Victory To The Fast-Food Workers The Vanguard Of The Fight For $15......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers-Join The Actions April 15th

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Frank Jackman had always ever since he was a kid down in Carver, a working class town formerly a shoe factory mecca about thirty miles south of Boston and later dotted with assorted small shops related to the shipbuilding trade, a very strong supporters of anything involving organized labor and organizing labor, anything that might push working people ahead. While it had taken it a long time, and some serious military service during the Vietnam War, his generation’s war, to get on the right side of the angels on the war issue and even more painfully and slowly on the woman’s liberation and gay rights issues, and he was still having a tough time with the transgender thing although the plight of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Army soldier Chelsea Manning had made it easier to express solidarity, he had always been a stand-up guy for unions and for working people. Maybe it was because his late father, Lawrence Jackman, had been born and raised in coal country down in Harlan County, Kentucky where knowing which side you were on, knowing that picket lines mean don’t cross, knowing that every scrap given by the bosses had been paid for in blood and so it was in his blood. Maybe though it was closer to the nub, closer to home, that the closing of the heavily unionized shoe factories which either headed down south or off-shore left slim leaving for those who did not follow them south, slim pickings for an uneducated man like his father trying to raise four daughters and son on hopes and dreams and not much else. Those hopes and dreams leaving his mother to work in the “mother’s don’t work” 1950s at a local donut shop filling donuts for chrissakes to help make ends meet so his was always aware of how close the different between work and no work was, and decent pay for decent work too. How ever he got “religion” on the question as a kid, and he suspected the answer was in the DNA, Frank was always at the ready when the latest labor struggles erupted, the latest recently being the sporadic uprisings amount fast-food workers and lowly-paid Walmart workers to earn a living wage.        

One day in the late summer of 2014 he had picked up a leaflet from a young guy, a young guy who later identified himself as a field organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a union filled to the brim with low-end workers like janitors, nurses assistants, salespeople, and the like, passing them out at an anti-war rally (against the American escalations in Syria and Iraq) in downtown Boston. The leaflet after giving some useful information about how poorly fast-food worker were paid and how paltry the benefits, especially the lack of health insurance announced an upcoming “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 at noon as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. He told the young organizer after expressing solidarity with the upcoming efforts that he would try to bring others to the event although being held during a workday would be hard for some to make the time.

In the event Frank brought about a dozen others with him. They and maybe fifty to one hundred others during the course of the event stood in solidarity for a couple of hours while a cohort of fast-food workers told their stories. And while another cohort of fast-food workers were sitting on the ground in protest prepared to commit civil disobedience by blocking the street to make their point. Several of them would eventually be arrested and taken away by the police later to be fined and released.

Frank, when he reflected on the day’s events later, was pretty elated as he told his old friend Josh Breslin whom he had called up in Maine to tell him what had happened that day. Josh had also grown up in a factory town, a textile town, Olde Saco, and had been to many such support events himself and before he retired had as a free-lance writer written up lots of labor stories. The key ingredient that impressed Josh in Frank’s description had been how many young serious black and Latino workers had participated in the actions. Later than night when Frank reflected further on the situation he broke out in a smile as he was writing up his summary of his take on the events. There would be people pass off the torch to when guys like him and Josh were no longer around. He had been afraid that would not happen after the long drought doldrums in the class struggle of the previous few decades. Here is what else he had to say:            

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones,” “los olvidados,” those who a writer who had worked among them had long ago correctly described as the world fellahin, the ones who never get ahead. This day we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Mart jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right to keep them on a string and keep them from qualifying for certain benefits that do not kick in with “part-time” work. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of decent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. Growing up working class town poor, the only difference on the economic question was that it was all poor whites unlike today’s crowd. Also for many years living from hand to mouth before things got steady. I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for these slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!  

 

       http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/09/04/boston-fast-food-workers-rally-for-wages-unions/bc1ZqZIgwsVcOw0QHIV74M/story.html         

Reforge the Fourth International- An International Party That Leon Trotsky Would Recognize As Something He Would Belong To Workers Vanguard No. 1064	20 March 2015

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International

(Quote of the Week)

 

Under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, the Fourth International was founded in 1938 as a proletarian vanguard in opposition to the social-democratic Second and Stalinized Third Internationals. With much of its best cadre wiped out during the World War II period, the Fourth International was destroyed in the early 1950s under its then-leader, Michel Pablo, who had impressionistically responded to the postwar social overturns and expansion of Stalinism. The Pabloites liquidated, wherever they could, into the Stalinist Communist Parties (and elsewhere into social-democratic or petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations), renouncing the need to build Trotskyist parties. Albeit belatedly and partially, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the U.S. joined the fight against this revisionist current.

 

Our forebears, the Revolutionary Tendency, waged a struggle within the SWP as it was succumbing to Pabloite revisionism in the early 1960s. Today, the International Communist League remains dedicated to the fight to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. We reprint below excerpts from an article anticipating the Fourth International’s founding, which appeared as the lead in the first issue of the New International, theoretical organ of the American Trotskyists in the 1930s.

 

The whole history of the modern proletarian movement has only served to underscore the all-importance and indispensability of that most highly perfected of all its instruments: the political party. Especially in our time has it become the master key to all problems. The class war is fought by class armies. The working class as a whole—to say nothing of its necessary allies in other sections of the population—is not characterized by firm homogeneity, it is stratified at different levels of consciousness, it is divided by conflicting ideologies, by separatist interests of caste, religion, nationality, sex, age. Emerging from its ranks—but transcending these differences and consequently able to overcome them—is its vanguard, the revolutionary political party. The party embodies the accumulated experiences of the proletariat distilled into its revolutionary theory. It is the repository of the consciousness of the class. It embraces the most advanced, the most militant, the most devoted, unites them firmly on the basis of tested principles and welds them together in rigorous discipline....

The day of national revolutionary parties ended long ago, as did the day of national party programs. In the period when world politics and world economy exist as distinct entities, there can be only one revolutionary party—the International, with sections in every country....

 

The Fourth International? This is no meaningless phrase. It is a fighting program! It means a fight to the death against Fascism, imperialism, war. It means an intransigeant struggle against treacherous social reformism, bureaucratic Stalinism, cowardly compromising centrism of all species. It means the unconditional struggle to defend the Soviet Union which social democrats and Stalinists left in the lurch in Germany when they permitted the arch-anti-Sovietist Hitler to come to power without a battle. It means the militant struggle for revolutionary Marxism, for the final victory of the working class.

 

For the Fourth International! For revolutionary Marxism!

 

That is the unsullied banner our periodical will defend. In periods such as the one we are passing through now, it becomes fashionable in certain quarters to seek the reasons for defeat and reaction in all corners except where they are to be found, to trace the causes everywhere except to their roots. Not the traducers of internationalism are at fault; perhaps it is internationalism itself. Not the traducers of Marxism; perhaps it is Marxism itself which requires revision or “re-interpretation.” As yesterday, so today, we shall continue to work with all our strength for all the fundamental theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which have been tested through and through and confirmed a thousand times over and from every angle.

 

—“For the Fourth International!” New International (July 1934)

 

A View From The Left-Ferguson, Madison, Nationwide Capitalist Rule Means Racist Cop Terror
 

Workers Vanguard No. 1064	20 March 2015

Ferguson, Madison, Nationwide

Capitalist Rule Means Racist Cop Terror

In front of a crowd commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, President Barack Obama offered a rehash of the bald-faced lie that racism is no longer “endemic” to America. This tune is to be expected from the black overseer of a system that criminalizes young black men as part of maintaining the racial oppression that is woven into the fabric of American capitalist society.

Obama declared that “what happened in Ferguson” is “no longer sanctioned by law or custom,” as it was before the 1950s-’60s civil rights movement. In fact, under its liberal leadership, that struggle, while leading to the dismantling of legal segregation in the South, could not challenge the systemic police violence, poverty and misery that define life for the black masses. Within days of Obama’s speech, killer cops had taken the lives of more unarmed black men, including Tony Robinson, a 19-year-old recent high school graduate in Madison, Wisconsin, who viewed himself as biracial, and Anthony Hill, a mentally ill Air Force veteran gunned down outside Atlanta, Georgia.

Each new killing by the police, as usual, comes with an official stamp of approval. The city of Cleveland pointed the finger at 12-year-old Tamir Rice for failing to “avoid” being blown away, while a Justice Department investigation gave a free pass to Michael Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson. Such is par for the course in, to use Obama’s phrase, “fair America,” where a filthy rich elite lord it over working people, the black masses and the rest of the downtrodden. Indeed, terrorizing the poor and oppressed, as well as violently suppressing workers struggle and social protest, is what the capitalist rulers pay the cops to do. The thugs in blue have not resorted to planting “throwaway guns” on these victims; the law sanctions deadly force by police against any threat they perceive—and in this racist society black youth are widely perceived, especially by the cops, as lawbreakers. Harassment, or worse, for driving/walking/breathing while black is a daily reality.

Ferguson’s black residents and anti-police brutality activists were back in the crosshairs after two cops standing guard were shot and wounded during a protest outside police headquarters the night of March 11. City authorities and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blamed protesters for the “ambush,” paving the way for heightened repression as county and state police again descended on the small community. After a huge manhunt, a 20-year-old black man was arrested. Whatever happened the night of the protest, the ongoing violence-baiting of protesters is a clear message: they deserve whatever they get from the marauding cops.

Some observers have found solace in the Feds’ second Ferguson report, which knocked the aggressive ticketing and other “unconstitutional” practices of its police as well as their pervasive harassment of black people. In an online Atlantic article (5 March), black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates lauds the “due process” extended to Wilson while remarking: “The lack of faith among black people in Ferguson’s governance, or in America’s governance, is not something that should be bragged about. One cannot feel good about living under gangsters, and that is the reality of Ferguson right now.”

Since the report was released, several local officials, including the widely reviled police chief, have submitted their resignations. We say good riddance. But changing who fills these positions does nothing to address the material reality of racist oppression in this country or the cop terror that is one of its starkest expressions. The aim of the federal investigation, as always in such cases, was never to rein in the police, but to neutralize fury over their crimes, thwart unrest and paint a gloss on the “justice” system. In fact, Ferguson is hardly the worst case, as even the liberal bourgeoisie’s main mouthpiece, the New York Times, felt compelled to document in the article “Ferguson Became a Symbol, but Bias Knows No Border” (7 March).

As many of those around the Black Lives Matter movement proclaim, state violence is endemic to a society that has written off the lives of black ghetto youth, who are deemed unworthy of education and cast aside into the ranks of the jobless and/or locked up. But in faulting a “broken system,” these activists are criticizing social and legal institutions, not the economic foundations on which those institutions stand. The entrenched oppression of black people in this country, a legacy of chattel slavery, is rooted in the capitalist profit system. Under capitalism, a handful of exploiters who own industry, the banks and large farms—that is, the capitalist class—amass huge wealth off the labor of the working class. The police, as the frontline defense of that system, are at the core of the repressive capitalist state machinery, along with the courts and prisons. This system cannot be fixed by tweaking laws or cleaning out corruption, which is the content of the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black people are an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at its bottom as a race-color caste. Bearing the brunt of cutbacks and job losses, they are the last hired (if at all) and first fired. Even so, black workers continue to form a strategic core of the multiracial working class—the only force, based on its role in production, with the social power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system, paving the way for black liberation in an egalitarian socialist society.

The Illusion of Police Accountability

On March 11, over a thousand people marched in Madison to demand justice for Tony Robinson, who was shot in the head by a cop in his own apartment in this mostly white college town. One of the protest organizers was the Young Gifted and Black Coalition (YGBC), which formed after the killing of Michael Brown. In January correspondence with the Madison police chief, the YGBC sought “open and honest dialogue” with the city’s top cop, offering specific recommendations for reforming local law enforcement and the county jail. Politically linking arms with the YGBC, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) posted this correspondence approvingly on its website with the headline: “Time to Hold the Police Accountable” (socialistworker.org, 22 January).

The YGBC imbibes in the widespread illusion, peddled by the ISO, that the police can be made answerable to the public. The letter calls on the Madison Police Department to “address racial disparities,” which is like imploring a viper to ease up on its bite. In fact, the capitalist state apparatus can never be made to “protect and serve” the interests of workers and minorities.

The cops are not “accountable” to anyone other than to the capitalist masters they serve. Madison is proof positive. A petri dish for police reform schemes, the city is known as a liberal haven in a state with a long history of supposedly progressive police chiefs. Still, as the YGBC itself attests, black people are arrested and incarcerated there at much higher rates than whites. Matters will not change with more diversity training and more black cops, who are no less devoted to the job than their white counterparts. A black officer was involved in killing Charly Leundeu Keunang in Los Angeles earlier this month (see article on page 1).

The YGBC also embraces “the values of community control and self-determination.” The black nationalists who raised “community control” in the late 1960s were drawn from a layer of the black petty bourgeoisie seeking its own piece of the pie by making a virtue of the ingrained segregation that was seen as unchangeable. They also often opposed organized labor. The actual content of the “community control” slogan was an appeal for more black Democratic Party politicians, cops, judges and administrators. Since then, black mayors have been installed in one major city after another to help contain the discontent of the black masses while presiding over cop terror and pushing through attacks on labor and social programs.

Cops Are Not Workers

Drawing a link between the interests of the besieged black masses and those of the working class does not take a Marxist analysis. In an article titled “Black Lives Matter to Labor” (27 February), Terry Melvin, secretary-treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO and president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, observes how “the fate of Black workers is the fate of American workers,” with black workers playing a central role in the unions. So why hasn’t anti-black repression been met with massive, militant protest by organized labor, with its ability to bring production to a halt and stop the flow of profits?

Melvin’s conclusion that black lives matter “because the American Dream matters” is indicative. This patriotic myth holds that working people can “make it” if they work hard to help maximize the bosses’ profits. The union bureaucracy, of which Melvin is a part, has long shackled the workers to their class enemies, largely through support to the capitalist Democratic Party, falsely portrayed as a friend of labor and black people. The “American Dream” is in fact a nightmare for the untold millions who daily scramble to get by.

Emblematic of the labor tops’ allegiance to the capitalist system is their opening of the unions’ doors to the police and security guards. Of the 16 million people covered by a union contract today, around 7 percent are in so-called “protective service occupations.” This embrace of the racist killer cops and strikebreakers as class brothers and sisters is just one more noose around the neck of organized labor, further sapping the fighting strength of the unions. Cops, prison guards and security guards have no place in the union movement.

Separate associations representing cops and prison guards, referred to by the misnomer “unions,” have grown in recent years, right along with mass incarceration. Above and beyond defending the capitalists’ hired guns, the role of these organizations is to advance an agenda of more weapons, manpower and leeway for cop savagery. Witness the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York City, which seized on the killing of two Brooklyn cops last year to spin a tale of a “war on police” in order to better squelch protest. In Albuquerque, New Mexico—with one of the country’s highest rates of fatal shootings by cops, eight times that of the NYPD—the police fraternity routinely has rewarded trigger-happy cops with $500 to help them “decompress” after they shoot someone.

Pseudo-Marxist groups like Socialist Alternative (SAlt) regurgitate the union bureaucracy’s filth that cops are “fellow workers.” Such a view makes a mockery of the entire history of workers struggle. When miners used to sing the old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” they were not addressing the strikebreaking cops or Pinkertons.

In documents posted on SAlt’s website under the title “Marxism and the State: An Exchange” from a 2006 debate within their British affiliate, the Socialist Party, these reformists’ longstanding position that cops are “workers in uniform” is given a theoretical wrapping. The reader is told that “a revolutionary policy” involves supporting the police ranks’ “democratic rights, including the right to organise in a trade union.” SAlt goes on to say that unionizing the cops will create “more favourable conditions of struggle for the working class” by bringing them closer to the workers movement (yes, close enough to land a baton). The mere fact that these thugs are paid for their dirty work does not make them workers. If reformists like SAlt truly had the courage of their convictions, they should split off from the protests, go inside police stations—say in Ferguson, for example—and appeal for solidarity from these agents of state repression. Then see what happens.

For a Proletarian Orientation

Notably, in Madison the March 11 march and rally sparked by Tony Robinson’s killing was appended to a protest in opposition to an anti-union “right to work” bill signed two days earlier by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Some protesters also expressed sympathy with fast-food workers engaged in the “Fight for $15” campaign to raise the minimum wage and win union recognition, including by marching to a Burger King and a Papa John’s after rallying at the Department of Corrections.

The cause of these heavily black, immigrant and female workers has become a focal point for the struggle against poverty wages and tenuous employment, with the campaign attracting fast-food workers who want to make a fight of it. But labor officials like those of the SEIU service workers union use the “15” rhetoric to pressure the Democratic Party into supporting minimum wage increases as a substitute for waging a class-struggle fight to obtain increased pay from the bosses. Ditto the reformists of SAlt, who in tailing behind the union bureaucracy have focused their efforts on legislative wheeling and dealing and petitioning to raise the minimum wage.

As we wrote in “Fight Poverty Wages Through Class Struggle!” (WV No. 1052, 19 September 2014), “The organization of the atomized fast-food workforce poses the need to mobilize the power of unionized workers along the supply lines of the fast-food chains, where once-strong union concentrations, such as in trucking and meatpacking, have been eroded by the craven policies of the union bureaucrats. A hard struggle to organize fast-food workers would rapidly fuel a resurgence of union strength in those industries.”

The millennials of today’s Black Lives Matter protests have not witnessed much by way of strike action. Many activists wrongly associate the working class as a whole with the sellout leaders atop the unions. What is necessary to transform the unions into battalions of class struggle and champions of the oppressed is a new labor leadership willing to fight it out class against class.

There is plenty of raw anger among working people over smaller paychecks, among black youth over cop terror, among immigrants over mass deportations. That anger must be turned into class struggle against the common enemy, the capitalist ruling class, which thrives on promoting racial antagonisms in order to keep working people divided. Such struggle could provide a springboard for working-class consciousness and organization. Crucially, the political ties of the unions and the black masses to the Democratic Party must be severed. And that requires revolutionary leadership. To militant activists unwilling to be led down the path of the same dead-end liberal politics that have buried black struggle for decades, we offer the perspective of building a multiracial workers party in which black workers will be in the front ranks. Such a party would be dedicated to putting an end to the brutal capitalist order once and for all and establishing a socialist America. iew

No medical execution of Mumia!

 

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URGENT!  URGENT!  URGENT!

Mon. April 6 national call in: No medical execution of Mumia!

SAVE THE LIFE OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
STOP HIS EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
DON’T LET THE STATE MURDER ANOTHER BLACK LEADER!
SHUT IT DOWN FOR MUMIA!
Stopped from carrying out the death penalty against Mumia Abu-Jamal by a worldwide movement that spanned three decades, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has been attempting over the past three months to execute him by medical neglect.
On March 30, Abu-Jamal was rushed, unconscious, to the Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa., suffering from diabetic shock, with a dangerously high blood sugar level of 779.   After just two days of treatment in the hospital’s ICU, on April 1, Abu-Jamal was returned to the prison infirmary at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pa., into the hands of the very same doctors whose medical neglect and mistreatment nearly killed him.
Prison officials initially denied visits by family members, supporters and Abu-Jamal’s attorneys and only backed down after receiving thousands of calls. Those able to visit Mumia on April 3 reported he was extremely weak, had lost 80 pounds, and still had elevated blood sugar levels over 300. For lunch that day the prison fed him spaghetti, one of the worst foods to give a diabetic patient.
The murder of aging political prisoners by denying them inadequate health care has happened before. Earlier this year, MOVE 9 member Phil Africa died under suspicious circumstances at SCI Dallas. The lack of standard medical treatment impacts all prisoners, particularly those over 55.
We are demanding that the state of Pennsylvania cease and desist in their attempts to murder political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal:

●Allow daily visits by Mumia’s family, friends and attorneys. Their support and protection at this time of vulnerability should not be restricted.

●Allow Mumia’s choice of specialist doctors to examine and schedule treatment for him -- NOW. Neither the prison staff at SCI Mahanoy nor the Schuylkill Medical Center has a diabetes specialist. There is precedent in Pennsylvania for this. Prisoner John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, was allowed care by private doctors during imprisonment. Mumia deserves the same.

●Release Mumia’s medical records to his attorneys.

●Release from prison all the elderly age 55 and over. Mumia will turn 61 on April 24.

●Allowa full investigation of prison health care in Pennsylvania.

●Mumia is innocent and should never have been incarcerated. We demand his immediate release.

We are calling on everyone to participate in the following actions over the next few days:

●Twitter widely using the hashtags #mumiamustlive,  #saveMumia and #Blacklivesmatter.

●Call, fax and email the following state officials to raise the above demands:

~ DOC Secretary John Wetzel: 717-728-4109; crpadocsecretary@pa.gov.
~ Gov. Tom Wolf: 717-772-5000; fax 717-772-8284; governor@pa.gov.
~ Prison Superintendent John Kerestes: 570-773-2158; contact.doc@pa.gov.

●MONDAY, APRIL 6: A car caravan will demand to see Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Superintendent John Wetzel at the DOC office: 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050 at 11 a.m. Cars leaving Philadelphia will gather at 7 a.m. on JFK Boulevard between 30th and 31st Streets (across from Bolt and Mega buses). If you can offer rides or need a ride, call or text Joe Piette at 610-931-2615 or email jpiette660@hotmail.com.

●TUESDAY, APRIL 7: Press conference in Philadelphia at 11 a.m. outside

District Attorney Seth Williams’ office at Juniper Street & South Penn Square (across from City Hall, near Macy’s).

●FRIDAY, APRIL 10: Organize a demonstration in your city, on your campus, wherever you can get out word to stop this attempt to murder Mumia. We need to SHUT IT DOWN FOR MUMIA!

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Mumia's family and supporters present demands to the Dept. of Corrections, Mechanicsburg, PA 4/3/2015  
  https://youtu.be/1VSYaj9Ab8U

Video link by Power to the People Radio Program

April 3 NYC emergency protest: No medical execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal!

https://youtu.be/-kAkhjJsNXQ
Video link by Peoples Video Network

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Column written by Mumia Abu-Jamal 3/5/15 

“Ferguson, USA”

With breathless news reports, the U.S. Deptartment of Justice’s Pattern and Practice Study paints a damning picture of a long, cruel and bitter train of maltreatment, mass profiling, police targeting and brutality against Black people in the Missouri town of Ferguson.
What may be even worse, however, is how the town’s police, judges and political leaders conspired to loot the community -- by fining them into more poverty, fines which today account for some 25 percent of the county’s budget.
Correctly, cops have been criticized for their juvenile emails and texts of racism and contempt against the local Black community and even Black leaders in Washington, D.C.
There is largely silence, however, over the role of judges, who used their robes to squeeze money from the community, with unfair fines and fees -- even using their jails as an illegal kind of debtor’s prison.
In 1869, during the reign of England’s Queen Victoria, a statute known as the Debtors Act was passed, which forever abolished imprisonment as punishment for debt.
In today’s Missouri, it’s still used to punish and exploit the poor. But, truth be told, it ain’t just Missouri.
Famed Rolling Stone writer, Matt Taibbi, in his 2014 book, The Divide, tells a similar tale, but from points all across America -- Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, Gainesville, Georgia, Los Angeles, San Diego and beyond -- [where] poor people are being squeezed and squeezed by cops, by judges, by local governments -- to part with their last dime -- to support a system corrupt to the core.
Taibbi’s full title might give us some insight: The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
It’s the system -- one of exploitation or predation, ultimately of capitalism.
© ‘15maj

 

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2nd FL
New York, NY 10011

Join Hatem Abudayyeh, Susan Abulhawa, Pam Africa, Abayomi Azikiwe, Ajamu Baraka, Medea Benjamin, The Cuban 5, Lamis Deek, Steve Downs, Bernadette Ellorin, Glen Ford, Sara Flounders, Bruce Gagnon, Teresa Gutierrez, Lawrence Hamm, Chris Hedges, Joe Iosbaker, Charles Jenkins, Antonia Juhasz, Chuck Kaufman, Kathy Kelly, Jeff Mackler, Christine Marie, Ray McGovern, Cynthia McKinney, Michael McPhearson, Malik Mujahid, Lucy Pagoada, Lynne Stewart, David Swanson, Clarence Thomas, Ann Wright, Kevin Zeese & many more at ...   A national conference to connect all the issues:   “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” (to register now, click the link below)   The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) invites you to attend the “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” conference, to be held May 8-10, 2015, in Secaucus, N.J, just outside New York City.   More and more, we can see how all the problems of the world are connected. The trillions of dollars being spent on wars-for-profit abroad could be used here at home to rebuild our cities, educate our youth, employ our jobless, repair damage to the environment – and try to make up for the endless suffering the Pentagon is inflicting on people around the world, most of them people of color, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with threatening us or anyone else.   Some of the connections are even more striking. Some of the very same kinds of military equipment used in Iraq was seen this past summer on the streets of Ferguson, Mo. Surveillance drones developed for use by the military are now being used by domestic police departments. The endless “war on terror” is being used to justify taking away our civil liberties here at home. Wars for oil in the Middle East keep fossil fuels flowing, accelerating the climate change that threatens all humanity.   This conference will be an opportunity to meet and network with activists from across the country and learn about the many struggles going on today, both at home and around the world. Speakers with decades of experience will be joined by members of the new generations of activists who are bringing fresh energy and ideas into the movement. Together, we will learn from and inspire each other.   Most conferences cost many hundreds of dollars to attend, but UNAC organizers are doing their best to keep this one affordable for young activists and working people. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to expand your knowledge, make many new progressive friends and build the movement for fundamental social change.      Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad! For more information and to register for the conference, see:  www.unacconference2015.org   To place an ad in the conference journal, see: http://www.unacconference2015.org/p/endorsers.html   UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COALITION (UNAC) P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054  ●  Ph:  518-227-6947 Email:  UNACpeace@gmail.com  ●  Web:  www.UNACpeace.org   To view this email in your browser, please go to: http://nepajac.org/blast.html     Join the Facebook event for the conference: https://www.facebook.com/events/1426863107605812/

 

 

 

HANDS UP

                                DON’T SHOOT!

SYSTEMIC RACISM IN THE CRIMINAL “JUSTICE” SYSTEM

AND HOW TO COMBAT IT

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 7:30 PM

NORTHEASTERN SCHOOL OF LAW

DOCKSER HALL, 65 FORSYTH ST., BOSTON, RM 240

 

DR. KHALILAH BROWN DEAN          Assoc. Professor Quinnipiac University.  Author “Once Convicted, Forever Doomed: Race Punishment, and Governance.”

CARLTON WILLIAMS, ESQ       Attorney, ACLU of Massachusetts. Longtime activist/organizer.  Member Boston Coalition for Police Accountability.

 

PANELIST FROM BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT.

 

 

Co-Sponsored by the Northeastern and Suffolk Law School chapters of the

National Lawyers Guild and the United for Justice with Peace coalition.

 

www.justicewithpeace.org       info@justicewithpeace.org       617-491-3333

 

Please register online to avoid long lines day of Walk! "Thank you and everyone at the Peace Institute for helping us get through a very difficult time in our lives. There is no way possible that we could have handled all of the things you guys did for us, while grieving at the same time.  You guys are truly amazing, and we can't thank you enough for everything you have done for us."-- Campbell, Sheppard, & Hopkins Family  Dear Friend, Have you registered for the 19th Annual Mother's Day Walk for Peace yet? If not, please do so today.  We are just 34 days away from the Walk. This Mother's Day, Sunday, May 10, 2015, rally and walk with thousands of caring and concerned citizens in support of creating a more peaceful and violence-free community.  Mother's Day Walk For Peace Boston by KutRoc Records There are 85 Teams registered! We have raised $61,501 in hand and another $63,000 in pledges so far towards our $400,000 goal.  Thank you so much to everyone working hard to make this year's event the greatest walk yet! Our top 10 fundraising teams so far are:Martin Richard Foundation   $6,345.09 Team Smith Mothers for Peace  $2,000.00  Simmons College  $1,000.00 Beacon Hill Friends Meeting (Quaker) $985.00  Julia's Team  $765.00  Compassionate Cohasset  $670.00 FOLLEN COMMUNITY CHURCH TEAM   $663.00  Watertown Walks for Peace $645.00  Team Rashad    $510.00 Trinity Church Boston Team  $510.00   Please show your commitment to a Peaceful Boston today by giving. Encourage your team mates to register and give now too.    Walking the walk to end the violence.    We thank you for your generosity. You make our work possible in making peace a reality!     In Peace and Service,      Clementina M. Chery President and CEO LDB Peace Institute 15 Christopher St Dorchester, MA 02122  617-825-1917

15 Now Passes in the First Student Vote for a campus wide $15/hr in the country at Northeastern University!

15 Now Passes in the First Student Vote for a campus wide $15/hr in the country at Northeastern University! Boston, Massachusetts: On April 6th students at Northeastern University made history by winning a student referendum vote to implement the nation's first campus-wide $15/hour minimum wage. The initiative passes with 76.39% of the vote. Not only did these students break ground nationally by becoming the first campus to demand $15, they broke ground at Northeastern by smashing all previous election records. With a coalition of 9 progressive student groups on campus, 15 Now Northeastern is poised to put their university on the front lines of the fight for wage equality nationwide.  15 Now Northeastern is a historic campaign in a number of ways. In February, 15 Now NU required 750 student signatures to be allowed on the ballot. 15 Now Northeastern shattered this target by collecting almost 2000, making it the most signatures for any question in NU history. Over 4500 students voted in this election, making it the biggest student vote in campus history as well.  In illustrating this wage inequality, students pointed to the salary of Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun. In 2011 he made over $3.12 million, which is 117 times the average salary of a campus protective service employee, making him the second highest paid Administrator in the country. In previous years, the school's student government has struggled to meet the threshold required to validate the election. However this year with the placement of 15 Now on the ballot the threshold was exceeded well before voting closed.  While the vote for 15 Now's referendum does not immediately raise wages for campus workers, it does show a clear mandate to address the issue of income inequality on campus and forces the Administration to act. The work of 15 Now Northeastern is set to become the blueprint for winning $15 on campuses across the country, with similar initiatives already underway at the University of Washington in Seattle and Temple University in Philadelphia. With the support of the student body behind them, this 15 Now Northeastern hopes to soon enter into public negotiations with the school's administration. This is poised to be a heated process, considering the Northeastern administration has a history of being antagonistic to progressive campaigns on campus. We need to build on this victory by spreading 15 Now to every campus in Boston! The movement for a living wage is growing and winning more and more victories every week. On April 14th, workers and students will be marching in Boston as part of the biggest day of action for $15 in history! Join us on April 14th to march for 15! Want to start a 15 Now chapter on your campus or in your neighborhood? Contact one of our organizers at 15NowNU@gmail.com to get involved!

 

Our NYC event calendar is full as we prepare for the April 24-26 events. Please join us and other NYC area activists and organizers as we build momentum for our April 24-26 two-day international conference, interfaith convocation, rally, march and festival. Please forward far and wide!

 

Monday April 13 7:00 PM at Brooklyn Friends Meetinghouse (110 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn)

Building a Just, Sustainable, and Nuclear-Free Future: Brooklyn for Peace/Climate Action and the Brooklyn Friends/Peace and Social Action Committee. Just four years after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, nuclear power is being promoted as a "clean, green" solution to climate change; the number of nuclear power plants is expected to double globally over the next 20 years. And the United States has announced that it will "upgrade" its nuclear arsenal of 7,500 weapons to the tune of $1 trillion. Russia and the other seven nuclear states are following suit. When attention should be focused on halting climate change, building a sustainable world, and ending racial and economic injustice, we appear to be building for war instead. Speakers Marilyn Elie (founding member, Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition) and Joseph Gerson (AFSC; author of Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapson to Dominate the World).

RSVP on BFP's Facebook page

Co-sponsors: Brooklyn for Peace; Peace and Social Action Committee of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting (Quakers)

Endorsers: Bay Ridge Peace Action; Fort Greene Peace, Muslim Community Network

Sunday April 19 3:00-5:00 PM at La Plaza Community Garden (9th St & Avenue C, Manhattan)

Prop and Banner-Making +BBQ for the Peace and Planet Mobilization.: Join us in the garden with long time community and environmental activists, Times Up! We will provide materials, but more are always welcome, including paint, cardboard, cardboard polls, and other art-making supplies.

Thursday April 23 6:30-8:30 PM Aranow Theater First Floor North Academic Center 138th Street and Convent Avenue, The City College of New York

Building a peaceful world: Ending U.S. Militarism --Nick Turse and Rory Fanning will lead a frank discussion of violence inherent in U.S. militarism and the steps we need to take to end the violence and create a world grounded in peace, negotiation, and cooperation. Nick Turse is an award winning journalist and historian. He has written a number of books including Kill Anything that Moves: The real America War in Vietnam and the The Complex: How Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008-2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. He is author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America (Haymarket Books, 2014).

Saturday April 25 5:00--7:00 PM at La Plaza Community Garden (9th St & Avenue C, Manhattan)

Prop and Banner-Making +BBQ for the Peace and Planet Mobilization. Round 2 of our Peace and Planet and Times Up! banner-making! We will be putting the final touches on our banners, signs and art, and we will be joined by activists and organizers from the region and around the world converging on NYC for the Peace and Planet mobilization.

Tuesday April 28 9:30 AM Vigil: Isaiah Wall  (First Ave. and 43 St.) followed by Direct Action at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. (First Ave. and 45 st).  Isaiah Wall Vigil and Nonviolent Direct Action at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. 9:30am. More information on Facebook

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Letter from the World’s Social Movements to the President of the

United States of America Barack Hussein Obama

Dear Mr. President,

We, representatives from the social movements worldwide, have seen

with bewilderment and indignation how on the 9th of March 2015 you

decreed a national emergency in your country in order to confront

Venezuela by labeling it as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the

national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Such executive order is an act of aggression which violates

international law, and it is the most severe attempt to change the

democratic will of the Venezuelan people.

In addition, we believe that your executive order endangers peace

throughout the continent, since it clearly implies that your Government

is determined to roll back the social advances that have been achieved

during the last decade in Latin America.

Mr. President, you are isolating your own country by turning it

into a true rouge state

You are treating Venezuela as an enemy, a country that over the last

two centuries has cultivated a tradition of international peace.

You are acting as a world bully who wishes to forcibly impose his might

over the rule of law and over people’s sovereignty.

The military and economic power of the United States shall never be

enough to tread on the rights of the rest of humanity.

Mr. President, you want to change the Government of Venezuela

in order to upset the continent’s progress in social policies

The Government of the United States wants “to twist arms” to

Venezuelan men and women because they decided, peacefully and

democratically, to correct the social inequalities accumulated over

centuries of racism against indigenous and Afro-Latin Americans, of

violence against women, oppression against rural and urban workers,

discrimination against sexual minorities, exclusion of the minorities with

special needs and environmental destruction.

Over the past 15 years, millions of men and women in Venezuela, as

well as in Latin America and the Caribbean, have seen their quality of

life improve thanks to the ongoing fight against poverty, illiteracy, lack

of medical attention, and the recognition of their cultural, environmental

and sexual rights.

This is due to a great historical change that has turned social

movements into fundamental political actors, eroding the power of

traditional elites.

Mr. President, you use the power of your country to privilege the

powerful one percent which for centuries has oppressed the ninetynine

percent of the peoples in Latin America.

By trying to turn back the clock of Latin American history, your

Government plots against democracy, popular majorities and the peace

with justice that millions of us, Latin Americans, have built with so much

sacrifice.

Venezuela is not alone

In this struggle for peace and justice, the people of Venezuela have the

right to freely decide their future. They even have the right to make

their own mistakes.

We join Venezuela in its liberation effort. The struggle of Venezuela’s

majorities is our struggle. Their victories and defeats are ours.

Venezuela may well be unusual and extraordinary, but you Mr.

President are the threat

Mr. President, you seem to be convinced that Venezuela’s defeat

would create a “domino effect” all over the continent, halting the wave

of social change that runs throughout the region. This error is born of

your lack of understanding of Latin American social movements, which

is also the case among the elites in your country. Your unjustified

aggression is doomed to failure.

While Venezuela offers peace, solidarity and friendship to the people of

the world, your Government only offers a return to the past through the

illegal use of force, military bases, threats and intimidation.

For us the choice is clear: Venezuela may be unusual and

extraordinary; however, you Mr. President and the US Government

pose a real threat to democracy, peace and justice in Latin America.

We call upon reflection, so that arrogance may cease. We call upon

respect for the human rights of people all over the world. Finally, we

also call upon the most active organization and mobilization of the

world’s ninety-nine percent to defend our social achievements and to

advance our aspirations for peace and justice.

Therefore, Mr. President Obama, we demand that you repeal your

executive order now!