This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
“The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
--(Martin Luther King Jr., Massey Lectures, November-December, 1967)
Our growing movement of poor folks is that new and unsettling force. We’ve organized rallies. Flooded state capitols. Made thousands of calls. Now, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’re living up to his words with action by delivering the Campaign’s full demands to each and every state lawmaker.
Let’s remind our leaders that Dr. King called on us to fight poverty, racism, militarism and the structures and systems that keep them going. He called on us to bring about a revolution of values.
There is no time to waste. Already this year, we have been canvassing, organizing hearings, speaking out against these conditions and building power in over 40 states. We’re going from Cancer Alley in Louisiana to Paradise, California, from Little Rock, Arkansas to Albany, New York, and elsewhere, delivering our demands and putting our elected representatives on notice: We will not be silent anymore!
They have tried to shut us out, but they can't; they have tried to shut us up, but they can't. We are here, we are coming back, bigger and bolder than we were in 2018, preparing to come back to D.C. in June. Get ready!
Forward together, not one step back,
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis President of Repairers of the Breach & Director of the Kairos Center Co-Chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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Wednesday, 1/23 6:30pm Encuentro 5, 9A Hamilton Pl. [Downtown Boston; 1 block from Park St, 2 blocks from Downtown Crossing]
A new women’s movement has developed through the giant women’s marches, the online explosion of #MeToo, and now through workers taking job action to fight sexual harassment. Increasingly women are enraged by there being one set of rules for the elites and another for everyone else.
Over the past decade, feminism has mainly been about celebrating the achievements of individual elite women. These “feminist” CEO’s and capitalist politicians want to see more women at the top, but they still actively work against working class women’s interests. The for-profit health care system, the severe crisis of housing affordability, and low wage jobs, alongside the rollback of reproductive rights and rampant sexual violence all contribute to women’s oppression.
We need a women’s movement with an organized socialist feminist wing that will fight to center the needs of working class women, women of color and LGBTQ people. A socialist feminist movement would point away from the capitalist system organized solely on the basis of profit and toward a new egalitarian society where meeting human needs and eradicating oppression will be the top priority.
Join Socialist Alternative this Wednesday to discuss building the fight against sexism and all oppression under capitalism, and for a socialist society based on our needs, not profit!
Beginning to fill in his declaration of last year about turning space into a war zone and establishing a U.S. Space Force, President Trump was at the Pentagon last week promoting a plan titled “Missile Defense Review.”
As The New York Times said in its headline on the scheme:: “Plans Evoke 1983 ‘Star Wars’ Program.” Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, called it “provocative and destabilizing and basically insane.”
As Trump stated at the Pentagon on January 17: “We will recognize that space is a new war-fighting domain with the Space Force leading the way. My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer technology. It’s ultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and obviously of our offense.”
The new United States space military plan comes despite the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that designates space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. The U.S., the United Kingdom and then Soviet Union worked together in assembling the treaty. It has been ratified or signed by 123 nations. The release of the 100-page “Missile Defense Review” follows the Trump announcement, also at the Pentagon, in June, that he is moving to establish a U.S. Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. He stated then: “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space.”
The component of the “Missile Defense Review” that closely resembles the “Star Wars” program of President Reagan involves what it describes as “space-based interceptors.”
As The Times said: “In the most contentious proposal, the report embraced Reagan’s Star Wars plan of putting weapons in space to shoot down enemy missiles during ascent.” The Times also noted that “the document was careful to describe the step as largely a research project—for now.”
“The space-basing of interceptors also may provide significant advantages, particularly for boost-phase defense. As directed by Congress, DoD will identify the most promising technologies, and estimated schedule, cost, and personnel requirements for a possible space based defensive layer that achiev…
The Reagan Star Wars program also utilized a defense rationale—it was formally called the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was based on orbiting battle platforms with nuclear reactors or “super” plutonium systems on board providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons. Despite its claim of being defensive, it was criticized for being offensive and a major element in what the U.S. military in numerous documents then and since has described as “full spectrum dominance” of the Earth below that the U.S. is seeking in taking the “ultimate high ground” of space.
Gagnon, whose Maine-based organization has been a world leader since its formation in 1992 in challenging the weaponization of space, said: “The new Trump space proposal is a key element in Pentagon first-strike attack planning sold to the public as ‘missile defense’. The system is not actually designed to protect the U.S. from every nuclear missile launched at us—that would be a mathematical impossibility. This Star Wars system would only work as the ‘shield’ to be used to pick off Russian or Chinese retaliatory responses after a U.S. first-strike sword is thrust.”
He said “we know this because the Space Command,” the division of the U.S. Air Force which Trump seeks to have succeeded by a separate Space Force, “has been computer war gaming such a scenario for years—they call it the ‘Red team’ versus the ‘Blue team.’”
“The kicker” regarding the U.S. space military plans, said Gagnon, “is that the costs would be colossal—what the aerospace industry has long said would be the ‘largest industrial project in human history.’ The only way the U.S. can pay for it is by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and by twisting the arms of NATO members to pony up more money.”
The Outer Space Treaty was spurred, as Craig Eisendrath, who had been a U.S. State Department officer involved in its creation, noted in the 2001 TV documentary that I wrote and narrate, “Star Wars Returns,” by the Soviet Union launching the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Eisendrath said “we sought to de-weaponize space before it got weaponized…to keep war out of space.”
It provides that nations “undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in space in any other manner.”
In recent decades, Canada, Russia and China have been leaders in pushing a treaty that would broaden the Outer Space Treaty—the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) Treaty. This treaty would not only ban nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction but any weapons in space. But U.S. administration after administration, Democrat and Republican, have refused to support the PAROS Treaty, thus providing a veto of its passage at the United Nations.
The new “Missile Defense Review” is explicit in how the U.S. “will not accept any limitation or constraint on the development or deployment of missile defense capabilities.”
The announcement of the new U.S. space plan came a day after the U.S. confirmed it would initiate under the Trump administration a withdrawal from another treaty, this one between the U.S. and the then Soviet Union, limiting nuclear missiles, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987.
Russia is warning that the “Missile Defense Review” will fuel an arms race in space. An Associated Press story out of Russia last week reported: “The Russian Foreign Ministry described the new U.S. strategy as a proof of ‘Washington’s desire to ensure uncontested military domination in the world.’”
“It warned that the expansion of the U.S. missile defense system ‘will inevitably start an arms race in space with the most negative consequences for international security and stability.’”
The “’implementation of its plans and approaches will not strengthen security of the U.S. and its allies,’ the ministry said in a statement. ‘Attempts to take that path will have the opposite effect and deal another heavy blow to international stability.’”
The AP story said: “The Russian Foreign Ministry described the review as an attempt to reproduce President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ missile defense plans on a new technological level and urged the Trump administration to ‘come to its senses’ and engage in arms control talks with Russia.”
Meanwhile, Defense News last week questioned whether Congress will fund the “Missile Defense Review” proposals. It said that “unless Congress approves the major funding increases that will be required to make it a reality, many of those programs may fall by the wayside—and questions are emerging over whether these systems will be funded by the Democratic House of Representatives that is looking to cut defense spending.”
Professor Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, who has long written about space military and weaponization issues, ties the new space plan to where the Reagan Star Wars plan got its name: “Well Lucas Films and its successors,” stated Boyle, “have done all they can to keep their Star Wars franchise alive for the past four decades and milk it for all it’s worth. And now the Pentagon will be keeping their Star Wars franchise and milking it for all its worth.”
This is being done, of course, with the zealous promotion of Darth Trump.
Brand-new 4 for Fair Food Tour logo, hot off the presses, featuring the four universities where farmworkers and consumer allies will take action this coming March.
Today, we bring you a brief but exciting update on the 4 for Fair Food Tour, the four-stop major action that the CIW has planned for March 2-14 – just six weeks from now!
Back in December, we announced the 4 for Fair Food Tour, making sure you had time to mark your calendar. In case you missed it, here’s a quick reprise from the original announcement of what this whole tour’s going to be about:
From March 2-14, farmworkers and their families from Immokalee will travel from Florida to Michigan and back again for the national “4 for Fair Food Tour,” joining forces with students at four leading state universities who have been ramping up pressure on their administrations to boot Wendy’s off campus until the hamburger giant joins the Fair Food Program.
The action will build on years of intense campus organizing at all four tour stops, bringing farmworkers themselves to the doorstep of these powerful academic institutions to demand accountability alongside students and community leaders. For the past several years, students at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Floria have been organizing to send Wendy’s the same, crystal-clear message: If you want to do business on our campus, it’s not enough to just sell fast-food, it has to be Fair Food, too. In other words, instead of Wendy’s famous “4 for $4 deal,” students at all four schools are saying, with one voice, it is time to put Fair Food on Wendy’s menu, or get Wendy’s off our campus!
What’s the route of the tour?
No matter where you are, there are opportunities to get involved!...