Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Jezebel [1] / By Katie J.M. Baker [2]
Dartmouth Quick to Punish Rape Protestors Instead of Actual Rapists
May 29, 2013
It's been a tumultuous spring semester at Dartmouth College, thanks to a highly publicized student protest [3] and widely supported Clery Act complaint, both of which accused the college of mishandling violations of sexual assault, homophobia, and racism. This week, Dartmouth responded by...charging undergrad protesters for rallying in a dining hall. Somehow, we're not surprised.
To recap: in April, a group of Dartmouth undergraduates interrupted a presentation for 550 accepted students to protest [4] the above issues, among other grievances. Both administrators and fellow students were pissed, since it's not fab PR to tell prospies that the college they're considering has larger problems than a disappointing cafeteria salad bar. Some of the upset Ivy Leaguers responded by posting online death and rape threats about the protestors — a few suggested lynchings and public executions.
Afterwards, Interim President Carol Folt and Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson cancelled classes for a day to soothe campus tensions and, according to Dartmouth senior Karenina Rojas, promised several protesters that they wouldn't receive disciplinary action. Rojas said local police also claimed Dartmouth College wouldn't press charges.
On May 23, over 30 students and alums filed a Clery Act complaint with the Department of Education, alleging that Dartmouth College was in violation of the Clery Act, citing "violations of sexual assault, LGBT, racial and religious discrimination, hate crimes, bullying and hazing," according to The Dartmouth [5]. Things were heated, but moving right along!
Until May 28th — the day before the last day of classes and right before The Dartmouth winds up for the academic year — when around two-thirds of protesters at the prospie student show received an email from the head of Undergraduate Judicial Affairs letting them know that they were being charged with a violation of "Standard IX - Failure to Comply: Directions," because college officials told us not to enter the dining hall where the protest was held.
The possible repercussions — a letter of Warning, Reprimand or a maximum sanction of probation — aren't huge, but protesters believe it sends a clear message about whose side the administration is really on. "There is a belief among some of the protesters that the Dartmouth administration finally caved in to pressures to punish us, despite the fact that no one, to our knowledge, has been punished for harassing us or for publishing threats online against us," Rojas told Jezebel in an email, citing "calls from prominent alumni to punish us, particularly at a conference that they just held two weekends ago" (Here's aDartmouth article [6] with some pretty ignorant alumni quotes.)
Rojas has reported homophobic harassment and said the perpetrators received no punishment, and "certainly" no disciplinary hearing. Yet: protestors are in trouble for entering a dining hall. "Several people I know have been sexually assaulted, went through the official college disciplinary process, and the perpetrators were found guilty—yet no disciplinary action beyond a warning or probation was taken against them," Rojas added.
Will this story blow up like UNC student Landen Gambill's, who was punished [7] by the Office of Student Conduct for "intimidating" her rapist by speaking to the press about her sexual assault earlier this year? Her case was eventually dropped by the chancellor's request — and after #standwithLanden trended nationally. It seems by the timing of Dartmouth's response that they're hoping it doesn't.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dartmouth-quick-punish-rape-protestors-instead-actual-rapists
Links:
[1] http://blog.jezebel.com/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/katie-jm-baker-0
[3] http://protest/
[4] http://jezebel.com/dartmouth-protestors-rudely-distract-prospies-by-talk-478008315
[5] http://thedartmouth.com/2013/05/23/news/clery
[6] http://thedartmouth.com/2013/05/20/news/alumni
[7] http://jezebel.com/5986693/college-rape-survivor-faces-potential-expulsion-for-intimidating-her-rapist
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Mass Rally for Bradley Manning This Saturday, Trial Begins Monday
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/304-justice/17676-mass-rally-for-bradley-manning-this-saturday-trial-begins-monday
Fuller writes: "We the People must send a message to the military prosecuting authority, and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a patriot and heroic truth-teller."
In advance of Bradley Manning's trial scheduled to start next week, Manning supporters will rally at Fort Meade. (photo: Bradley Manning Support Network)
Mass Rally for Bradley Manning This Saturday, Trial Begins Monday
By Nathan Fuller, Open Mike
30 May 13
The highly secretive trial of Bradley Manning begins Monday, June 3rd, at Fort Meade in Maryland. Fort Meade is the home of the National Security Agency, the Defense Information School, the Defense Courier Service, and most recently the US Cyber Command. A large portion of the trial will be held in secret, with no transcripts available.
Despite the efforts by the government to hide this trial, Reader Supported News will be there. Civil Rights attorney Bill Simpich, courtroom sketch artist Kay Rudin, and RSN political director Scott Galindez will be shining a spotlight on the proceedings. Stay tuned to RSN for our special coverage of the trial of Bradley Manning.
y the Bradley Manning Support Network.
• 1pm Gather (Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland)
• 2pm March
• 3pm Rally and Speak Out
Sponsored by the Bradley Manning Support Network and the national Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War organizations, with the help of Courage to Resist, and many other groups.
RSVP to this event on facebook.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
After more than three years of imprisonment, including nine months of torture, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning's trial is finally scheduled to begin June 3, 2013, at Fort Meade, Maryland. The outcome of this trial will determine whether a conscience-driven 25-year-old WikiLeaks whistle-blower spends the rest of his life in prison. Bradley believed that the American people have a right to know the truth about what our government does around the world in our name. We the People must send a message to the military prosecuting authority, and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a patriot and heroic truth-teller.
June 1st is the International Day of Action to Support Bradley Manning. Join us at Fort Meade on the eve of Bradley’s court martial. Solidarity actions are welcome at bases, recruiting centers and US embassies worldwide. We ask that Veterans for Peace join us in cosponsoring these historic events.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
-------------------------------
Monday, June 3, 2013
ATTEND THE BEGINNING OF US v. BRADLEY MANNING
7:30am - 8:00 am, enter Fort Meade at Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland
9:00 am scheduled daily start of hearings at Magistrate Court
4432 Llewellyn Avenue, Fort Meade, MD. It is 2 miles from the Main Gate.
The court martial is expected to last 6-12 weeks. Supporters are encouraged to attend as many days of this trial as they are able.
-------------------------------
PARKING for June 1st
Free parking has been arranged at Meade Heights Elementary School, 1925 Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 20755. This parking lot is only half a mile (11 min. walk) from the the Ft. Meade Main Gate.
Additional parking will be available at Van Bokkelen Elementary School, 1140 Reece Road, Severn, MD 21144. This parking lot is one mile (24 min. walk) from the Ft. Meade Main Gate. We'll try to help shuttle folks along Reece Road.
There are a small number of unrestricted parking spaces along US 175; however, do not park in the the mini-shopping centers or the Weis Market near Blue Water Blvd.
Portable toilets are expected to be available.
Join us in the courtroom for the trial beginning June 3, 2013. Drive (or taxi) to the Fort Meade Visitor Control Center at the Fort Meade Main Gate (all the other gates are for military ID holders only), Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland. We suggest arriving when the visitor center opens at 7:30am, and certainly before 8:15am. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 9am daily. The multiple layers of security take time to navigate, and procedures often change from day to day. Each person will need a valid state or federal photo ID such as a driver’s license, state photo ID card, or passport. Foreign passports are accepted. Anyone driving on to Fort Meade will be required to submit their driver’s license, vehicle registration, and printed (not digital) proof of insurance. Your vehicle will be subject to search, and you may be required to cover over political bumper stickers on your vehicle. Consider walking on base if there are any questions at all regarding your vehicle and paperwork.
The proceedings will be held at the Magistrate Court, 4432 Llewellyn Ave, Fort Meade, MD 20755 (this is one mile from the Visitor Center). Electronic devices, including cell phones, computers, cameras, are not allowed in the courtroom, and should be left in your vehicle.
There are no pre-registration requirements for the public to attend the proceedings. However, those wishing to attend as credentialed media should contact the US Army Military District of Washington Public Affairs Office at 202-685-4645.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Fuller writes: "We the People must send a message to the military prosecuting authority, and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a patriot and heroic truth-teller."
In advance of Bradley Manning's trial scheduled to start next week, Manning supporters will rally at Fort Meade. (photo: Bradley Manning Support Network)
Mass Rally for Bradley Manning This Saturday, Trial Begins Monday
By Nathan Fuller, Open Mike
30 May 13
The highly secretive trial of Bradley Manning begins Monday, June 3rd, at Fort Meade in Maryland. Fort Meade is the home of the National Security Agency, the Defense Information School, the Defense Courier Service, and most recently the US Cyber Command. A large portion of the trial will be held in secret, with no transcripts available.
Despite the efforts by the government to hide this trial, Reader Supported News will be there. Civil Rights attorney Bill Simpich, courtroom sketch artist Kay Rudin, and RSN political director Scott Galindez will be shining a spotlight on the proceedings. Stay tuned to RSN for our special coverage of the trial of Bradley Manning.
y the Bradley Manning Support Network.
• 1pm Gather (Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland)
• 2pm March
• 3pm Rally and Speak Out
Sponsored by the Bradley Manning Support Network and the national Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War organizations, with the help of Courage to Resist, and many other groups.
RSVP to this event on facebook.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
After more than three years of imprisonment, including nine months of torture, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning's trial is finally scheduled to begin June 3, 2013, at Fort Meade, Maryland. The outcome of this trial will determine whether a conscience-driven 25-year-old WikiLeaks whistle-blower spends the rest of his life in prison. Bradley believed that the American people have a right to know the truth about what our government does around the world in our name. We the People must send a message to the military prosecuting authority, and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a patriot and heroic truth-teller.
June 1st is the International Day of Action to Support Bradley Manning. Join us at Fort Meade on the eve of Bradley’s court martial. Solidarity actions are welcome at bases, recruiting centers and US embassies worldwide. We ask that Veterans for Peace join us in cosponsoring these historic events.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
-------------------------------
Monday, June 3, 2013
ATTEND THE BEGINNING OF US v. BRADLEY MANNING
7:30am - 8:00 am, enter Fort Meade at Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland
9:00 am scheduled daily start of hearings at Magistrate Court
4432 Llewellyn Avenue, Fort Meade, MD. It is 2 miles from the Main Gate.
The court martial is expected to last 6-12 weeks. Supporters are encouraged to attend as many days of this trial as they are able.
-------------------------------
PARKING for June 1st
Free parking has been arranged at Meade Heights Elementary School, 1925 Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 20755. This parking lot is only half a mile (11 min. walk) from the the Ft. Meade Main Gate.
Additional parking will be available at Van Bokkelen Elementary School, 1140 Reece Road, Severn, MD 21144. This parking lot is one mile (24 min. walk) from the Ft. Meade Main Gate. We'll try to help shuttle folks along Reece Road.
There are a small number of unrestricted parking spaces along US 175; however, do not park in the the mini-shopping centers or the Weis Market near Blue Water Blvd.
Portable toilets are expected to be available.
Join us in the courtroom for the trial beginning June 3, 2013. Drive (or taxi) to the Fort Meade Visitor Control Center at the Fort Meade Main Gate (all the other gates are for military ID holders only), Reece Road and US 175, Fort Meade, Maryland. We suggest arriving when the visitor center opens at 7:30am, and certainly before 8:15am. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 9am daily. The multiple layers of security take time to navigate, and procedures often change from day to day. Each person will need a valid state or federal photo ID such as a driver’s license, state photo ID card, or passport. Foreign passports are accepted. Anyone driving on to Fort Meade will be required to submit their driver’s license, vehicle registration, and printed (not digital) proof of insurance. Your vehicle will be subject to search, and you may be required to cover over political bumper stickers on your vehicle. Consider walking on base if there are any questions at all regarding your vehicle and paperwork.
The proceedings will be held at the Magistrate Court, 4432 Llewellyn Ave, Fort Meade, MD 20755 (this is one mile from the Visitor Center). Electronic devices, including cell phones, computers, cameras, are not allowed in the courtroom, and should be left in your vehicle.
There are no pre-registration requirements for the public to attend the proceedings. However, those wishing to attend as credentialed media should contact the US Army Military District of Washington Public Affairs Office at 202-685-4645.
LEARN MORE ABOUT GETTING THERE: DRIVING INFORMATION, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, LODGING INFORMATION.
Get on the Bradley Manning bus! Click here for information for buses from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City, Willimantic CT, New Brunswick NJ, Philadelphia PA.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Baltimore Activist Alert - May 30-31, 2013
46] 5 Days for the Cuban Five -- May 30-31
47] Book talk on peacemaking, faith and U.S. policy – May 30
48] Pentagon Budget Happy Hour -- May 30
49] Max is seeking a place to live after June 30
50] Support the Transform Now Plowshares
51] Student looking for an internship
52] Drones Quilt Project
53] Death Penalty Referendum Watch
54] SOA Watch job
55] Just Vision job
56] Critical Exposure has four job openings
57] David Swanson book--When the World Outlawed War
58] Support Red Emma’s in its move
59] Sign up with Washington Peace Center
60] Join Fund Our Communities
61] Submit articles to Indypendent Reader
62] Donate books, videos, DVDs and records
63] Do you need any book shelves?
64] Join Global Zero campaign
65] War Is Not the Answer signs for sale
66] Fire & Faith
67] Join Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil
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46] – The SECOND “5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5 IN WASHINGTON D.C.” goes from Thurs., May 30 to Thurs., June 5. On May 30, there is a 9 AM press conference with Wayne Smith, Dolores Huerta, Ignacio Ramonet, Yeidckol Polevnsky, Fernando Morais, lawyers and other guests at the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Bloomberg Room, WDC. From 9:30 AM to 5 PM, there will be a booth with information about the Cuban 5 at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference, Washington Marriott Wardman Park, 2660 Woodley Road NW, WDC. At 5 PM, there will be an orientation meeting at Howard University Hospital, 2041 Georgia Ave. NW, Ambulatory Care Center/Towers Building, Auditorium, First Floor, WDC 20060, (There is parking in back of the hospital and also an entrance off of 5th St., between Elm and V Sts.) The orientation will be followed by the 7 PM meeting at the same location about the Role of Cuba in Africa and the Cuban 5 in Angola. Email apoyojornada@gmail.com.
On Fri., May 31 from 9:30 AM to 5 PM, there will be a booth with information about the Cuban 5 at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference. From 10 AM to 5 PM, engage in Washington area outreach. Pick up literature and assignments for distributions at busy Metro stops and other public places at the Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th St. NW, Suite 600, WDC. At 7PM, catch the Role of Cuba in Africa and the Cuban 5 in Angola, as part of an interactive panel discussion with representative of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, representatives from the Embassy of Namibia, Eugene Puryear from the ANSWER Coalition, Mary-Alice Waters from Pathfinder Press and Glen Ford, co-founder and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report." It takes place at Howard University Hospital, 2041 Georgia Ave. NW, Ambulatory Care Center/Towers Building, Auditorium, First Floor, WDC 20060. Email Netfa Freedman at netfa@ips-dc.org,
47] – On Thurs., May 30, from 3 to 4:30 PM, Dr. Eli McCarthy will share a bit about his book on peacemaking, faith and U.S. policy ("Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. policy"), followed by a conversation about some of the core practices that can respond to critical issues that the church and nation face today. See the table of contents at http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Nonviolent-Peacemakers-Catholic-Teaching/dp/1610971132#reader_1610971132. In the book, Dr. McCarthy looks at the limits of rule-based and strategic-based approaches to nonviolence; the ways Jesus, Gandhi, and Khan illuminate a virtue-based approach; prominent approaches to NV in U.S. policy discourse and how virtue could address some limits; aspects of human rights to draw on; impact on Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. policy with 7 core practices; and finally a case study that applies this to the period of genocide in Sudan. The discussion will occur at the Washington Home of Stewart R. Mott, 122 Maryland Ave. NE, WDC 20002. Call 202-546-3732.
48] – The Pentagon Budget Campaign is pleased to invite you to a Happy Hour on Thurs., May 30 at 5:30 PM at the Stewart R. Mott House, 122 Maryland Ave. NE. Invite other colleagues and put a face to the name of all the hardworking people behind the Campaign. RSVP to Stephanie at stephanie@budgetpriorities.org.
49] – As of June 30, Max is seeking a place to live. Let him know of any possibilities. He can be reached at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.dot net.
50] – You can support the Transform Now Plowshares resisters by writing the judge and the prisoners. Greg Boertje-Obed, Michael Walli and Megan Rice are currently in the Irwin County Detention Facility in Ocilla, GA, awaiting their sentencing on September 23, 2013. The three were found guilty by a jury in Tennessee in May on two counts. Judge Amul Thapar revoked their pre-trial release saying they were technically guilty of a crime of violence and must be held.
Here are the addresses: Gregory Boertje-Obed 22090 Irwin County Detention Center 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774; Michael Walli 4444, Irwin County Detention Center, 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774; and Megan Rice 22100, Irwin County Detention Center, 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774. You must make sure to include your entire return address on the outside of the envelope. No staples or paperclips can be included in your mail; no oversized envelopes. Magazines and books must be sent directly from the publisher or bookstore/Amazon. Photocopies of brief articles are likely to be permitted (based on our past experience). If you include inappropriate material or fail to comply with these rules, your mail will not get through—it will be returned to you.
The second thing you can do is send a letter to Judge Thapar. We have suggested guidelines for your letter, and we are asking people to send their letter to Bill Quigley, lawyer for Mike Walli (address below), so they can be collected and delivered to the judge. If you want to send a copy of your letter to us, that would be great—our address is also below. Invite Judge Thapar to think about sentencing in light of the fact that this was an act of nonviolent civil disobedience intended to awaken the conscience of the nation, and no evidence was presented that it was an act of terrorism meant to harm anyone. You could write that you share the court's concern that Congress would write a law that wouldn’t allow a judge to distinguish between peace activists and terrorists, and are disturbed that the government defines the crime they stand convicted of as a violent "crime of terrorism.” As testimony of the defendants showed during trial, they carried out their action in a spirit of nonviolence and hope. Without making it the focus of the letter, you could mention that the action was carried out with the clear understanding of the illegality and immorality of nuclear weapons, and intent to uphold higher laws. Encourage him to consider downward departures from the high guidelines for the charges, and to use his discretion at sentencing to bring more justice into the situation by recognizing that the defendants are NOT violent terrorists as the government has implied through its interpretation of the crime; and remind him of the intentions of the three nonviolent activists: to follow the words of the prophet Isaiah to beat swords into plowshares, and build a safer and more secure world for all. Our purpose with these letters is not to reargue the case, nor is it to condemn nuclear weapons production—the judge is not engaging those issues at this time. Our purpose is to address the legal system’s distortion of the nonviolent action of the TNP resisters and to provide support to the judge for a sentencing decision that takes into account the nature of their action and their nonviolent behavior throughout their action.
Letters should be sent to US District Judge Amul R Thapar, c/o Professor Bill Quigley, Loyola Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice, 7214 St. Charles Ave., Campus Box 902, New Orleans, LA 70118. If you care to send a copy to OREPA that would also be appreciated--orep@earthlink.net or OREPA, PO Box 5743, Oak Ridge, TN 37831.
51] – "Anna Wijatyk is graduating in May with a Biochemistry degree and is pursuing an MD/MPH. She speaks four languages (English, French, Polish, and Spanish), and, last year, she spent 7 months volunteering as a hospital assistant and community health education assistant in Chad, Africa. In Chad, Anna came to understand the influence that a physician can have by having knowledge of public health. She hopes to obtain a public health internship this summer to allow her to build on her prior experience, and to explore how she can make a difference in the fields of maternal and child health and international development."
52] – The launch of the website to support the U.S. version of the Drones Quilt Project was developed to memorialize the victims of U.S. combat drone strikes. Leah Bolger has about 185 names, and at present there are over 40 completed blocks. Soon the blocks will be sown together to create panels of quilt blocks. She will create educational information about killer drones to accompany the quilts as part of a traveling exhibit. To support the project visit www.dronesquiltproject.wordpress.com. The completed blocks are shown on the web site. The web site also contains information about creating a block, anti-drone resources and endorsing organizations. Follow the project on Twitter: @dronesproject.
53] – The death penalty repeal has been signed into law. However, two Democrats from Baltimore County – State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger and state Senator James Brochin – have joined with Republican Delegate Neil Parrott in a joint effort to petition repeal of the death penalty to the 2014 ballot. Parrott is the owner of MDpetitions.com.
The petition campaign was launched Friday, May 3. Keep a lookout for anyone collecting signatures FOR the referendum. If you see petitioning, please share where, how many volunteers, when and anything else at 301-779-5230 or info@mdcase.org. The time frame is short – one third of the signatures (18,579) are due on May 31 and those remaining of the total 55,736 signatures required are due June 30. Go to http://www.mdcase.org/.
If you live in Baltimore County, call State's Attorney Shellenberger at 443-798-1375! Tell him you are disappointed that he has decided to push for a broken system that does NOT make our communities safer and has proven to be at the detriment of justice and even to murder victims' family members.
54] – SOA Watch is Looking for a Development and Operations Coordinator! The job is based in Washington, D.C. for a minimum of 2 years. The position is full-time with health benefits, paid vacation and holiday time, and there are opportunities for skills development. The salary is $35,000 per year. Please send resume, a cover letter explaining what qualities you would bring to this job and three references to arturo@soaw.org. If you have questions about applying, call Arturo Viscarra at 202-234-3440. The hope is to fill the position as soon as possible. Go to http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=756.
55] – Just Vision (www.justvision.org) is a nonprofit organization that informs local and international audiences about under-documented Palestinian and Israeli civilian efforts to end the occupation and resolve the conflict nonviolently. The group is based in Washington, D.C., Jerusalem and New York City. There is an open position--Media and Public Engagement Manager. The person hired will join the D.C.-based team and be responsible for building a U.S. and international outreach strategy to engage thought leaders, policymakers, think tanks, journalists and other high profile influencers to generate attention and support for Palestinian and Israeli grassroots nonviolence leaders, as well as visibility for Just Vision's work, including films, public education campaigns and multimedia projects.
To apply, submit a resume, three one-page writing samples, three references, links to public speaking or media appearances if any, and a cover letter to: info@justvision.org. Incomplete applications will not be considered.
56] – Critical Exposure, a social justice education organization that teaches youth to use photography as a tool for social change, is now hiring for 4 AmeriCorps VISTA members to join the team in Washington, D.C. for a year beginning August 2013. Please see full job description for details and contact hiring@criticalexposure.org with resume and cover letter.
VISTA members working with Critical Exposure will have the opportunity to take on significant responsibility and will be an integral part of helping to support and strengthen the organization's growth and operations. VISTAs will be encouraged to take initiative on projects addressing areas of need that they identify and will have the opportunity to work closely with Critical Exposure's four permanent staff members.
The position provides a stipend of $15,840, as well as an education award or a post-service stipend upon completion of service. The position is a year-long, full-time commitment with a strongly encouraged, although not guaranteed, second year extension opportunity. Email hiring@criticalexposure.org or call 202-745-3745 x20. Submit your application through the AmeriCorps*VISTA online process: https://my.americorps.gov/mp/listing/publicRequestSearch.do or submit a resume and cover letter to hiring@criticalexposure.org.
57] – David Swanson’s latest book is When the World Outlawed War. Go to http://davidswanson.org/outlawry This is an account of how people in the United States and around the world worked to abolish war as a legitimate act of state policy and won in 1928, outlawing war with a treaty that is still on the books. Swanson's account of the successful work of those who came before us to insist that war be outlawed points us toward new ways of thinking about both war and political activism.
Buy the paperback at your local independent bookstore, which can order it through Ingram. (The list price is $15.) Or you can get 10 copies for $60, or 50 copies for $200, or more (all with free shipping) here. http://davidswanson.org/outlawrybulk. Donate free books to nonprofit educational groups at http://davidswanson.org/outlawrygive.
Buy the iPad/iPhone version at the iBookstore. Get any of these versions for $2 here: Kindle: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, Epub: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, PDF: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, and Audio book (mp3), read by the author: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry.
58] – Red Emma's is in the process of closing down the location at 800 St. Paul St., and reopening in a much larger new space on North Avenue in the fall. The collective is seeking your help. It's time to reinvent the project started in 2004 to build a self-sustaining progressive space in Baltimore, committed to providing a daily reminder that another world was possible and that there were people working in the city to build it.
Here's how you can help: donate money, buy books at the current store, provide skilled help, and share these needs. Email john@redemmas.org or go to http://indiegogo.com/redemmas2.
59] – The Washington Peace Center has a progressive calendar & activist alert! Consider signing up to receive its weekly email: info@washingtonpeacecenter.org.
60] – Fund Our Communities campaign is a grass roots movement to get support from local organizations and communities to work together with their local and state elected officials to pressure Congresspersons and senators to join with Congresspersons Barney Frank and Ron Paul, who have endorsed a 25% cut to the federal military budget. Bring home the savings to state and county governments to meet the local needs which are under tremendous budget pressures. Plan to join FOC on the March 23 Peace Bus from Baltimore to D.C. Go to www.OurFunds.org.
61] – MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Baltimore's Indypendent Reader is looking for individuals interested in creating media - written, photo, audio, or video - that relates to issues like...economic justice, race, prisons & policing, environment, gender & sexuality, war & peace and more! If you would like to create social justice media, then email indypendentreader@gmail.com. Visit http://www.indyreader.org.
62] – If you would like to get rid of books, videos, DVDs or records, contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
63] – Can you use any book shelves? Can you use any file cabinets? Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
64] – Join an extraordinary global campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons: http://www.globalzero.org/sign-declaration. A growing group of leaders around the world is calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons and a majority of the global public agrees. This is an historic window of opportunity. With momentum already building in favor of Zero, a major show of support from people around the world could tip the balance. When it comes to nuclear weapons, one is one too many.
65] – WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER signs from Friends Committee on National Legislation are again for sale at $5. To purchase a sign, call Max at 410-366-1637.
66] – Go online for FIRE AND FAITH: The Catonsville Nine File. On May 17, 1968, nine people entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. View http://www.prattlibrary.org/digital/.
67] – Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil takes place every day in Lafayette Park, 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 24 hours a day, since June 3, 1981. Go to http://prop1.org; call 202-682-4282.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better" - Daniel Berrigan
47] Book talk on peacemaking, faith and U.S. policy – May 30
48] Pentagon Budget Happy Hour -- May 30
49] Max is seeking a place to live after June 30
50] Support the Transform Now Plowshares
51] Student looking for an internship
52] Drones Quilt Project
53] Death Penalty Referendum Watch
54] SOA Watch job
55] Just Vision job
56] Critical Exposure has four job openings
57] David Swanson book--When the World Outlawed War
58] Support Red Emma’s in its move
59] Sign up with Washington Peace Center
60] Join Fund Our Communities
61] Submit articles to Indypendent Reader
62] Donate books, videos, DVDs and records
63] Do you need any book shelves?
64] Join Global Zero campaign
65] War Is Not the Answer signs for sale
66] Fire & Faith
67] Join Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil
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46] – The SECOND “5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5 IN WASHINGTON D.C.” goes from Thurs., May 30 to Thurs., June 5. On May 30, there is a 9 AM press conference with Wayne Smith, Dolores Huerta, Ignacio Ramonet, Yeidckol Polevnsky, Fernando Morais, lawyers and other guests at the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Bloomberg Room, WDC. From 9:30 AM to 5 PM, there will be a booth with information about the Cuban 5 at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference, Washington Marriott Wardman Park, 2660 Woodley Road NW, WDC. At 5 PM, there will be an orientation meeting at Howard University Hospital, 2041 Georgia Ave. NW, Ambulatory Care Center/Towers Building, Auditorium, First Floor, WDC 20060, (There is parking in back of the hospital and also an entrance off of 5th St., between Elm and V Sts.) The orientation will be followed by the 7 PM meeting at the same location about the Role of Cuba in Africa and the Cuban 5 in Angola. Email apoyojornada@gmail.com.
On Fri., May 31 from 9:30 AM to 5 PM, there will be a booth with information about the Cuban 5 at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference. From 10 AM to 5 PM, engage in Washington area outreach. Pick up literature and assignments for distributions at busy Metro stops and other public places at the Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th St. NW, Suite 600, WDC. At 7PM, catch the Role of Cuba in Africa and the Cuban 5 in Angola, as part of an interactive panel discussion with representative of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, representatives from the Embassy of Namibia, Eugene Puryear from the ANSWER Coalition, Mary-Alice Waters from Pathfinder Press and Glen Ford, co-founder and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report." It takes place at Howard University Hospital, 2041 Georgia Ave. NW, Ambulatory Care Center/Towers Building, Auditorium, First Floor, WDC 20060. Email Netfa Freedman at netfa@ips-dc.org,
47] – On Thurs., May 30, from 3 to 4:30 PM, Dr. Eli McCarthy will share a bit about his book on peacemaking, faith and U.S. policy ("Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. policy"), followed by a conversation about some of the core practices that can respond to critical issues that the church and nation face today. See the table of contents at http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Nonviolent-Peacemakers-Catholic-Teaching/dp/1610971132#reader_1610971132. In the book, Dr. McCarthy looks at the limits of rule-based and strategic-based approaches to nonviolence; the ways Jesus, Gandhi, and Khan illuminate a virtue-based approach; prominent approaches to NV in U.S. policy discourse and how virtue could address some limits; aspects of human rights to draw on; impact on Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. policy with 7 core practices; and finally a case study that applies this to the period of genocide in Sudan. The discussion will occur at the Washington Home of Stewart R. Mott, 122 Maryland Ave. NE, WDC 20002. Call 202-546-3732.
48] – The Pentagon Budget Campaign is pleased to invite you to a Happy Hour on Thurs., May 30 at 5:30 PM at the Stewart R. Mott House, 122 Maryland Ave. NE. Invite other colleagues and put a face to the name of all the hardworking people behind the Campaign. RSVP to Stephanie at stephanie@budgetpriorities.org.
49] – As of June 30, Max is seeking a place to live. Let him know of any possibilities. He can be reached at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.dot net.
50] – You can support the Transform Now Plowshares resisters by writing the judge and the prisoners. Greg Boertje-Obed, Michael Walli and Megan Rice are currently in the Irwin County Detention Facility in Ocilla, GA, awaiting their sentencing on September 23, 2013. The three were found guilty by a jury in Tennessee in May on two counts. Judge Amul Thapar revoked their pre-trial release saying they were technically guilty of a crime of violence and must be held.
Here are the addresses: Gregory Boertje-Obed 22090 Irwin County Detention Center 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774; Michael Walli 4444, Irwin County Detention Center, 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774; and Megan Rice 22100, Irwin County Detention Center, 132 Cotton Drive, Ocilla, GA 31774. You must make sure to include your entire return address on the outside of the envelope. No staples or paperclips can be included in your mail; no oversized envelopes. Magazines and books must be sent directly from the publisher or bookstore/Amazon. Photocopies of brief articles are likely to be permitted (based on our past experience). If you include inappropriate material or fail to comply with these rules, your mail will not get through—it will be returned to you.
The second thing you can do is send a letter to Judge Thapar. We have suggested guidelines for your letter, and we are asking people to send their letter to Bill Quigley, lawyer for Mike Walli (address below), so they can be collected and delivered to the judge. If you want to send a copy of your letter to us, that would be great—our address is also below. Invite Judge Thapar to think about sentencing in light of the fact that this was an act of nonviolent civil disobedience intended to awaken the conscience of the nation, and no evidence was presented that it was an act of terrorism meant to harm anyone. You could write that you share the court's concern that Congress would write a law that wouldn’t allow a judge to distinguish between peace activists and terrorists, and are disturbed that the government defines the crime they stand convicted of as a violent "crime of terrorism.” As testimony of the defendants showed during trial, they carried out their action in a spirit of nonviolence and hope. Without making it the focus of the letter, you could mention that the action was carried out with the clear understanding of the illegality and immorality of nuclear weapons, and intent to uphold higher laws. Encourage him to consider downward departures from the high guidelines for the charges, and to use his discretion at sentencing to bring more justice into the situation by recognizing that the defendants are NOT violent terrorists as the government has implied through its interpretation of the crime; and remind him of the intentions of the three nonviolent activists: to follow the words of the prophet Isaiah to beat swords into plowshares, and build a safer and more secure world for all. Our purpose with these letters is not to reargue the case, nor is it to condemn nuclear weapons production—the judge is not engaging those issues at this time. Our purpose is to address the legal system’s distortion of the nonviolent action of the TNP resisters and to provide support to the judge for a sentencing decision that takes into account the nature of their action and their nonviolent behavior throughout their action.
Letters should be sent to US District Judge Amul R Thapar, c/o Professor Bill Quigley, Loyola Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice, 7214 St. Charles Ave., Campus Box 902, New Orleans, LA 70118. If you care to send a copy to OREPA that would also be appreciated--orep@earthlink.net or OREPA, PO Box 5743, Oak Ridge, TN 37831.
51] – "Anna Wijatyk is graduating in May with a Biochemistry degree and is pursuing an MD/MPH. She speaks four languages (English, French, Polish, and Spanish), and, last year, she spent 7 months volunteering as a hospital assistant and community health education assistant in Chad, Africa. In Chad, Anna came to understand the influence that a physician can have by having knowledge of public health. She hopes to obtain a public health internship this summer to allow her to build on her prior experience, and to explore how she can make a difference in the fields of maternal and child health and international development."
52] – The launch of the website to support the U.S. version of the Drones Quilt Project was developed to memorialize the victims of U.S. combat drone strikes. Leah Bolger has about 185 names, and at present there are over 40 completed blocks. Soon the blocks will be sown together to create panels of quilt blocks. She will create educational information about killer drones to accompany the quilts as part of a traveling exhibit. To support the project visit www.dronesquiltproject.wordpress.com. The completed blocks are shown on the web site. The web site also contains information about creating a block, anti-drone resources and endorsing organizations. Follow the project on Twitter: @dronesproject.
53] – The death penalty repeal has been signed into law. However, two Democrats from Baltimore County – State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger and state Senator James Brochin – have joined with Republican Delegate Neil Parrott in a joint effort to petition repeal of the death penalty to the 2014 ballot. Parrott is the owner of MDpetitions.com.
The petition campaign was launched Friday, May 3. Keep a lookout for anyone collecting signatures FOR the referendum. If you see petitioning, please share where, how many volunteers, when and anything else at 301-779-5230 or info@mdcase.org. The time frame is short – one third of the signatures (18,579) are due on May 31 and those remaining of the total 55,736 signatures required are due June 30. Go to http://www.mdcase.org/.
If you live in Baltimore County, call State's Attorney Shellenberger at 443-798-1375! Tell him you are disappointed that he has decided to push for a broken system that does NOT make our communities safer and has proven to be at the detriment of justice and even to murder victims' family members.
54] – SOA Watch is Looking for a Development and Operations Coordinator! The job is based in Washington, D.C. for a minimum of 2 years. The position is full-time with health benefits, paid vacation and holiday time, and there are opportunities for skills development. The salary is $35,000 per year. Please send resume, a cover letter explaining what qualities you would bring to this job and three references to arturo@soaw.org. If you have questions about applying, call Arturo Viscarra at 202-234-3440. The hope is to fill the position as soon as possible. Go to http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=756.
55] – Just Vision (www.justvision.org) is a nonprofit organization that informs local and international audiences about under-documented Palestinian and Israeli civilian efforts to end the occupation and resolve the conflict nonviolently. The group is based in Washington, D.C., Jerusalem and New York City. There is an open position--Media and Public Engagement Manager. The person hired will join the D.C.-based team and be responsible for building a U.S. and international outreach strategy to engage thought leaders, policymakers, think tanks, journalists and other high profile influencers to generate attention and support for Palestinian and Israeli grassroots nonviolence leaders, as well as visibility for Just Vision's work, including films, public education campaigns and multimedia projects.
To apply, submit a resume, three one-page writing samples, three references, links to public speaking or media appearances if any, and a cover letter to: info@justvision.org. Incomplete applications will not be considered.
56] – Critical Exposure, a social justice education organization that teaches youth to use photography as a tool for social change, is now hiring for 4 AmeriCorps VISTA members to join the team in Washington, D.C. for a year beginning August 2013. Please see full job description for details and contact hiring@criticalexposure.org with resume and cover letter.
VISTA members working with Critical Exposure will have the opportunity to take on significant responsibility and will be an integral part of helping to support and strengthen the organization's growth and operations. VISTAs will be encouraged to take initiative on projects addressing areas of need that they identify and will have the opportunity to work closely with Critical Exposure's four permanent staff members.
The position provides a stipend of $15,840, as well as an education award or a post-service stipend upon completion of service. The position is a year-long, full-time commitment with a strongly encouraged, although not guaranteed, second year extension opportunity. Email hiring@criticalexposure.org or call 202-745-3745 x20. Submit your application through the AmeriCorps*VISTA online process: https://my.americorps.gov/mp/listing/publicRequestSearch.do or submit a resume and cover letter to hiring@criticalexposure.org.
57] – David Swanson’s latest book is When the World Outlawed War. Go to http://davidswanson.org/outlawry This is an account of how people in the United States and around the world worked to abolish war as a legitimate act of state policy and won in 1928, outlawing war with a treaty that is still on the books. Swanson's account of the successful work of those who came before us to insist that war be outlawed points us toward new ways of thinking about both war and political activism.
Buy the paperback at your local independent bookstore, which can order it through Ingram. (The list price is $15.) Or you can get 10 copies for $60, or 50 copies for $200, or more (all with free shipping) here. http://davidswanson.org/outlawrybulk. Donate free books to nonprofit educational groups at http://davidswanson.org/outlawrygive.
Buy the iPad/iPhone version at the iBookstore. Get any of these versions for $2 here: Kindle: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, Epub: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, PDF: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry, and Audio book (mp3), read by the author: http://davidswanson.org/outlawry.
58] – Red Emma's is in the process of closing down the location at 800 St. Paul St., and reopening in a much larger new space on North Avenue in the fall. The collective is seeking your help. It's time to reinvent the project started in 2004 to build a self-sustaining progressive space in Baltimore, committed to providing a daily reminder that another world was possible and that there were people working in the city to build it.
Here's how you can help: donate money, buy books at the current store, provide skilled help, and share these needs. Email john@redemmas.org or go to http://indiegogo.com/redemmas2.
59] – The Washington Peace Center has a progressive calendar & activist alert! Consider signing up to receive its weekly email: info@washingtonpeacecenter.org.
60] – Fund Our Communities campaign is a grass roots movement to get support from local organizations and communities to work together with their local and state elected officials to pressure Congresspersons and senators to join with Congresspersons Barney Frank and Ron Paul, who have endorsed a 25% cut to the federal military budget. Bring home the savings to state and county governments to meet the local needs which are under tremendous budget pressures. Plan to join FOC on the March 23 Peace Bus from Baltimore to D.C. Go to www.OurFunds.org.
61] – MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Baltimore's Indypendent Reader is looking for individuals interested in creating media - written, photo, audio, or video - that relates to issues like...economic justice, race, prisons & policing, environment, gender & sexuality, war & peace and more! If you would like to create social justice media, then email indypendentreader@gmail.com. Visit http://www.indyreader.org.
62] – If you would like to get rid of books, videos, DVDs or records, contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
63] – Can you use any book shelves? Can you use any file cabinets? Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
64] – Join an extraordinary global campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons: http://www.globalzero.org/sign-declaration. A growing group of leaders around the world is calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons and a majority of the global public agrees. This is an historic window of opportunity. With momentum already building in favor of Zero, a major show of support from people around the world could tip the balance. When it comes to nuclear weapons, one is one too many.
65] – WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER signs from Friends Committee on National Legislation are again for sale at $5. To purchase a sign, call Max at 410-366-1637.
66] – Go online for FIRE AND FAITH: The Catonsville Nine File. On May 17, 1968, nine people entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. View http://www.prattlibrary.org/digital/.
67] – Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil takes place every day in Lafayette Park, 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 24 hours a day, since June 3, 1981. Go to http://prop1.org; call 202-682-4282.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better" - Daniel Berrigan
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
'Resist These Dark Times': Advice from an Afghan Mother and Activist
Published on Tuesday, May 28, 2013 by Common Dreams
'Resist These Dark Times': Advice from an Afghan Mother and Activist
by Kathy Kelly
When she was 24 years old, in 1979, Fahima Vorgetts left Afghanistan. By reputation, she had been outspoken, even rebellious, in her opposition to injustice and oppression; and family and friends, concerned for her safety, had urged her to go abroad. Twenty-three years later, returning for the first time to her homeland, she barely recognized war-torn streets in urban areas where she had once lived. She saw and felt the anguish of villagers who couldn’t feed or shelter their families, and no less able to accept such unjust suffering than she’d been half her life before, Fahima decided to make it her task to help alleviate the abysmal conditions faced by ordinary Afghans living at or below the poverty line - by helping to build independent women’s enterprises wherever she could. She trusted in the old adage that if a person is hungry it’s an even greater gift to teach the person how to fish than to only give the person fish.
Last week, our small delegation here in Kabul traveled around the city with her to visit several clinics and “shuras,” or women’s councils that she has opened.
The first clinic we visited has been here since 2006. Two women, a doctor and a midwife, told us that they are part of a staff who work in three shifts to keep the clinic open “24-7.” Not one of their patients has died while being treated at the clinic.
Next we visited two villages, one Pashtun and the other Tajik, on the outskirts of Kabul.
“Why did you pick this village?” asked Jake Donaldson, an M.D. from Ventura, CA who joined us here in Kabul about a week ago. “I didn’t pick them,” Fahima exclaimed. “They picked me.”
A year previously, the villagers had asked her to build a clinic and a literacy center. She had told them that if they would agree to organize a women’s cooperative and pool their resources to hire teachers, midwives and nurses, she herself would build the physical building and help with supplies.
In each village, we visited a newly constructed building which will house a clinic, a women’s cooperative for jewelry-making, tailoring, and canning, a set of literacy classes for children and adults, and even a public shower which families can sign up to use. A young teacher invited us to step inside his classroom where about fifty children, girls and boys, were learning their alphabet in the first week of a literacy class. Several villagers proudly showed us the well they had dug, powered by a generator. The well will help them irrigate their land as well as supply clean drinking water for the village.
Before we left, a male village elder described to Fahima how valuable her work has been for his village. Fahima seemed to blush a bit as she gratefully acknowledged his compliment.
Such appreciative words, along with the children’s eager expressions, seem to be the main compensation for her tireless work. “I and the board members of The Afghan Women’s Fund are 100% volunteers,” Fahima assures me. “Our board members are people of tremendous integrity.”
On the day before our tour, Fahima had come to the Afghan Peace Volunteer home to speak to the seamstresses who run a sewing cooperative here and encourage them to hold on at all costs to their dignity. She urged them never to prefer handouts to hard work in self-sustaining projects. Fahima had helped the seamstresses begin their cooperative effort at the Volunteer house when she purchased sewing machines for them a little over a year ago.
“Not all of the projects I’ve tried to start have worked out,” said Fahima. “Sometimes people are hampered by conservative values and some families don’t want to allow women to leave their homes. Most often, it is war or the security situation that prevents success.”
She firmly believes that war will never solve problems in her country - or anywhere else, for that matter.
Fahima is outspoken, even blunt, as she speaks about warlords and war profiteers. She has good reason to be bitter over the cruelties inflicted on ordinary Afghans by all those interested in filling their own pockets and expanding control of Afghanistan’s resources. She advises the Afghan Peace Volunteers with the voice and love of a mother. “The world is gripped by a class war in which the 1% elite, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity and including the Afghan and U.S./NATO elite, have been ganging up to control, divide, oppress and profit from us, the ordinary 99%. Resist these ‘dark times’, resist war and weapons, educate yourselves, and work together in friendship.”
Fahima’s spirit of youthful rebellion clearly hasn’t been snuffed out by age or experience. Her practical compassion is like a compass for all of us who learn about her work.
For more about the Afghan Women Fund, go to www.Afghanwomensfund.org
Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is presently a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers in Kabul. Kathy Kelly's email is kathy@vcnv.org
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/28-1
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
'Resist These Dark Times': Advice from an Afghan Mother and Activist
by Kathy Kelly
When she was 24 years old, in 1979, Fahima Vorgetts left Afghanistan. By reputation, she had been outspoken, even rebellious, in her opposition to injustice and oppression; and family and friends, concerned for her safety, had urged her to go abroad. Twenty-three years later, returning for the first time to her homeland, she barely recognized war-torn streets in urban areas where she had once lived. She saw and felt the anguish of villagers who couldn’t feed or shelter their families, and no less able to accept such unjust suffering than she’d been half her life before, Fahima decided to make it her task to help alleviate the abysmal conditions faced by ordinary Afghans living at or below the poverty line - by helping to build independent women’s enterprises wherever she could. She trusted in the old adage that if a person is hungry it’s an even greater gift to teach the person how to fish than to only give the person fish.
Last week, our small delegation here in Kabul traveled around the city with her to visit several clinics and “shuras,” or women’s councils that she has opened.
The first clinic we visited has been here since 2006. Two women, a doctor and a midwife, told us that they are part of a staff who work in three shifts to keep the clinic open “24-7.” Not one of their patients has died while being treated at the clinic.
Next we visited two villages, one Pashtun and the other Tajik, on the outskirts of Kabul.
“Why did you pick this village?” asked Jake Donaldson, an M.D. from Ventura, CA who joined us here in Kabul about a week ago. “I didn’t pick them,” Fahima exclaimed. “They picked me.”
A year previously, the villagers had asked her to build a clinic and a literacy center. She had told them that if they would agree to organize a women’s cooperative and pool their resources to hire teachers, midwives and nurses, she herself would build the physical building and help with supplies.
In each village, we visited a newly constructed building which will house a clinic, a women’s cooperative for jewelry-making, tailoring, and canning, a set of literacy classes for children and adults, and even a public shower which families can sign up to use. A young teacher invited us to step inside his classroom where about fifty children, girls and boys, were learning their alphabet in the first week of a literacy class. Several villagers proudly showed us the well they had dug, powered by a generator. The well will help them irrigate their land as well as supply clean drinking water for the village.
Before we left, a male village elder described to Fahima how valuable her work has been for his village. Fahima seemed to blush a bit as she gratefully acknowledged his compliment.
Such appreciative words, along with the children’s eager expressions, seem to be the main compensation for her tireless work. “I and the board members of The Afghan Women’s Fund are 100% volunteers,” Fahima assures me. “Our board members are people of tremendous integrity.”
On the day before our tour, Fahima had come to the Afghan Peace Volunteer home to speak to the seamstresses who run a sewing cooperative here and encourage them to hold on at all costs to their dignity. She urged them never to prefer handouts to hard work in self-sustaining projects. Fahima had helped the seamstresses begin their cooperative effort at the Volunteer house when she purchased sewing machines for them a little over a year ago.
“Not all of the projects I’ve tried to start have worked out,” said Fahima. “Sometimes people are hampered by conservative values and some families don’t want to allow women to leave their homes. Most often, it is war or the security situation that prevents success.”
She firmly believes that war will never solve problems in her country - or anywhere else, for that matter.
Fahima is outspoken, even blunt, as she speaks about warlords and war profiteers. She has good reason to be bitter over the cruelties inflicted on ordinary Afghans by all those interested in filling their own pockets and expanding control of Afghanistan’s resources. She advises the Afghan Peace Volunteers with the voice and love of a mother. “The world is gripped by a class war in which the 1% elite, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity and including the Afghan and U.S./NATO elite, have been ganging up to control, divide, oppress and profit from us, the ordinary 99%. Resist these ‘dark times’, resist war and weapons, educate yourselves, and work together in friendship.”
Fahima’s spirit of youthful rebellion clearly hasn’t been snuffed out by age or experience. Her practical compassion is like a compass for all of us who learn about her work.
For more about the Afghan Women Fund, go to www.Afghanwomensfund.org
Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is presently a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers in Kabul. Kathy Kelly's email is kathy@vcnv.org
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/28-1
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Half of America is in or Near Poverty -- and It’s Getting Worse
Half of America is in or Near Poverty -- and It’s Getting Worse
By Paul Buchheit
The Census Bureau has reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But it's actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade of prosperity.
1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009
Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney's famous 47 percent, the alleged 'takers,' have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009.
2. It's Even Worse 3 Years Later
Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that "inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve," with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.
3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty.
The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four.
Even the Census Bureau recognizes that its own figures under-represent the number of people in poverty. Its Supplemental Poverty Measure increases, by 50%, the number of Americans who earn between one-half and two times the poverty threshold.
4. Based on household expense totals, poverty is creeping into the top half of America.
A family in the top half, making $60,000 per year, will have their income reduced by a total tax bill of about $15,000 ($3,000 for federal income tax and $12,000 for payroll, state, and local taxes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau agree that food, housing, and transportation expenses will deduct another $30,000, and that total household expenditures will be about $50,000. That leaves nothing.
Nothing, that is, except debt. The median debt level rose to $75,600 in 2009, while the median family net worth, according to the Federal Reserve, dropped from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010.
5. Putting it in Perspective
Inequality is at its ugliest for the hungriest people. While food support was being targeted for cuts, just 20 rich Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire 2012 SNAP (food assistance) budget, which serves 47 million people.
And as Congress continues to cut life-sustaining programs, its members should note that their 400 friends on the Forbes list made more from their stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing, and education budgets combined.
Arguments about poverty won't end. Neither should our efforts to uncover the awful truth.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/half-america-or-near-poverty-and-it-s-getting-worse-1369748635. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
By Paul Buchheit
The Census Bureau has reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But it's actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade of prosperity.
1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009
Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney's famous 47 percent, the alleged 'takers,' have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009.
2. It's Even Worse 3 Years Later
Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that "inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve," with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.
3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty.
The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four.
Even the Census Bureau recognizes that its own figures under-represent the number of people in poverty. Its Supplemental Poverty Measure increases, by 50%, the number of Americans who earn between one-half and two times the poverty threshold.
4. Based on household expense totals, poverty is creeping into the top half of America.
A family in the top half, making $60,000 per year, will have their income reduced by a total tax bill of about $15,000 ($3,000 for federal income tax and $12,000 for payroll, state, and local taxes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau agree that food, housing, and transportation expenses will deduct another $30,000, and that total household expenditures will be about $50,000. That leaves nothing.
Nothing, that is, except debt. The median debt level rose to $75,600 in 2009, while the median family net worth, according to the Federal Reserve, dropped from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010.
5. Putting it in Perspective
Inequality is at its ugliest for the hungriest people. While food support was being targeted for cuts, just 20 rich Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire 2012 SNAP (food assistance) budget, which serves 47 million people.
And as Congress continues to cut life-sustaining programs, its members should note that their 400 friends on the Forbes list made more from their stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing, and education budgets combined.
Arguments about poverty won't end. Neither should our efforts to uncover the awful truth.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/half-america-or-near-poverty-and-it-s-getting-worse-1369748635. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
"Masters of War" Released 50 Years Ago Today - May 27
Published on Portside (http://portside.org)
"Masters of War" Released 50 Years Ago Today
http://www.militaryproject.org
Monday, May 27, 2013
Military Project.Org
Masters of War
By Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
Till I'm sure that you're dead
Source URL: http://portside.org/2013-05-27/masters-war-released-50-years-ago-today
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
"Masters of War" Released 50 Years Ago Today
http://www.militaryproject.org
Monday, May 27, 2013
Military Project.Org
Masters of War
By Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
Till I'm sure that you're dead
Source URL: http://portside.org/2013-05-27/masters-war-released-50-years-ago-today
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Monday, May 27, 2013
In Bangladesh, Workers Escalate Demands for Better Working Conditions
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16594-in-bangladesh-workers-escalate-demands-for-better-working-conditions
In Bangladesh, Workers Escalate Demands for Better Working Conditions
Sunday, 26 May 2013 09:52 By Jodie Gummow, AlterNet Report
A photo of Shaheena, a garment industry worker who was killed after Rana Plaza, the building where she worked, collapsed, in Savar, Bangladesh, May 4, 2013. The story of Shaheena, involving a heroic if ultimately doomed rescue operation, offered the last bit of hope of finding anyone alive in what is now considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. (Photo: Taslima Akhter / The New York Times)The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices.
Violence has erupted in Bangladesh, following the world’s worst garment industry disaster last month, as thousands of workers gathered in the country’s capital on Monday demanding better pay conditions. Police charged batons and fired rubber bullets and tear gas as angry protesters demonstrated outside the capital’s main factory district, blocking the main highway in the Ashulia industrial area, home to the world’s largest manufacturing factories such as Walmart.
Up to 20,000 people took part in the protests, with more than 50 people injured by police intervention. Ashulia chief police Badrul Alam defended the action, arguing that workers had attacked police, throwing stones and striking police vehicles.
"They were demanding higher wages. We fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them after they became violent and occupied a road," he told the AFP.
The demonstration is part of a rising string of protests over the past month. Since the April tragedy, a million people have signed petitions calling on global corporations like Gap and Walmart to end unsafe labor practices in Bangladesh, with hundreds protesting at stores across the country.
Members from United Students Against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice were arrested at demonstrations at the Gap shareholder meeting in San Francisco where they were calling upon the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh aimed at improving worker safety conditions.
The Gap and Walmart, two of the major producers in Bangladesh, have resisted signing any agreement that is legally enforceable to date. Instead, Walmart said last week that it will conduct its own investigations into its supplier factories. This is a questionable move that raises much concern particularly in light of yesterday’s Reuters report that a Bangladesh factory where Walmart inspectors spotted cracks in the wall this month, is still making Wrangler shirts for the world’s largest apparel maker, US-based VF Corp.
The incident highlights an increasing need for policy makers to step in and harden their stance on international manufacturing practices. Moreover, there is a lack of government accountability and impetus to act to respond to tragedies despite their continual occurrence.
According to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fashion, increasing wages and conditions for workers would not only improve labor conditions in developing countries like Bangladesh, but also allow the United States an opportunity to once again compete in the garment industry.
Over the last 20 years, the amount of clothing imports into the US has risen exponentially with the US now only making about two per cent of its clothing domestically, Cline states. Not only does this feed the exploitation of cheap labor in countries like Bangladesh, but it also impacts upon the US job market.
Without the political will to promote fair-priced labor conditions in the US and implement laws aimed at protecting workers from unfair buying practices, workers at both ends of the spectrum continue to suffer.
While media coverage of the April disaster undoubtedly placed Bangladesh and its contentious labor practices under scrutiny, the tragedy was not the first of its kind; over 1,800 workers have been killed in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh since 2005.
Despite such figures, it is now considered the second largest clothing manufacturer in the world with 80% of its annual exports deriving from a $20 billion industry.
Furthermore, with a population of approximately 150 million people living in a radius the size of Iowa state, the country is one of the most densely populated on the globe. While this has contributed to many of its social and economic problems, Bangladesh continues to remain economically resilient.
Historically, the Bengal delta operated as a thriving, commercial trading route in the early 20th century, connecting India, China and Southeast Asia and expanding trade between the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. However, following Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan after the Liberation War in 1971, the country lost access to its much-needed capital and suffered from extreme economic loss and poverty.
In an effort to rebuild, it began focusing on the ready-made garment sector by adopting export-orientated industrialization methods, denationalizing the public sector and shifting its socialist policies toward private sector participation and foreign investments.
In 1974, the Multi-Fiber Arrangement in the North American market began regulating the international garment trade industry, imposing quotas on exports from developing countries within Asia. Subsequently, foreign entrepreneurs went in search for countries that could become “quota-free” manufacturing locations.
Bangladesh, as a developing nation, benefited substantially from the Arrangement in that no restrictions on imports were imposed on those countries considered the poorest. This led to the emergence of the “export-oriented garment industry” in Bangladesh, which turned the country into one of the world’s leading export sectors.
Over the next 25 years, the garment industry in Bangladesh contributed to a major reduction in poverty and boosted employment by five percent a year from 1995-2005. Unfortunately, this economic success could not be reconciled with the increasingly poor labor conditions and low wages, which followed.
In response to the media exposure of a number of worldwide sweatshop scandals within the garment industry involving companies such as Walmart and Nike, US President Bill Clinton established the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) in the mid ‘90s, joining forces with retailers and labor unions, with a view to eliminating sweatshops and improving labor conditions for workers worldwide.
The AIP also established the 1999 Fair Labor Association, which aimed to promote corporate culpability and facilitate inspections of unfair labor practices both domestically and internationally. However, as the garment supply chains moved further away from the United States to places such China and Asia, it became increasingly more difficult to monitor internal labor practices and conditions in factories abroad.
As a result, the 2000s were fraught with continuous workers rights violations, government intimidation and violence in Bangladesh. After a series of demonstrations and intense pressure from workers to improve work safeguards, the Bangladeshi government finally introduced laws allowing for the establishment of a workers association in 2006. However, such progression took a back seat when the government imposed a state of emergency in 2007 and banned union activities for the entire year.
In response, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) filed a petition in 2007 with US Trade Representative resulting in the removal of the state of emergency status in Bangladesh 2008. However, in 2009, workers rights violations continued prompting further review by the AFL-CIO.
Today, there are approximately 5000 garment factories in Bangladesh with 3.6 million garment workers, paid around $38 per month. While there has been an increase in worker elections supporting the formation of unions, dialogue between associations and employers remains sluggish.
Moreover, 80% of garment workers in the industry are women and are subject not only to inhumane work conditions, such as long work hours, unbearable working temperatures, lack of bathroom facilities and sexual harassment, but their voices are disregarded on the mere basis of their sex.
According to Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Bangladesh deteriorated significantly in 2012 with labor groups in the country such as the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity continuing to face criminal charges -- some as serious as the death penalty -- as well as numerous restrictions on funding for their activism.
Last week, the Bangladesh Cabinet agreed to allow the country’s garment workers to form unions without having to obtain consent from factory owners. In addition, a board has been set up to review the minimum wage for garment workers within three months.
Whether or not the government will follow through on these promises remains uncertain, but in the interim global companies can at least react by complying with international recognized standards and fair-labor agreements such as signing the Accord.
Of course, even a legally binding agreement signed by Western conglomerates has the potential to be ineffective in the face of homegrown corruption, particularly by local governments in Bangladesh which have continuously averted from rules and regulations.
The question of the validity of any agreement also remains fallible, with enforcement still proving to be the greatest hurdle and anti-union companies like Walmart and the Gap still refusing to get on board.
Without the backbone of the major stakeholders, the immediate plight of the Bangladeshis will not change. With that in mind, the April 24 tragedy provides an opportunity for political reform. The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices and help the country emerge into the developed world.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Jodie Gummow is a freelance journalist and human rights activist.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
In Bangladesh, Workers Escalate Demands for Better Working Conditions
Sunday, 26 May 2013 09:52 By Jodie Gummow, AlterNet Report
A photo of Shaheena, a garment industry worker who was killed after Rana Plaza, the building where she worked, collapsed, in Savar, Bangladesh, May 4, 2013. The story of Shaheena, involving a heroic if ultimately doomed rescue operation, offered the last bit of hope of finding anyone alive in what is now considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. (Photo: Taslima Akhter / The New York Times)The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices.
Violence has erupted in Bangladesh, following the world’s worst garment industry disaster last month, as thousands of workers gathered in the country’s capital on Monday demanding better pay conditions. Police charged batons and fired rubber bullets and tear gas as angry protesters demonstrated outside the capital’s main factory district, blocking the main highway in the Ashulia industrial area, home to the world’s largest manufacturing factories such as Walmart.
Up to 20,000 people took part in the protests, with more than 50 people injured by police intervention. Ashulia chief police Badrul Alam defended the action, arguing that workers had attacked police, throwing stones and striking police vehicles.
"They were demanding higher wages. We fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them after they became violent and occupied a road," he told the AFP.
The demonstration is part of a rising string of protests over the past month. Since the April tragedy, a million people have signed petitions calling on global corporations like Gap and Walmart to end unsafe labor practices in Bangladesh, with hundreds protesting at stores across the country.
Members from United Students Against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice were arrested at demonstrations at the Gap shareholder meeting in San Francisco where they were calling upon the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh aimed at improving worker safety conditions.
The Gap and Walmart, two of the major producers in Bangladesh, have resisted signing any agreement that is legally enforceable to date. Instead, Walmart said last week that it will conduct its own investigations into its supplier factories. This is a questionable move that raises much concern particularly in light of yesterday’s Reuters report that a Bangladesh factory where Walmart inspectors spotted cracks in the wall this month, is still making Wrangler shirts for the world’s largest apparel maker, US-based VF Corp.
The incident highlights an increasing need for policy makers to step in and harden their stance on international manufacturing practices. Moreover, there is a lack of government accountability and impetus to act to respond to tragedies despite their continual occurrence.
According to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fashion, increasing wages and conditions for workers would not only improve labor conditions in developing countries like Bangladesh, but also allow the United States an opportunity to once again compete in the garment industry.
Over the last 20 years, the amount of clothing imports into the US has risen exponentially with the US now only making about two per cent of its clothing domestically, Cline states. Not only does this feed the exploitation of cheap labor in countries like Bangladesh, but it also impacts upon the US job market.
Without the political will to promote fair-priced labor conditions in the US and implement laws aimed at protecting workers from unfair buying practices, workers at both ends of the spectrum continue to suffer.
While media coverage of the April disaster undoubtedly placed Bangladesh and its contentious labor practices under scrutiny, the tragedy was not the first of its kind; over 1,800 workers have been killed in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh since 2005.
Despite such figures, it is now considered the second largest clothing manufacturer in the world with 80% of its annual exports deriving from a $20 billion industry.
Furthermore, with a population of approximately 150 million people living in a radius the size of Iowa state, the country is one of the most densely populated on the globe. While this has contributed to many of its social and economic problems, Bangladesh continues to remain economically resilient.
Historically, the Bengal delta operated as a thriving, commercial trading route in the early 20th century, connecting India, China and Southeast Asia and expanding trade between the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. However, following Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan after the Liberation War in 1971, the country lost access to its much-needed capital and suffered from extreme economic loss and poverty.
In an effort to rebuild, it began focusing on the ready-made garment sector by adopting export-orientated industrialization methods, denationalizing the public sector and shifting its socialist policies toward private sector participation and foreign investments.
In 1974, the Multi-Fiber Arrangement in the North American market began regulating the international garment trade industry, imposing quotas on exports from developing countries within Asia. Subsequently, foreign entrepreneurs went in search for countries that could become “quota-free” manufacturing locations.
Bangladesh, as a developing nation, benefited substantially from the Arrangement in that no restrictions on imports were imposed on those countries considered the poorest. This led to the emergence of the “export-oriented garment industry” in Bangladesh, which turned the country into one of the world’s leading export sectors.
Over the next 25 years, the garment industry in Bangladesh contributed to a major reduction in poverty and boosted employment by five percent a year from 1995-2005. Unfortunately, this economic success could not be reconciled with the increasingly poor labor conditions and low wages, which followed.
In response to the media exposure of a number of worldwide sweatshop scandals within the garment industry involving companies such as Walmart and Nike, US President Bill Clinton established the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) in the mid ‘90s, joining forces with retailers and labor unions, with a view to eliminating sweatshops and improving labor conditions for workers worldwide.
The AIP also established the 1999 Fair Labor Association, which aimed to promote corporate culpability and facilitate inspections of unfair labor practices both domestically and internationally. However, as the garment supply chains moved further away from the United States to places such China and Asia, it became increasingly more difficult to monitor internal labor practices and conditions in factories abroad.
As a result, the 2000s were fraught with continuous workers rights violations, government intimidation and violence in Bangladesh. After a series of demonstrations and intense pressure from workers to improve work safeguards, the Bangladeshi government finally introduced laws allowing for the establishment of a workers association in 2006. However, such progression took a back seat when the government imposed a state of emergency in 2007 and banned union activities for the entire year.
In response, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) filed a petition in 2007 with US Trade Representative resulting in the removal of the state of emergency status in Bangladesh 2008. However, in 2009, workers rights violations continued prompting further review by the AFL-CIO.
Today, there are approximately 5000 garment factories in Bangladesh with 3.6 million garment workers, paid around $38 per month. While there has been an increase in worker elections supporting the formation of unions, dialogue between associations and employers remains sluggish.
Moreover, 80% of garment workers in the industry are women and are subject not only to inhumane work conditions, such as long work hours, unbearable working temperatures, lack of bathroom facilities and sexual harassment, but their voices are disregarded on the mere basis of their sex.
According to Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Bangladesh deteriorated significantly in 2012 with labor groups in the country such as the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity continuing to face criminal charges -- some as serious as the death penalty -- as well as numerous restrictions on funding for their activism.
Last week, the Bangladesh Cabinet agreed to allow the country’s garment workers to form unions without having to obtain consent from factory owners. In addition, a board has been set up to review the minimum wage for garment workers within three months.
Whether or not the government will follow through on these promises remains uncertain, but in the interim global companies can at least react by complying with international recognized standards and fair-labor agreements such as signing the Accord.
Of course, even a legally binding agreement signed by Western conglomerates has the potential to be ineffective in the face of homegrown corruption, particularly by local governments in Bangladesh which have continuously averted from rules and regulations.
The question of the validity of any agreement also remains fallible, with enforcement still proving to be the greatest hurdle and anti-union companies like Walmart and the Gap still refusing to get on board.
Without the backbone of the major stakeholders, the immediate plight of the Bangladeshis will not change. With that in mind, the April 24 tragedy provides an opportunity for political reform. The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices and help the country emerge into the developed world.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Jodie Gummow is a freelance journalist and human rights activist.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
BALTIMORE ACTIVIST ALERT - MAY 27-29, 2013
31] Marc Steiner on WEAA – May 27 – May 31
32] Memorial Day in D.C. – May 2731] Marc Steiner on WEAA – May 27 – May 31
33] Pledge of Resistance/Fund Our Communities meeting – May 27
34] Editing Out the Occupation – May 28
35] Baltimore Commission on Sustainability Meeting – May 28
36] Philadelphia Peace Vigil – May 28
37] No drone research at JHU – May 28
38] Alice Walker at Busboys – May 28
39] Stop Energy Answers – May 28
40] Send Off Rally for OUR Wal-Mart members – May 28
41] Protest Koch Brothers – May 29
42] Day of Action on Climate Change – May 29
43] The number of incarcerated is outrageous – May 29
44] Film AMERICAN WINTER – May 29
45] Music for Peace – May 29
31] – The Marc Steiner Show airs Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 AM on WEAA 88.9 FM, The Voice of the Community, or online at www.weaa.org. The call-in number is 410-319-8888, and comments can also be sent by email to steinershow@gmail.com. All shows are also available as podcasts at www.steinershow.org.
32] – Memorial Day 2013 takes place on Mon., May 27 from 10 AM to 3 PM at President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldiers' Home, Upshur Street at Rock Creek Church Road NW. Honor those who served in our military. A wreath laying ceremony will take place at the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home (USSAH) National Cemetery to remember those killed in combat. Then, enjoy the rare opportunity to take a guided tour of the USSAH National Cemetery (predecessor of Arlington National Cemetery). Guided tours of the Cottage will be offered on the hour from 10 Am until 3 PM. Be sure to bring a picnic lunch so you can enjoy the beautiful grounds and cool breezes on this historic hilltop after your tours! Picnic tables and ample lawn space are open to the public. Go to http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=6nwbdqcab&oeidk=a07e7d119l61fe697f3&oseq=a0167flfd1kig.
33] – The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore usually meets on Mondays at 7:30 PM, and the meetings take place at Max’s residence. There will be a meeting on Mon., May 27. What a week to review. The agenda will focus on the criminal complaint against the CIA filed in Alexandria, the drone research protest at JHU, Medea Benjamin at the Pratt, peace diplomas distribution at JHU, Obama’s speech, the Transform Now Plowshares, the Gitmo hunger strikers, Bradley Manning, and the June 29 action at the CIA. Let me know about additional agenda items. Call 410-366-1637 or email mobuszewski at verizon.net for directions.
34] – Editing Out the Occupation is happening on Tues., May 28 at 10:30 AM at the Cannon House Office Building, Room #121. After nearly forty-six years of military occupation, two intifadas, a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and a stalled political process, the Israeli public seems to have lost whatever interest it ever had in the Palestinian issue. Public attention has turned inwards -- looking at economic and social concerns. However a critical examination of these concerns, by necessity, requires an equally critical examination of the ongoing occupation. Visiting Israeli journalists Uri Misgav and Linoy Bar-Geffen examine why the occupation is edited out of mainstream Israeli media and offer some ways that mainstream and alternative media can bring the occupation more forcefully into the Israeli national conversation. Bar-Geffen is a journalist, television news anchor and radio broadcaster in Israel. She is currently a co-host for the Channel 2 television program "Visitor's Club" and an editor for Hayarkon 70, an online alternative news program. She has worked as a journalist and television reporter since 1997 holding positions at Israel’s Army Radio Galatz, Ynet, an Israeli news website, and Channel 10 News.
Misgav is a writer, commentator and blogger in Israel. He is currently a columnist and a blogger for Ha’aretz, which hosts his blog “Misgav for the People.” He has worked as a journalist since 1999 serving as a television reporter for Channel 10 News, a writer for the Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Achronot and a New York-based correspondent for Ha’Ir Weekly, a weekly newspaper published in Tel Aviv. Email info@fmep.org.
35] – The Baltimore Commission on Sustainability Meeting is on Tues., May 28 from 4 to 5 PM at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. The board will be talking about Baltimore City schools and sustainability, which is apropos considering the recent approval of the Baltimore City Public School Construction Revitalization Act.
The Commission is composed of 21 members who stand in for environmental groups, community organizations, labor unions, public health and environmental justice interests, and private industry. The Commission is in charge of oversight of the Baltimore Sustainability Plan. Contact the Cheryl Casciani at ccasciani@bcs.org or visit http://www.ba.
36] – Each Tuesday from 4:30 - 5:30 PM, the Catholic Peace Fellowship-Philadelphia for peace in Afghanistan and Iraq gathers at the Suburban Station, 16th Street & JFK Blvd., at the entrance to Tracks 3 and 4 on the mezzanine. The next vigil is May 21. Call 215-426-0364. Call 410- 230-0450 or go to http://www.redemmas.org.
37] – Vigil to say "No Drone Research at JHU" each Tuesday at 34th & North Charles Sts. Join this ongoing vigil. The next vigil is May 21 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. Call Max at 410-366-1637.
38] – Alice Walker, on Tues., May 28 at 6:30, will be at Busboys & Poets, 2021 14th St. NW. Walker will discuss and sign her two new books, “The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way” and “The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers” (new poems}. Visit http://www.busboysandpoets.com/events/2013/2/25.
39] – Help Build a Powerful Campaign to Stop Energy Answers. Come to a Community Meeting to stop the Energy Answers Incinerator and Bring Green Jobs to Baltimore. It takes place on Tues., May 28 at 7 PM at the William J Myers Pavilion, 4300 West Bay Ave., Baltimore 21225. Be there to develop plans to stop the industrial waste incinerator.
Last January, the Maryland Public Service Commission granted Energy Answers an extension on its permit to build an enormous industrial waste incinerator in Curtis Bay and spew toxic pollution into the air of southeast Baltimore. This facility would most certainly affect the health and environment of families in Baltimore City as well as northern Anne Arundel County. The company now has until early August to begin construction. If it fails to meet that deadline, Energy Answers must apply for another extension if it wishes to pursue the project. Now is the time to identify and pursue alternatives that could bring well-paying, green jobs to southeast Baltimore and to the rest of the region.
This meeting is being organized by Zero Waste Maryland, an alliance formed last year to promote zero waste policies and programs in Maryland. The founding members of Zero Waste Maryland are Community Research, Clean Water Action, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the Energy Justice Network. To RSVP or to volunteer, visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/stopenergyanswersrsvp. Contact Mike Artes at 410-235-8808 or martes@cleanwater.org.
40] – Attend the Send Off Rally for OUR Wal-Mart members on Wed., May 29 at 8 AM at the Florida Avenue Baptist Church, 623 Florida Ave. NW, WDC. During the first week of June Wal-Mart workers from across the country and the globe will converge on Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas for the company’s annual shareholders meeting.
Send off the workers with a prayer breakfast/pep rally with food, coffee and entertainment, These workers will travel for nearly two weeks in a caravan with workers from Boston, head to Atlanta, and following the route of the Freedom Riders, pick up more Wal-Mart workers on the road to Bentonville to confront their bosses at the shareholders meeting. Go to http://corporateactionnetwork.org/events/send-off-rally-for-dmv-our-walmart-members.
41] – The union-busting, Tea Party-funding Koch brothers are attempting to buy the Baltimore Sun. On Wed., May 29 at 11 AM, attend a rally organized by Maryland Working Families against a Koch takeover of the newspaper. It will take place in front of the Baltimore Sun offices, 501 N. Calvert St.
Activists across the country will be gathering in front of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all of the major Tribune-owned papers. There have been a half a million signatures on the petition against a Koch buyout. Newspapers need to serve the public interest, not the corporate interest. RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/143274165860898.
42] –A Day of Action on Climate Change takes place at 7131 Willow Brook Way, Columbia 21046, on Wed., May 29 at 1:30 PM. See https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gscx2f. Call out members of Congress who aren't even taking this problem seriously.
43] – A Glimpse of PIC from Inside is on Wed., May 29 from 6 to 8 PM at Busboys & Poets, 5th & K Sts. "More than 2.2 million men, women and children live behind bars in the U.S. In regards to prisons we've depended on journalists and the media to be the light on the overuse and abuse of incarceration which is one of the most pressing Human rights concerns of our time." - The Correctional Association of New York Family and Friends of Incarcerated People wants to change the incarceration rate. Family & Friends of Incarcerated People and Institute for Policy Studies will host the first of a two part series focused upon exposing the impact of the Prison Industrial Complex on individuals, families and communities. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/169010506581711/.
44] – On Wed., May 29, join Montgomery Councilmember Valerie Irvin and special guests for a screening of AMERICAN WINTER and a panel discussion on Breakthroughs in the Fight Against Poverty at 6:30 PM at The AFI Silver Theater.
45] – Discover music as a means to communicate and connect across cultures. Listen, play, or learn. The event will feature an open mic forum, guitar lessons, and the chance to meet and connect with other musicians in the city. Music for Peace takes place at 7:30 PM on the last Wednesday of the month at the HI Baltimore Hostel, 17 W. Mulberry St. Call 410-576-8880 or go to http://www.baltimorehostel.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
32] Memorial Day in D.C. – May 2731] Marc Steiner on WEAA – May 27 – May 31
33] Pledge of Resistance/Fund Our Communities meeting – May 27
34] Editing Out the Occupation – May 28
35] Baltimore Commission on Sustainability Meeting – May 28
36] Philadelphia Peace Vigil – May 28
37] No drone research at JHU – May 28
38] Alice Walker at Busboys – May 28
39] Stop Energy Answers – May 28
40] Send Off Rally for OUR Wal-Mart members – May 28
41] Protest Koch Brothers – May 29
42] Day of Action on Climate Change – May 29
43] The number of incarcerated is outrageous – May 29
44] Film AMERICAN WINTER – May 29
45] Music for Peace – May 29
31] – The Marc Steiner Show airs Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 AM on WEAA 88.9 FM, The Voice of the Community, or online at www.weaa.org. The call-in number is 410-319-8888, and comments can also be sent by email to steinershow@gmail.com. All shows are also available as podcasts at www.steinershow.org.
32] – Memorial Day 2013 takes place on Mon., May 27 from 10 AM to 3 PM at President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldiers' Home, Upshur Street at Rock Creek Church Road NW. Honor those who served in our military. A wreath laying ceremony will take place at the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home (USSAH) National Cemetery to remember those killed in combat. Then, enjoy the rare opportunity to take a guided tour of the USSAH National Cemetery (predecessor of Arlington National Cemetery). Guided tours of the Cottage will be offered on the hour from 10 Am until 3 PM. Be sure to bring a picnic lunch so you can enjoy the beautiful grounds and cool breezes on this historic hilltop after your tours! Picnic tables and ample lawn space are open to the public. Go to http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=6nwbdqcab&oeidk=a07e7d119l61fe697f3&oseq=a0167flfd1kig.
33] – The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore usually meets on Mondays at 7:30 PM, and the meetings take place at Max’s residence. There will be a meeting on Mon., May 27. What a week to review. The agenda will focus on the criminal complaint against the CIA filed in Alexandria, the drone research protest at JHU, Medea Benjamin at the Pratt, peace diplomas distribution at JHU, Obama’s speech, the Transform Now Plowshares, the Gitmo hunger strikers, Bradley Manning, and the June 29 action at the CIA. Let me know about additional agenda items. Call 410-366-1637 or email mobuszewski at verizon.net for directions.
34] – Editing Out the Occupation is happening on Tues., May 28 at 10:30 AM at the Cannon House Office Building, Room #121. After nearly forty-six years of military occupation, two intifadas, a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and a stalled political process, the Israeli public seems to have lost whatever interest it ever had in the Palestinian issue. Public attention has turned inwards -- looking at economic and social concerns. However a critical examination of these concerns, by necessity, requires an equally critical examination of the ongoing occupation. Visiting Israeli journalists Uri Misgav and Linoy Bar-Geffen examine why the occupation is edited out of mainstream Israeli media and offer some ways that mainstream and alternative media can bring the occupation more forcefully into the Israeli national conversation. Bar-Geffen is a journalist, television news anchor and radio broadcaster in Israel. She is currently a co-host for the Channel 2 television program "Visitor's Club" and an editor for Hayarkon 70, an online alternative news program. She has worked as a journalist and television reporter since 1997 holding positions at Israel’s Army Radio Galatz, Ynet, an Israeli news website, and Channel 10 News.
Misgav is a writer, commentator and blogger in Israel. He is currently a columnist and a blogger for Ha’aretz, which hosts his blog “Misgav for the People.” He has worked as a journalist since 1999 serving as a television reporter for Channel 10 News, a writer for the Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Achronot and a New York-based correspondent for Ha’Ir Weekly, a weekly newspaper published in Tel Aviv. Email info@fmep.org.
35] – The Baltimore Commission on Sustainability Meeting is on Tues., May 28 from 4 to 5 PM at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. The board will be talking about Baltimore City schools and sustainability, which is apropos considering the recent approval of the Baltimore City Public School Construction Revitalization Act.
The Commission is composed of 21 members who stand in for environmental groups, community organizations, labor unions, public health and environmental justice interests, and private industry. The Commission is in charge of oversight of the Baltimore Sustainability Plan. Contact the Cheryl Casciani at ccasciani@bcs.org or visit http://www.ba.
36] – Each Tuesday from 4:30 - 5:30 PM, the Catholic Peace Fellowship-Philadelphia for peace in Afghanistan and Iraq gathers at the Suburban Station, 16th Street & JFK Blvd., at the entrance to Tracks 3 and 4 on the mezzanine. The next vigil is May 21. Call 215-426-0364. Call 410- 230-0450 or go to http://www.redemmas.org.
37] – Vigil to say "No Drone Research at JHU" each Tuesday at 34th & North Charles Sts. Join this ongoing vigil. The next vigil is May 21 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. Call Max at 410-366-1637.
38] – Alice Walker, on Tues., May 28 at 6:30, will be at Busboys & Poets, 2021 14th St. NW. Walker will discuss and sign her two new books, “The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way” and “The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers” (new poems}. Visit http://www.busboysandpoets.com/events/2013/2/25.
39] – Help Build a Powerful Campaign to Stop Energy Answers. Come to a Community Meeting to stop the Energy Answers Incinerator and Bring Green Jobs to Baltimore. It takes place on Tues., May 28 at 7 PM at the William J Myers Pavilion, 4300 West Bay Ave., Baltimore 21225. Be there to develop plans to stop the industrial waste incinerator.
Last January, the Maryland Public Service Commission granted Energy Answers an extension on its permit to build an enormous industrial waste incinerator in Curtis Bay and spew toxic pollution into the air of southeast Baltimore. This facility would most certainly affect the health and environment of families in Baltimore City as well as northern Anne Arundel County. The company now has until early August to begin construction. If it fails to meet that deadline, Energy Answers must apply for another extension if it wishes to pursue the project. Now is the time to identify and pursue alternatives that could bring well-paying, green jobs to southeast Baltimore and to the rest of the region.
This meeting is being organized by Zero Waste Maryland, an alliance formed last year to promote zero waste policies and programs in Maryland. The founding members of Zero Waste Maryland are Community Research, Clean Water Action, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the Energy Justice Network. To RSVP or to volunteer, visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/stopenergyanswersrsvp. Contact Mike Artes at 410-235-8808 or martes@cleanwater.org.
40] – Attend the Send Off Rally for OUR Wal-Mart members on Wed., May 29 at 8 AM at the Florida Avenue Baptist Church, 623 Florida Ave. NW, WDC. During the first week of June Wal-Mart workers from across the country and the globe will converge on Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas for the company’s annual shareholders meeting.
Send off the workers with a prayer breakfast/pep rally with food, coffee and entertainment, These workers will travel for nearly two weeks in a caravan with workers from Boston, head to Atlanta, and following the route of the Freedom Riders, pick up more Wal-Mart workers on the road to Bentonville to confront their bosses at the shareholders meeting. Go to http://corporateactionnetwork.org/events/send-off-rally-for-dmv-our-walmart-members.
41] – The union-busting, Tea Party-funding Koch brothers are attempting to buy the Baltimore Sun. On Wed., May 29 at 11 AM, attend a rally organized by Maryland Working Families against a Koch takeover of the newspaper. It will take place in front of the Baltimore Sun offices, 501 N. Calvert St.
Activists across the country will be gathering in front of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all of the major Tribune-owned papers. There have been a half a million signatures on the petition against a Koch buyout. Newspapers need to serve the public interest, not the corporate interest. RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/143274165860898.
42] –A Day of Action on Climate Change takes place at 7131 Willow Brook Way, Columbia 21046, on Wed., May 29 at 1:30 PM. See https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gscx2f. Call out members of Congress who aren't even taking this problem seriously.
43] – A Glimpse of PIC from Inside is on Wed., May 29 from 6 to 8 PM at Busboys & Poets, 5th & K Sts. "More than 2.2 million men, women and children live behind bars in the U.S. In regards to prisons we've depended on journalists and the media to be the light on the overuse and abuse of incarceration which is one of the most pressing Human rights concerns of our time." - The Correctional Association of New York Family and Friends of Incarcerated People wants to change the incarceration rate. Family & Friends of Incarcerated People and Institute for Policy Studies will host the first of a two part series focused upon exposing the impact of the Prison Industrial Complex on individuals, families and communities. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/169010506581711/.
44] – On Wed., May 29, join Montgomery Councilmember Valerie Irvin and special guests for a screening of AMERICAN WINTER and a panel discussion on Breakthroughs in the Fight Against Poverty at 6:30 PM at The AFI Silver Theater.
45] – Discover music as a means to communicate and connect across cultures. Listen, play, or learn. The event will feature an open mic forum, guitar lessons, and the chance to meet and connect with other musicians in the city. Music for Peace takes place at 7:30 PM on the last Wednesday of the month at the HI Baltimore Hostel, 17 W. Mulberry St. Call 410-576-8880 or go to http://www.baltimorehostel.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground
Published on Portside (http://portside.org)
How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/04/how-the-ford-motor-company-won-a-battle-and-lost-ground/
Gilbert King
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Smithsonian Magazine
In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union.
On the morning of May 26, 1937, Detroit News photographer James “Scotty” Kilpatrick was among a crowd waiting for the shift change at River Rouge, which employed 90,000 workers. About 2 p.m. that May 26, Reuther arrived at the Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4 with an entourage of clergymen, representatives from the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties and dozens of women from UAW Local 174, where Reuther was president. The woman wore green berets and carried leaflets reading, “Unionism, not Fordism,” which they intended to hand out to departing workers. At the direction of “Scotty” Kilpatrick, Reuther posed for photographs with UAW organizational director Richard Frankensteen and a few other organizers atop the overpass—public property—with the Ford Motor Company sign in the background.
Then Harry Bennett [1] showed up with his entourage. Bennett, one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men, led the notorious Ford Service Department, a private police force composed of ex-convicts, ex-athletes, ex-cops and gang members.
“You will have to get off here,” one of Bennett’s men told the unionists.
“We’re not doing anything,” Reuther replied.
[2]
Frankensteen (with his jacket pulled over his head) said members of the Ford Service Department gave him “the worst licking I’ve ever taken.” Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons
Like that, what would become infamous as the Battle of the Overpass was on. Forty of Bennett’s men charged the union organizers. Kilpatrick called out a warning, but the security men pounced, beating the union leaders while reporters and clergy looked on. Kilpatrick and the other photographers began snapping away. Reporters accompanying them took notes on what they were seeing.
Reuther was kicked, stomped, lifted into the air, thrown to the ground repeatedly, and tossed down two flights of stairs. Frankensteen, a 30-year-old, hulking former football player, go it worse because he tried to fight back. Bennett’s men swarmed him, pulled his jacket over his head and beat him senseless.
“It was the worst licking I’ve ever taken, [3]” he later told reporters. “They bounced us down the concrete steps of an overpass we had climbed. Then they would knock us down, stand us up, and knock us down again.” Another union leader was tossed off the overpass; his fall 30 feet to the pavement below broke his back. The security men even roughed up some of the women.
The battle, such as it was, ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. But then there was the matter of witnesses—especially the journalists on the scene. Some of Bennett’s security men began to tear notebooks from reporters’ hands. Others went after the photographers, confiscating film and smashing cameras to the ground. They chased one fleeing photographer for five miles, until he ducked into a police station for safety.
Scotty Kilpatrick fled, too—and made it to his car in just enough time to hide the glass-plate negatives from his Speed Graphic under the back seat. When some Bennett men stopped him and demanded that he surrender his negatives, he handed them unexposed plates.
Once Reuther, Frankensteen and witnesses began to tell reporters what they had seen in front of the Ford plant, Harry Bennett issued a statement. “The affair was deliberately provoked by union officials,” it said. “They feel, with or without justification, the [Senator] La Follette Civil Liberties Committee sympathizes with their aims and they simply wanted to trump up a charge of Ford brutality that they could take down to Washington and flaunt before the senatorial committee.
“I know definitely no Ford service men or plant police were involved in any way in the fight,” Bennett continued. “As a matter of fact, the service men had issued instructions the union people could come and distribute their pamphlets at the gates so long as they didn’t interfere with employees at work.” The unionists, he said, “were beaten by regular Ford employees who were on their way to work on the afternoon shift. The union men called them scabs and cursed and taunted them.”
Dearborn Police later said the Ford Service Department was “defending public property.”
Meanwhile, Scotty Kilpatrick developed his negatives, and other photographers, after the event, captured on film the injuries to the bloodied Reuther and Frankensteen. “If Mr. Ford thinks this will stop us, he’s got another thing coming,” Frankensteen said. “We’ll go back there with enough men to lick him at his own game.”
[4]
Ford security men harassed and beat women from the UAW auxiliary. Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons.
Reuther was more composed: “Before the UAW gets through with Harry Bennett and Ford’s Service Department, Dearborn will be a part of the United States and the workers will be able to enjoy their constitutional rights.”
Bennett did his best to put his version into news accounts of the Battle of the Overpass, but once Kilpatrick’s photographs were published, it was obvious that the beatings were far more violent than Bennett had described. And they showed Ford security men surrounding and beating UAW men and grabbing UAW women. In all, 16 unionists were injured in the attack, including seven women. Reuther was pictured bloodied and with a swollen skull, and Frankensteen was even worse—his face cut and his shirt torn and bloodstained. Kilpatrick’s photographs quickly turned public opinion toward the notion that the Ford Service Department was a gang of hired thugs.
In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in 1937, the Ford Motor Company [5] was called to defend itself from charges that the company was engaging in unfair labor practices in violation of the 1935 Wagner Act, which prohibited employers from interfering with workers’ efforts to organize into unions. During the hearing, Ford workers testified that if their superiors suspected them of showing interest in the UAW, Ford Service Department men would pull them from the assembly lines and escort them to the gate as they were fired on the spot, often without explanation.
The publicity from the Battle of the Overpass and the ensuing labor-board hearing proved to be too much for Henry Ford. He had tried to raise his workers’ pay soon after the incident in Dearborn, but his efforts came too late, and ultimately, like Detroit’s other automotive giants, he had no choice but to sign a contract with the UAW.
The power of Scotty Kilpatrick’s photographs eventually vaulted Walter Reuther into national prominence as a labor leader and prompted the administrators of the Pulitzer Prizes to institute an award for photography. The first Pulitzer for photography would be awarded to Milton Brooks of the Detroit News in 1942—for his image of UAW strikers savagely beating a strikebreaker.
Source URL: http://portside.org/2013-05-27/how-ford-motor-company-won-battle-and-lost-ground
Links:
[1] http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/7648
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labor-Strike-Ford_Motor_Company-men_in_physical_altercation_-_NARA_-_195594.tif
[3] http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/3398
[4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labor-Strike-Ford_Motor_Company-crowd_of_men_and_women_standing_on_far_side_of_wire_fencing_-_NARA_-_195606.tif
[5] http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/Harry_Bennett.htm
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/04/how-the-ford-motor-company-won-a-battle-and-lost-ground/
Gilbert King
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Smithsonian Magazine
In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union.
On the morning of May 26, 1937, Detroit News photographer James “Scotty” Kilpatrick was among a crowd waiting for the shift change at River Rouge, which employed 90,000 workers. About 2 p.m. that May 26, Reuther arrived at the Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4 with an entourage of clergymen, representatives from the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties and dozens of women from UAW Local 174, where Reuther was president. The woman wore green berets and carried leaflets reading, “Unionism, not Fordism,” which they intended to hand out to departing workers. At the direction of “Scotty” Kilpatrick, Reuther posed for photographs with UAW organizational director Richard Frankensteen and a few other organizers atop the overpass—public property—with the Ford Motor Company sign in the background.
Then Harry Bennett [1] showed up with his entourage. Bennett, one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men, led the notorious Ford Service Department, a private police force composed of ex-convicts, ex-athletes, ex-cops and gang members.
“You will have to get off here,” one of Bennett’s men told the unionists.
“We’re not doing anything,” Reuther replied.
[2]
Frankensteen (with his jacket pulled over his head) said members of the Ford Service Department gave him “the worst licking I’ve ever taken.” Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons
Like that, what would become infamous as the Battle of the Overpass was on. Forty of Bennett’s men charged the union organizers. Kilpatrick called out a warning, but the security men pounced, beating the union leaders while reporters and clergy looked on. Kilpatrick and the other photographers began snapping away. Reporters accompanying them took notes on what they were seeing.
Reuther was kicked, stomped, lifted into the air, thrown to the ground repeatedly, and tossed down two flights of stairs. Frankensteen, a 30-year-old, hulking former football player, go it worse because he tried to fight back. Bennett’s men swarmed him, pulled his jacket over his head and beat him senseless.
“It was the worst licking I’ve ever taken, [3]” he later told reporters. “They bounced us down the concrete steps of an overpass we had climbed. Then they would knock us down, stand us up, and knock us down again.” Another union leader was tossed off the overpass; his fall 30 feet to the pavement below broke his back. The security men even roughed up some of the women.
The battle, such as it was, ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. But then there was the matter of witnesses—especially the journalists on the scene. Some of Bennett’s security men began to tear notebooks from reporters’ hands. Others went after the photographers, confiscating film and smashing cameras to the ground. They chased one fleeing photographer for five miles, until he ducked into a police station for safety.
Scotty Kilpatrick fled, too—and made it to his car in just enough time to hide the glass-plate negatives from his Speed Graphic under the back seat. When some Bennett men stopped him and demanded that he surrender his negatives, he handed them unexposed plates.
Once Reuther, Frankensteen and witnesses began to tell reporters what they had seen in front of the Ford plant, Harry Bennett issued a statement. “The affair was deliberately provoked by union officials,” it said. “They feel, with or without justification, the [Senator] La Follette Civil Liberties Committee sympathizes with their aims and they simply wanted to trump up a charge of Ford brutality that they could take down to Washington and flaunt before the senatorial committee.
“I know definitely no Ford service men or plant police were involved in any way in the fight,” Bennett continued. “As a matter of fact, the service men had issued instructions the union people could come and distribute their pamphlets at the gates so long as they didn’t interfere with employees at work.” The unionists, he said, “were beaten by regular Ford employees who were on their way to work on the afternoon shift. The union men called them scabs and cursed and taunted them.”
Dearborn Police later said the Ford Service Department was “defending public property.”
Meanwhile, Scotty Kilpatrick developed his negatives, and other photographers, after the event, captured on film the injuries to the bloodied Reuther and Frankensteen. “If Mr. Ford thinks this will stop us, he’s got another thing coming,” Frankensteen said. “We’ll go back there with enough men to lick him at his own game.”
[4]
Ford security men harassed and beat women from the UAW auxiliary. Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons.
Reuther was more composed: “Before the UAW gets through with Harry Bennett and Ford’s Service Department, Dearborn will be a part of the United States and the workers will be able to enjoy their constitutional rights.”
Bennett did his best to put his version into news accounts of the Battle of the Overpass, but once Kilpatrick’s photographs were published, it was obvious that the beatings were far more violent than Bennett had described. And they showed Ford security men surrounding and beating UAW men and grabbing UAW women. In all, 16 unionists were injured in the attack, including seven women. Reuther was pictured bloodied and with a swollen skull, and Frankensteen was even worse—his face cut and his shirt torn and bloodstained. Kilpatrick’s photographs quickly turned public opinion toward the notion that the Ford Service Department was a gang of hired thugs.
In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in 1937, the Ford Motor Company [5] was called to defend itself from charges that the company was engaging in unfair labor practices in violation of the 1935 Wagner Act, which prohibited employers from interfering with workers’ efforts to organize into unions. During the hearing, Ford workers testified that if their superiors suspected them of showing interest in the UAW, Ford Service Department men would pull them from the assembly lines and escort them to the gate as they were fired on the spot, often without explanation.
The publicity from the Battle of the Overpass and the ensuing labor-board hearing proved to be too much for Henry Ford. He had tried to raise his workers’ pay soon after the incident in Dearborn, but his efforts came too late, and ultimately, like Detroit’s other automotive giants, he had no choice but to sign a contract with the UAW.
The power of Scotty Kilpatrick’s photographs eventually vaulted Walter Reuther into national prominence as a labor leader and prompted the administrators of the Pulitzer Prizes to institute an award for photography. The first Pulitzer for photography would be awarded to Milton Brooks of the Detroit News in 1942—for his image of UAW strikers savagely beating a strikebreaker.
Source URL: http://portside.org/2013-05-27/how-ford-motor-company-won-battle-and-lost-ground
Links:
[1] http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/7648
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labor-Strike-Ford_Motor_Company-men_in_physical_altercation_-_NARA_-_195594.tif
[3] http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/3398
[4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labor-Strike-Ford_Motor_Company-crowd_of_men_and_women_standing_on_far_side_of_wire_fencing_-_NARA_-_195606.tif
[5] http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/Harry_Bennett.htm
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
An Endless "Peace Process" for Palestine
An Endless "Peace Process" for Palestine
By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/content/endless-peace-process-palestine
The United States balances its endless war of terrorism with the institution of an endless "peace process" for Palestine, a process valuable for its peaceyness and interminability.
Josh Ruebner's new book, Shattered Hopes: The Failure of Obama's Middle East Peace Process, could just as easily have been called "Fulfilled Expectations: The Success of Obama's Middle East Peace Process," depending on one's perspective. Its story could be summarized: Obama's performance in this area has been of a piece with his performance in every other. Some people became very hopeful about his rhetoric and then very dejected about his actions.
In this case, among those getting hopeful were Palestinian negotiators. But they didn't just grow depressed and despondent. They felt no obligation to behave like Democratic voters. They swore off the Hopium and went to work on an international approach through the United Nations that has begun to pay off.
Obama began his "peace process" efforts "naively unprepared for the intensity of the pushback from Israel and its supporters in the United States to its demand that Israel freeze settlements," Ruebner writes. But evidence of Obama's mental state is hard to pin down, and I'm not sure of the relevance. Whether Obama began with naive good intentions or the same cynicism that he was, by all accounts, fully immersed in by his second or third year in office, the important point remains the same. As Ruebner explains, Obama employs an all-carrots / no-sticks approach with Israel that is doomed to failure.
In fact, suggesting that the White House cease providing Israel with ever more weaponry and/or cease providing Israel with ever more protection from justice following its crimes is liable to get Ruebner himself denounced as naive, along with the rest of us who think he's right. Obama's fundamental problem is not one of naiveté, but of "seriousness," of upholding the solemn seriousness of willful belief in a respectable but doomed approach. If Obama was surprised that Palestinian negotiators didn't play along with this the way U.S. "journalists" do, that would suggest he had internalized the official point of view. Whether that is naiveté or deep cynicism may be in the eye of the beholder.
Ruebner provides the chronological play-by-play from Obama's first happy shiny moves in office to his familiar flailing about in search of propaganda that would continue to hold up year after year. And Ruebner includes analysis of what activists were up to along the way.
In fact, Ruebner begins with Obama's campaign promises, which -- upon close inspection -- prove, as with every other issue, to have been much closer to the President's abysmal performance than to the glowing image people recall of his early hope-and-changey self. Obama campaigned placing all blame on Palestinians, supporting Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital, backing resolutions and legislation in the Senate imposing sanctions on Palestinians as punishment for having held an open election, and supporting Israel during its wars on Lebanon and Gaza. Obama's speeches and his website made his position clear to those inclined to see it. Boycott campaigns against the Israeli government were, according to him, "bigoted."
As with every other area, on peace in Palestine, Obama's disastrous approach could also have been read clearly from his selection of individuals to run his foreign policy team. During the transition period prior to his inauguration, Obama took positions on many foreign policy matters, but when it came to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, he declared himself unable to speak prior to becoming president.
Watching the sequence of events play out post-inauguration is painful. Obama urges an end to Israel's expansion of settlements. Netanyahu suggests that Obama, with all due respect, stick his proposals where the sun don't shine. But Netanyahu backs "statehood" (someday, with no rights or power or independence or actual -- you know -- statehood) for Palestinians, but proceeds to rapidly expand settlements, effectively eliminating territory on which to create any state. Obama announces that victory has come and help is on the way!
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave up on freezing settlements and announced that slowing the pace of the expansion would be an "unprecedented" accomplishment -- a claim that was less credible to people who had lived and suffered through many such claims before. As reward for the same lawless abuses as always, Israel received from the Obama administration more weaponry than ever, and a veto of a resolution at the United Nations opposing more Israeli settlements.
Ruebner rightly concludes:
"Obama's failure to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace resulted not only from his unwillingness to go to the mat with the Israel lobby over the issue of fully freezing Israeli settlements, not only from the scattershot, frenetic lurching of his policy initiatives thereafter. Obama also foundered because his approach relied solely on providing Israel with carrots. With the trivial exceptions of denying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu photo-ops at the White House on a few occasions and reportedly forcing him to wait for several hours before a meeting, Obama never brandished the proverbial stick. But these personal insults did nothing to create incentives for Israel to cease openly and brazenly defying U.S. policy objectives."
Hope is so much more popular than reality. But Ruebner is full of hope. He holds it out there in front of us. All that's required is a little actually useful action:
"[I]f the United States were to pull its backing for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, then Israeli intransigence would melt away in the historical blink of an eye, as it did when President Dwight Eisenhower terminated all U.S. aid programs to Israel after it invaded and occupied the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in 1956."
How do we get there? Part of the answer, Ruebner persuasively suggests is Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanctions (BDS), a movement that is making great strides, including in changing the public discourse, altering the sorts of things that even U.S. politicians can get away with claiming with a straight face.
--
David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org.
By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/content/endless-peace-process-palestine
The United States balances its endless war of terrorism with the institution of an endless "peace process" for Palestine, a process valuable for its peaceyness and interminability.
Josh Ruebner's new book, Shattered Hopes: The Failure of Obama's Middle East Peace Process, could just as easily have been called "Fulfilled Expectations: The Success of Obama's Middle East Peace Process," depending on one's perspective. Its story could be summarized: Obama's performance in this area has been of a piece with his performance in every other. Some people became very hopeful about his rhetoric and then very dejected about his actions.
In this case, among those getting hopeful were Palestinian negotiators. But they didn't just grow depressed and despondent. They felt no obligation to behave like Democratic voters. They swore off the Hopium and went to work on an international approach through the United Nations that has begun to pay off.
Obama began his "peace process" efforts "naively unprepared for the intensity of the pushback from Israel and its supporters in the United States to its demand that Israel freeze settlements," Ruebner writes. But evidence of Obama's mental state is hard to pin down, and I'm not sure of the relevance. Whether Obama began with naive good intentions or the same cynicism that he was, by all accounts, fully immersed in by his second or third year in office, the important point remains the same. As Ruebner explains, Obama employs an all-carrots / no-sticks approach with Israel that is doomed to failure.
In fact, suggesting that the White House cease providing Israel with ever more weaponry and/or cease providing Israel with ever more protection from justice following its crimes is liable to get Ruebner himself denounced as naive, along with the rest of us who think he's right. Obama's fundamental problem is not one of naiveté, but of "seriousness," of upholding the solemn seriousness of willful belief in a respectable but doomed approach. If Obama was surprised that Palestinian negotiators didn't play along with this the way U.S. "journalists" do, that would suggest he had internalized the official point of view. Whether that is naiveté or deep cynicism may be in the eye of the beholder.
Ruebner provides the chronological play-by-play from Obama's first happy shiny moves in office to his familiar flailing about in search of propaganda that would continue to hold up year after year. And Ruebner includes analysis of what activists were up to along the way.
In fact, Ruebner begins with Obama's campaign promises, which -- upon close inspection -- prove, as with every other issue, to have been much closer to the President's abysmal performance than to the glowing image people recall of his early hope-and-changey self. Obama campaigned placing all blame on Palestinians, supporting Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital, backing resolutions and legislation in the Senate imposing sanctions on Palestinians as punishment for having held an open election, and supporting Israel during its wars on Lebanon and Gaza. Obama's speeches and his website made his position clear to those inclined to see it. Boycott campaigns against the Israeli government were, according to him, "bigoted."
As with every other area, on peace in Palestine, Obama's disastrous approach could also have been read clearly from his selection of individuals to run his foreign policy team. During the transition period prior to his inauguration, Obama took positions on many foreign policy matters, but when it came to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, he declared himself unable to speak prior to becoming president.
Watching the sequence of events play out post-inauguration is painful. Obama urges an end to Israel's expansion of settlements. Netanyahu suggests that Obama, with all due respect, stick his proposals where the sun don't shine. But Netanyahu backs "statehood" (someday, with no rights or power or independence or actual -- you know -- statehood) for Palestinians, but proceeds to rapidly expand settlements, effectively eliminating territory on which to create any state. Obama announces that victory has come and help is on the way!
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave up on freezing settlements and announced that slowing the pace of the expansion would be an "unprecedented" accomplishment -- a claim that was less credible to people who had lived and suffered through many such claims before. As reward for the same lawless abuses as always, Israel received from the Obama administration more weaponry than ever, and a veto of a resolution at the United Nations opposing more Israeli settlements.
Ruebner rightly concludes:
"Obama's failure to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace resulted not only from his unwillingness to go to the mat with the Israel lobby over the issue of fully freezing Israeli settlements, not only from the scattershot, frenetic lurching of his policy initiatives thereafter. Obama also foundered because his approach relied solely on providing Israel with carrots. With the trivial exceptions of denying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu photo-ops at the White House on a few occasions and reportedly forcing him to wait for several hours before a meeting, Obama never brandished the proverbial stick. But these personal insults did nothing to create incentives for Israel to cease openly and brazenly defying U.S. policy objectives."
Hope is so much more popular than reality. But Ruebner is full of hope. He holds it out there in front of us. All that's required is a little actually useful action:
"[I]f the United States were to pull its backing for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, then Israeli intransigence would melt away in the historical blink of an eye, as it did when President Dwight Eisenhower terminated all U.S. aid programs to Israel after it invaded and occupied the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in 1956."
How do we get there? Part of the answer, Ruebner persuasively suggests is Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanctions (BDS), a movement that is making great strides, including in changing the public discourse, altering the sorts of things that even U.S. politicians can get away with claiming with a straight face.
--
David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
One Drone Victim’s Trail From Raleigh to Pakistan
One Drone Victim’s Trail From Raleigh to Pakistan
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 22, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/one-drone-victims-trail-from-raleigh-to-pakistan.html?hpw&_r=0
WASHINGTON — When Jude Kenan Mohammad was about 18 and living in Raleigh, N.C., according to people who knew him, he came under the influence of an older man, Daniel Patrick Boyd, who taught him a violent, radical version of Islam.
Jude Kenan Mohammad, in a photo he sent from Pakistan.
• DOCUMENT: Holder Letter on Counterterror Strikes Against U.S. Citizens
Mr. Boyd would be charged in 2009 and eventually imprisoned as the ringleader of a group of North Carolina residents who had vowed to carry out a violent jihad both in the United States and overseas. Mr. Mohammad was also charged, but by then, partly at the direction of Mr. Boyd, he had traveled to Pakistan, where he had joined a group of militants in that country’s tribal area.
On Wednesday, the United States government officially acknowledged for the first time what had long been rumored among his friends in Raleigh: that Mr. Mohammad was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike on a compound in South Waziristan, Pakistan, on Nov. 16, 2011. He was 23.
He was one of at least four Americans to have been killed in “counterterrorism operations,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter sent on Wednesday to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Only one of those killed, the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was deliberately targeted, Mr. Holder said. The others were killed in strikes that did not specifically target them, he said, including Samir Khan, another young man from Raleigh who had joined the Qaeda branch in Yemen and was killed with Mr. Awlaki; Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed two weeks later; and Mr. Mohammad.
American officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Mohammad had been killed with about 12 other insurgents in what the C.I.A. calls a “signature strike,” an attack based on patterns of activity, such as men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the sharpest divisions inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.
After the strike, the family friend said, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, whom he had met and married after moving to Pakistan, called his mother in North Carolina to say he had been killed.
Reflecting the covert nature of the drone program in Pakistan, the F.B.I. had left Mr. Mohammad’s name on its wanted list after his death. An F.B.I. spokesman, Kathleen Wright, said on Wednesday that it would be removed.
While Mr. Mohammad was not directly targeted, he had come under increasing scrutiny by American counterterrorism officials, who said he was involved in recruiting militants for Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, as well as making videos on YouTube to incite violence against the United States.
“He had risen to the top of the U.S. deck,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and former adviser to the military’s Special Operations Command. Mr. Jones said that while in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad had made contact with five young Virginia men who disappeared from their homes around Thanksgiving in 2009 and turned up seeking to join militant groups. Instead they were arrested and remain in Pakistani custody.
A family friend, who asked not to be named because she did not want to offend Mr. Mohammad’s family, called him “a good kid, but a follower.” His Pakistani father, Taj Mohammad, met his mother, Elena, an American who converted from Catholicism to Islam, in New York in the early 1980s. They lived in Pakistan for several years, but in the late 1990s, Elena moved back to the United States with their son.
Jude Mohammad dropped out of high school but later earned his high school equivalency certificate and attended Wake Technical Community College. He was “a regular around the mosque” in Raleigh and often volunteered in the mosque kitchen to help prepare communal meals, the friend said.
“He’d put food on the back of his bike and ride a couple of miles to deliver groceries to the homebound,” she said.
Later, after dropping out of school, he used drugs and described himself as “lost,” the friend said. “He was looking for a father figure.”
After meeting Mr. Boyd, a convert to Islam who called himself Saifullah, he came to see going overseas to fight as a way to purify himself.
Mr. Boyd, who had trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, was later banned from the mosque in Raleigh as a troublemaker. In September 2009, he was indicted with his two sons, Mr. Mohammad and four other men for conspiring to plot terrorist acts at home and abroad.
Among other things, Mr. Boyd was accused of carrying out “reconnaissance” of the Marine base at Quantico, Va., and plotting to stage attacks on service members there.
While he was a fugitive in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad would sometimes call his American friends and family, especially on Muslim holidays, staying on the phone just long enough to offer a greeting for fear of having the call traced.
The calls stopped after November 2011, the friend said, and the reports of his death began to circulate through Raleigh’s Muslim community.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 22, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/one-drone-victims-trail-from-raleigh-to-pakistan.html?hpw&_r=0
WASHINGTON — When Jude Kenan Mohammad was about 18 and living in Raleigh, N.C., according to people who knew him, he came under the influence of an older man, Daniel Patrick Boyd, who taught him a violent, radical version of Islam.
Jude Kenan Mohammad, in a photo he sent from Pakistan.
• DOCUMENT: Holder Letter on Counterterror Strikes Against U.S. Citizens
Mr. Boyd would be charged in 2009 and eventually imprisoned as the ringleader of a group of North Carolina residents who had vowed to carry out a violent jihad both in the United States and overseas. Mr. Mohammad was also charged, but by then, partly at the direction of Mr. Boyd, he had traveled to Pakistan, where he had joined a group of militants in that country’s tribal area.
On Wednesday, the United States government officially acknowledged for the first time what had long been rumored among his friends in Raleigh: that Mr. Mohammad was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike on a compound in South Waziristan, Pakistan, on Nov. 16, 2011. He was 23.
He was one of at least four Americans to have been killed in “counterterrorism operations,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter sent on Wednesday to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Only one of those killed, the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was deliberately targeted, Mr. Holder said. The others were killed in strikes that did not specifically target them, he said, including Samir Khan, another young man from Raleigh who had joined the Qaeda branch in Yemen and was killed with Mr. Awlaki; Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed two weeks later; and Mr. Mohammad.
American officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Mohammad had been killed with about 12 other insurgents in what the C.I.A. calls a “signature strike,” an attack based on patterns of activity, such as men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the sharpest divisions inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.
After the strike, the family friend said, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, whom he had met and married after moving to Pakistan, called his mother in North Carolina to say he had been killed.
Reflecting the covert nature of the drone program in Pakistan, the F.B.I. had left Mr. Mohammad’s name on its wanted list after his death. An F.B.I. spokesman, Kathleen Wright, said on Wednesday that it would be removed.
While Mr. Mohammad was not directly targeted, he had come under increasing scrutiny by American counterterrorism officials, who said he was involved in recruiting militants for Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, as well as making videos on YouTube to incite violence against the United States.
“He had risen to the top of the U.S. deck,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and former adviser to the military’s Special Operations Command. Mr. Jones said that while in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad had made contact with five young Virginia men who disappeared from their homes around Thanksgiving in 2009 and turned up seeking to join militant groups. Instead they were arrested and remain in Pakistani custody.
A family friend, who asked not to be named because she did not want to offend Mr. Mohammad’s family, called him “a good kid, but a follower.” His Pakistani father, Taj Mohammad, met his mother, Elena, an American who converted from Catholicism to Islam, in New York in the early 1980s. They lived in Pakistan for several years, but in the late 1990s, Elena moved back to the United States with their son.
Jude Mohammad dropped out of high school but later earned his high school equivalency certificate and attended Wake Technical Community College. He was “a regular around the mosque” in Raleigh and often volunteered in the mosque kitchen to help prepare communal meals, the friend said.
“He’d put food on the back of his bike and ride a couple of miles to deliver groceries to the homebound,” she said.
Later, after dropping out of school, he used drugs and described himself as “lost,” the friend said. “He was looking for a father figure.”
After meeting Mr. Boyd, a convert to Islam who called himself Saifullah, he came to see going overseas to fight as a way to purify himself.
Mr. Boyd, who had trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, was later banned from the mosque in Raleigh as a troublemaker. In September 2009, he was indicted with his two sons, Mr. Mohammad and four other men for conspiring to plot terrorist acts at home and abroad.
Among other things, Mr. Boyd was accused of carrying out “reconnaissance” of the Marine base at Quantico, Va., and plotting to stage attacks on service members there.
While he was a fugitive in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad would sometimes call his American friends and family, especially on Muslim holidays, staying on the phone just long enough to offer a greeting for fear of having the call traced.
The calls stopped after November 2011, the friend said, and the reports of his death began to circulate through Raleigh’s Muslim community.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
Sparking Off Each Other is Building Mass Resistance
Sparking Off Each Other is Building Mass Resistance
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
This was a week that exemplified the historic moment in which we live. We will look back at these times and see the seeds of a national revolt against concentrated wealth that puts profits ahead of people and the planet. Not only were there a wide array of resistance actions, but activists against the Guantanamo prison and drone strikes scored partial victories on which we much continue to build challenges to US empire and militarism.
Mike Lux, who authored a history of the movements of the 1960s, wrote this week that when he researched his book he “was struck by the fact that so many big things happened so close together.” Comparing that moment to today he writes, “We are living in such a moment in history right now, that organizers and activists are sparking off each other and inspiring each other, that there is something building out there that will bring bigger change down the road.”
That is how we felt as we watched and participated in this week’s unfolding. We began the week prepared to focus our attention on the amazing teacher, student and community actions that were occurring in defense of schools. In Philadelphia, there was a giant walk-out of schools last Friday as students demanded their schools remain open and be adequately funded. The photos of young people fighting for the basic necessity of education were an inspiration.
That was followed by three days of protests in Chicago that were equally inspiring, students organized and communities came together to fight for education. Though corporate-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s carefully selected board voted to close 50 elementary schools and one high school (while the city funds the building of a new basketball stadium), the Chicago activists say they are not done. They are just getting started. It is that kind of persistence that wins transformation. These school battles are part of a national plan to replace community schools with corporatized charter schools. The battles of Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are all of our battles.
Then there were the college students, who inspired us with their bravery especially because they were not fighting for themselves but for the students who come after them. At Cooper Union, students are in their second week of occupying the school president’s office. As the sit-in grew to more than 100, they garnered increasing community support. The school is about to begin to charge tuition, ending the nearly two century mission of its founder for free higher education. The students protesting will get free tuition; they are protesting for the students who follow. While they are sitting in, they are painting the president’s offices black and will continue to do so until he resigns his $750,000 a year job. Thousands have signed a “no confidence” petition against the president and board chairman.
We believe that a country that really believed in its youth and was building for its future would provide free post-high school education, college or vocational school, to young adults rather than leaving them crippled by massive debt.
As the week went on, more Americans stood up and showed their power. On Monday, people who have lost their homes to foreclosure or are threatened with foreclosure, along with their allies, began an occupation of the Department of Justice. Some of them joined us first as guests on our radio show on We Act Radio. Afterwards, we went to Freedom Plaza where they rallied. The coalition was a great mix of people of different ages, races and regions who were angry, organized and prepared. They marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Department of Justice to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder prosecute the bankers who collapsed the economy and stole their homes.
They blocked the doors at the Department of Justice and put up tents emblazoned with “Foreclose on Banks Not on People,” put up a home with “Bank Foreclosed” over it and blocked the streets with orange mesh saying “Foreclosure and Eviction Free Zone.” As evening came, they moved their tents onto DOJ property, brought in a big couch and prepared to stay the night – and some did. By the third day of protests, they moved to Covington and Burling, the corporate law firm that spawned Eric Holder and where the DOJ official in charge of prosecuting the banks, Lenny Breuer, who did not prosecute a single big bank now gets a $4 million annual salary. In Congress the DOJ could not justify their claim that prosecuting the big banks would hurt the economy.
The Home Defenders League/Occupy Our Homes actions broke through in the media as you can see at the end of this photo essay. We particularly enjoyed the coverage in Forbes – someone claiming to be Jamie Dimon was arrested in DC – reporting on protesters who gave the name of banksters when they were arrested. The police responded aggressively, which often attracts media coverage, including the tasering non-violent protesters. And, we were pleased to see local groups, like Occupy Colorado, highlighting the efforts of their colleagues who came to DC.
But, action in the nation’s capital did not end there. There was also a massive walkout of food service workers across the city. The strike began at the building named for the famed union-destroying president, the Ronald Reagan Building, and then moved on, with a particular focus on Obama – the largest employer of low-wage workers. Obama could end poverty federal wages with a stroke of the pen. Will he?
DC is the sixth city to see low-wage workers striking, New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, came before the Capital. Communities have stood with the workers when employers threatened their jobs and people now need to do the same for the DC workers who are being threatened with job loss, please take action to support them. And, coming up is theWal-Mart workers’ “Ride for Respect” to the annual shareholders meeting on June 7 which emulates the Freedom Riders.
Actions are happening throughout the country. In Illinois, so far two people have been arrested at a sit-in in the capitol building to support a ban hydro-fracking. And, the reaction to the call for a fearless summer by front-line environmental groups has been very strong. They are working together to plan major actions throughout the summer escalating resistance against extreme energy extraction. Pressure is building in the environmental movement which now recognizes Obama is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Groups like 350.org that avoided protesting Obama, are now protesting his “grass roots” group, Organizing for America.
And, more is coming. At the end of the week people who have been marching to Washington, DC from Philadelphia as part of “Operation Green Jobs” will arrive to protest at the corporate bully of the capital – the US Chamber of Commerce – uniting the masses in opposition to the corporate lobbyists. Their long walk to DC echoes a walk last week by people from Baltimore seeking jobs and justice.
This Saturday will be the worldwide March Against Monsanto in 41 countries and nearly 300 cities. We published an article in Truthout that explains why we should all protest Monsanto on May 25. This is a great example of non-hierarchical organizing as this protest was called by young grass roots activists and supported by Occupy Monsanto.
One of the things that let us know the popular revolt is more powerful than we realize is the reaction of the power structure. The Center for Media and Democracy issued a report this week that examined thousands of pages of documents which showed how the national security apparatus against terrorism combined with corporate America to attack the occupy movement. And, in Chicago one of the undercover police involved in the NATO 5 case, is still spying, now on students and teachers protesting school closures. If they did not fear the people, would the power structure be behaving this way?But, when you read reports about police acting in this undemocratic way, don’t forget that many of them do not like doing what they are ordered to do and that pulling them to join the popular revolt is part of our job. A mass movement needs people from the power structure to join it in order to achieve success. We highlight one this week, Officer Pedro Serrano of New York who took the great personal risk of taping his superiors as part of an effort to end the racist ‘stop and frisk’ program of the NYPD.
And, it is great to see people planning ahead. We got notice this week from activists in Maine planning for an October Drone Walk. The anti-drone movement and Guantanamo protests have had very positive effects. This week, President Obama had to admit that he killed four Americans with drones, mostly by accident – even though the DoD claims drones are accurate. Also this week, activists filed a war crimes complaint against Obama, Brennan and other officials seeking their prosecution. And Thursday, Obama was forced to make a public speech at the National Defense University about both the drone program and Guantanamo Bay Prison. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, interrupted the speech several times such that the President had to acknowledge her and she asked powerful questions as she was escorted out by security. [See video and transcript.] As she was escorted from the room Obama acknowledged: “The voice of that women is worth paying attention to.” Guantanamo activists responded to the president saying “no more excuses” and vowed to keep the pressure on!
So, just as author Mike Lux saw in the 60s, there is a lot going on, lots of issues coming to a head at the same time and people taking action to confront them. How do we get to the next phase of popular resistance?
Long time writer on movements and transformational change, Sam Smith, the editor of Progressive Review wrote “The Great American Repair Manual in 1997,” we reprinted a portion of it this week: A Movement Manual. The essence: movements are “propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination.” He recommends: organize from the bottom up, create a subculture, create symbols, develop an agenda and make the movement’s values clear. He also recommends becoming what you want to be – become an existentialist – writing “existence precedes essence. We are what we do.” As far as buildingcommunity power, we recommend this video from “The Democracy School” on how to use local governance to challenge corporate power.”
Do not despair when the media says there is no popular resistance. We have been covering the actions of the movement with weekly reports since 2011 and even before the occupy movement began, we saw Americans beginning to stand up. We knew it was the right time for occupy and we now see it is the right time for a mass popular resistance.
We will be announcing a new project in mid-June to help bring the movement to a new level. Sign up here to hear about it and how you can help. To create the transformative change we want to see, we need people to get involved.
We agree with Mike Lux who writes: “just as it took several years for the seeds planted in those 18 months in the early '60s to take root and begin to bring about the changes of the years to come in terms of civil rights, women's rights, and the environment, it will take several years for the seeds being planted now to fully take root. But I believe more and more that it will happen.”
The government responds with police force and ignores the demands of the people. Super majorities of Americans agree with the views of the popular resistance, even if they are not yet acting. This is a recipe for a mass eruption of movement activity. We are in the midst of the pre-history of historic transformational change: a transformation, which will end the power of money to ensure that the people and planet come before profits.(For a listing of upcoming protests see last week’s newsletter.)
This article is produced in partnership with AlterNet and is based on a weekly newsletter for October2011/Occupy Washington, DC. To sign up for the free newsletter, click here. If you have actions you want to promote or report on write us at info@october2011.org.
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Read other articles by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/sparking-each-other-building-mass-resistance-1369574309. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
This was a week that exemplified the historic moment in which we live. We will look back at these times and see the seeds of a national revolt against concentrated wealth that puts profits ahead of people and the planet. Not only were there a wide array of resistance actions, but activists against the Guantanamo prison and drone strikes scored partial victories on which we much continue to build challenges to US empire and militarism.
Mike Lux, who authored a history of the movements of the 1960s, wrote this week that when he researched his book he “was struck by the fact that so many big things happened so close together.” Comparing that moment to today he writes, “We are living in such a moment in history right now, that organizers and activists are sparking off each other and inspiring each other, that there is something building out there that will bring bigger change down the road.”
That is how we felt as we watched and participated in this week’s unfolding. We began the week prepared to focus our attention on the amazing teacher, student and community actions that were occurring in defense of schools. In Philadelphia, there was a giant walk-out of schools last Friday as students demanded their schools remain open and be adequately funded. The photos of young people fighting for the basic necessity of education were an inspiration.
That was followed by three days of protests in Chicago that were equally inspiring, students organized and communities came together to fight for education. Though corporate-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s carefully selected board voted to close 50 elementary schools and one high school (while the city funds the building of a new basketball stadium), the Chicago activists say they are not done. They are just getting started. It is that kind of persistence that wins transformation. These school battles are part of a national plan to replace community schools with corporatized charter schools. The battles of Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are all of our battles.
Then there were the college students, who inspired us with their bravery especially because they were not fighting for themselves but for the students who come after them. At Cooper Union, students are in their second week of occupying the school president’s office. As the sit-in grew to more than 100, they garnered increasing community support. The school is about to begin to charge tuition, ending the nearly two century mission of its founder for free higher education. The students protesting will get free tuition; they are protesting for the students who follow. While they are sitting in, they are painting the president’s offices black and will continue to do so until he resigns his $750,000 a year job. Thousands have signed a “no confidence” petition against the president and board chairman.
We believe that a country that really believed in its youth and was building for its future would provide free post-high school education, college or vocational school, to young adults rather than leaving them crippled by massive debt.
As the week went on, more Americans stood up and showed their power. On Monday, people who have lost their homes to foreclosure or are threatened with foreclosure, along with their allies, began an occupation of the Department of Justice. Some of them joined us first as guests on our radio show on We Act Radio. Afterwards, we went to Freedom Plaza where they rallied. The coalition was a great mix of people of different ages, races and regions who were angry, organized and prepared. They marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Department of Justice to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder prosecute the bankers who collapsed the economy and stole their homes.
They blocked the doors at the Department of Justice and put up tents emblazoned with “Foreclose on Banks Not on People,” put up a home with “Bank Foreclosed” over it and blocked the streets with orange mesh saying “Foreclosure and Eviction Free Zone.” As evening came, they moved their tents onto DOJ property, brought in a big couch and prepared to stay the night – and some did. By the third day of protests, they moved to Covington and Burling, the corporate law firm that spawned Eric Holder and where the DOJ official in charge of prosecuting the banks, Lenny Breuer, who did not prosecute a single big bank now gets a $4 million annual salary. In Congress the DOJ could not justify their claim that prosecuting the big banks would hurt the economy.
The Home Defenders League/Occupy Our Homes actions broke through in the media as you can see at the end of this photo essay. We particularly enjoyed the coverage in Forbes – someone claiming to be Jamie Dimon was arrested in DC – reporting on protesters who gave the name of banksters when they were arrested. The police responded aggressively, which often attracts media coverage, including the tasering non-violent protesters. And, we were pleased to see local groups, like Occupy Colorado, highlighting the efforts of their colleagues who came to DC.
But, action in the nation’s capital did not end there. There was also a massive walkout of food service workers across the city. The strike began at the building named for the famed union-destroying president, the Ronald Reagan Building, and then moved on, with a particular focus on Obama – the largest employer of low-wage workers. Obama could end poverty federal wages with a stroke of the pen. Will he?
DC is the sixth city to see low-wage workers striking, New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, came before the Capital. Communities have stood with the workers when employers threatened their jobs and people now need to do the same for the DC workers who are being threatened with job loss, please take action to support them. And, coming up is theWal-Mart workers’ “Ride for Respect” to the annual shareholders meeting on June 7 which emulates the Freedom Riders.
Actions are happening throughout the country. In Illinois, so far two people have been arrested at a sit-in in the capitol building to support a ban hydro-fracking. And, the reaction to the call for a fearless summer by front-line environmental groups has been very strong. They are working together to plan major actions throughout the summer escalating resistance against extreme energy extraction. Pressure is building in the environmental movement which now recognizes Obama is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Groups like 350.org that avoided protesting Obama, are now protesting his “grass roots” group, Organizing for America.
And, more is coming. At the end of the week people who have been marching to Washington, DC from Philadelphia as part of “Operation Green Jobs” will arrive to protest at the corporate bully of the capital – the US Chamber of Commerce – uniting the masses in opposition to the corporate lobbyists. Their long walk to DC echoes a walk last week by people from Baltimore seeking jobs and justice.
This Saturday will be the worldwide March Against Monsanto in 41 countries and nearly 300 cities. We published an article in Truthout that explains why we should all protest Monsanto on May 25. This is a great example of non-hierarchical organizing as this protest was called by young grass roots activists and supported by Occupy Monsanto.
One of the things that let us know the popular revolt is more powerful than we realize is the reaction of the power structure. The Center for Media and Democracy issued a report this week that examined thousands of pages of documents which showed how the national security apparatus against terrorism combined with corporate America to attack the occupy movement. And, in Chicago one of the undercover police involved in the NATO 5 case, is still spying, now on students and teachers protesting school closures. If they did not fear the people, would the power structure be behaving this way?But, when you read reports about police acting in this undemocratic way, don’t forget that many of them do not like doing what they are ordered to do and that pulling them to join the popular revolt is part of our job. A mass movement needs people from the power structure to join it in order to achieve success. We highlight one this week, Officer Pedro Serrano of New York who took the great personal risk of taping his superiors as part of an effort to end the racist ‘stop and frisk’ program of the NYPD.
And, it is great to see people planning ahead. We got notice this week from activists in Maine planning for an October Drone Walk. The anti-drone movement and Guantanamo protests have had very positive effects. This week, President Obama had to admit that he killed four Americans with drones, mostly by accident – even though the DoD claims drones are accurate. Also this week, activists filed a war crimes complaint against Obama, Brennan and other officials seeking their prosecution. And Thursday, Obama was forced to make a public speech at the National Defense University about both the drone program and Guantanamo Bay Prison. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, interrupted the speech several times such that the President had to acknowledge her and she asked powerful questions as she was escorted out by security. [See video and transcript.] As she was escorted from the room Obama acknowledged: “The voice of that women is worth paying attention to.” Guantanamo activists responded to the president saying “no more excuses” and vowed to keep the pressure on!
So, just as author Mike Lux saw in the 60s, there is a lot going on, lots of issues coming to a head at the same time and people taking action to confront them. How do we get to the next phase of popular resistance?
Long time writer on movements and transformational change, Sam Smith, the editor of Progressive Review wrote “The Great American Repair Manual in 1997,” we reprinted a portion of it this week: A Movement Manual. The essence: movements are “propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination.” He recommends: organize from the bottom up, create a subculture, create symbols, develop an agenda and make the movement’s values clear. He also recommends becoming what you want to be – become an existentialist – writing “existence precedes essence. We are what we do.” As far as buildingcommunity power, we recommend this video from “The Democracy School” on how to use local governance to challenge corporate power.”
Do not despair when the media says there is no popular resistance. We have been covering the actions of the movement with weekly reports since 2011 and even before the occupy movement began, we saw Americans beginning to stand up. We knew it was the right time for occupy and we now see it is the right time for a mass popular resistance.
We will be announcing a new project in mid-June to help bring the movement to a new level. Sign up here to hear about it and how you can help. To create the transformative change we want to see, we need people to get involved.
We agree with Mike Lux who writes: “just as it took several years for the seeds planted in those 18 months in the early '60s to take root and begin to bring about the changes of the years to come in terms of civil rights, women's rights, and the environment, it will take several years for the seeds being planted now to fully take root. But I believe more and more that it will happen.”
The government responds with police force and ignores the demands of the people. Super majorities of Americans agree with the views of the popular resistance, even if they are not yet acting. This is a recipe for a mass eruption of movement activity. We are in the midst of the pre-history of historic transformational change: a transformation, which will end the power of money to ensure that the people and planet come before profits.(For a listing of upcoming protests see last week’s newsletter.)
This article is produced in partnership with AlterNet and is based on a weekly newsletter for October2011/Occupy Washington, DC. To sign up for the free newsletter, click here. If you have actions you want to promote or report on write us at info@october2011.org.
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Read other articles by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/sparking-each-other-building-mass-resistance-1369574309. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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