York Times revealed a secret about the NYC Mayor’s oft-touted subway commute: our City’s top elected leader is chauffeured to his preferred station in a caravan of Chevy Suburbans.
"Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine" Merle Travis
"The system is broken." Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. Aug 23
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