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
We invite you to support this call to action from the NWDC Resistance by phoning the authorities listed below.
Thank you.
NWDC Resistance/Resistencia al NWDC - CALL TO ACTION
Hunger Strike Continues at Northwest Detention Center As GEO Retaliates With Worsening Food
Tacoma, WA 19 April 2017 – Today, over a dozen individuals detained at Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) continued a hunger strike to call attention to the abysmal conditions at the facility, which have only gotten worse since Trump took office. More immigrants plan to join the hunger strike this weekend.
Men and women detained at the facility have reported the quality of the food has deterioratedin the last few days, potentially in response to their activism.
The NWDC, which is located on a superfund site, is the largest immigrant detention center on the West Coast, caging over 1500 immigrants while awaiting civil deportation proceedings.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts with The GEO Group, a multinational private prison corporation, to run the facility, and hunger strikers aimed their demands at both the federal government and the private contractor. NWDC has been a frequent target of immigrant activists since a March 2014 hunger strike involving 1200 detainees first brought international notoriety to the immigration prison.
Detention conditions have worsened under the Trump administration, triggering this latest strike, which started on April 10. Trump has staffed his deportation force with openly anti-immigrant officials with links to white supremacist organizations, leaving people detained with little choice but to put their bodies on the line to fight for their basic dignity.
Attorney General Jeff Session’s newly released memorandum calling for increased prosecutions of immigrants and their supporters, combined with a roll-out where he referred to immigrants as “filth,” highlights the continued need for local resistance to the federal deportation and detention dragnet
We need your support!! Call the City of Tacoma and ICE
Call the City of Tacoma’s Finance Department and urge them to revoke GEO Group’s Business License. In a March 2017 letter to GEO, Mayor Strickland noted that the City of Tacoma can revoke GEO’s business license if it is a “danger to the public health, safety and welfareof the individuals [detained] as well as the community as a whole.”
► Finance Department, Andrew Cherullo, Finance Director, +1 253.591.5800
Call ICE and demand that 1) they meet the Hunger Strikers Demands (see below) and 2) GEO Group not retaliate against hunger strikers. We have reports that strikers have been threatened with transfer to facilities away from their loved ones as punishment.
► Acting Field Director, Bryan S. Willcox
► Assistance Field Director (Detention): William Penaloza
► Facility Main Telephone: +1 253 779.6000
► Field Office Main Telephone Line: +1 206 835.0650
Hunger Striker’s Demands
Change the food menu
Lower commissary prices.
Improve hygiene, including the ability to wash clothes with soap and water.
Increase recreation time.
Have schoolwork and other programs available to keep detainees occupied.
From The Archives-On The 100th Anniversary Of Irish Easter Uprising 1916- A Word
A word on the Easter Uprising.
In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos”(and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.
Click on title to link the "Vladimir Lenin Internet Archive" for an online copy of his 1917 article, "The Tasks Of The Proletarian In Our Revolution".
Markin comment:
The name Lenin, the party Bolshevik and the revolution Russian need no introduction to readers of this space. We are still trying assimilate the lessons that Lenin drove home in the early struggles for socialism. Happy Birthday, Comrade Lenin wherever you are doing your revolutionary time.
Click on title to link the "Vladimir Lenin Internet Archive" for an online copy of his 1917 article, "The Tasks Of The Proletarian In Our Revolution".
Markin comment:
The name Lenin, the party Bolshevik and the revolution Russian need no introduction to readers of this space. We are still trying assimilate the lessons that Lenin drove home in the early struggles for socialism. Happy Birthday, Comrade Lenin wherever you are doing your revolutionary time.
Click on title to link the "Vladimir Lenin Internet Archive" for an online copy of his 1917 article, "The Tasks Of The Proletarian In Our Revolution".
Markin comment:
The name Lenin, the party Bolshevik and the revolution Russian need no introduction to readers of this space. We are still trying assimilate the lessons that Lenin drove home in the early struggles for socialism. Happy Birthday, Comrade Lenin wherever you are doing your revolutionary time.
In Boston-Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!-Join The Resistance
Q
Stand Up for Immigrants on May 1st!
View this email in your browser
Strike and Protest on May 1st in Boston!
An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
We need to disrupt “business as usual” to defeat Trump’s agenda. Working people have the potential power to strike a blow at Trump and his billionaire backers by shutting down their profits on May 1.
Alongside immigrant organizations and labor unions, we will take action against the deportations, Trump’s wall, the Muslim ban, anti-union laws and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. We will oppose any retaliation by employers or schools against workers or students who strike or walk out on May Day.
Join us for this powerful protest on May 1st in Boston!
Join us April 23 – April 29, 2017at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada for a 3rd national mobilization of nonviolent resistance to shut down killer drone operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan,Yemen, Somalia and everywhere. Includes weeklong Camp Justice peace encampment. Sponsored by: CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Nevada Desert Experience, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Veterans For Peace & Courage to Resist
Empire War Status
Op-ed by Bob Meola, Courage to Resist. April 3, 2017
A lot of people miss Barack Obama because he smiled nicely while he dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven nations, last year. He was a much more pleasant personality.…
Now, the McResistance, of the Democratic Party and the corporate media have their propagandists reviving the cold war and dangerously flirting with hot war with Russia. Americans are eating Russia Did It propaganda on a daily basis. It is the United States that has interfered with foreign elections and foreign governments everywhere and overthrown approximately five dozen of them since World War ll.… Read More
Support War Resister Pvt. Ryan Johnson
Imprisoned a decade after refusing crimes of his country
Please support US military war resister Army Private Ryan Johnson by making a tax-deductible donation to his support fund, hosted by Courage to Resist. Doing so will help Ryan through the remainder of his prison sentence, and help Ryan and his wife Jenna relocate after his release. Donate today: https://couragetoresist.org/support-ryan
Courage to Resist. March 23, 2017
We at Courage to Resist are reaching out to you to help imprisoned Army soldier Ryan Johnson and his wife Jenna. We’re helping them get on their feet upon Ryan’s expected May release from Miramar Brig in Southern California. Your support is critical to help them begin their next chapter.
Ryan Johnson hasn’t gotten many easy breaks. He lost his father at the age of three. Growing up he would face years of abuse at the hands of a new stepfather. As a teen Ryan escaped into patterns of drug abuse, self-harm, and finally dropped out of high school. Now he endures insult of military imprisonment after literal injury serving the US armed forces. This pall of unfortunate circumstances doesn’t mean there isn’t light in Ryan’s life. He has persevered, with his compassion, kindness, and conscience intact.
Yeah, Put Out That Fire In Your Head-With Patti Griffin’s Words
From “You Are Not Alone” In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
Sam Lowell was a queer duck, an odd-ball kind of guy who
couldn’t stop keeping his head from exploding with about seventeen ideas at
once and the determination to do all seventeen come hell or high water. And not
seventeen things like mowing the lawn or taking out the rubbish but what he
called “projects” which in Sam’s case meant political projects and writings and
other things along that line. Yeah, couldn’t put out “the fire in his head” the
way he told it to his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, one night at supper
after she had confronted him with the fact, and not for the first time, that he
was getting more irritable, was more often short with her of late, had seemed
distant, had seemed to be drifting into some bad place, a place where he was
not at peace with himself. That not “at peace” with himself an expression that
Laura had coined that night to express the way that she saw his current
demeanor. That would be the expression he would use in his group therapy group
to describe his condition when it met later that week.
He would almost shout out
the words in despair when the moderator-psychologist asked him pointedly
whether he felt at peace with himself at that moment and he pointed responded
immediately that he was not. Maybe it was at that point, more probably though
that night when Laura confronted him with his own mirror-self that told Sam his
was one troubled man.
Yea, it was that seventeen things in order and full steam
ahead that got him in trouble on more than on occasion. The need to do so the
real villain of the piece. See Sam had just turned seventy and so he should
have been trying to slow down, slow down enough to not try to keep doing those
seventeen things like he had when he was twenty or thirty but no he was not
organically capable of doing so , at least until the other shoe dropped.
Dropped hard.
It was that “other shoe” dropping that made him take stock
of his situation, although it had been too little too late. One afternoon a few
days after that stormy group therapy session he laid down on his bed to just
think through what was driving him to distraction, driving that fury inside him
that would not let him be, as he tried to put out the fire in his head. That
laying down itself might have been its own breakthrough since he had expected,
had fiercely desired to finish up an article that he was writing on behalf a
peace walk that was to take place shortly up in Maine, a walk that was
dedicated to stopping the wars, mostly of the military-type but also of the environmental
degradation against Mother Nature.
Sam, not normally introspective about his past, about the
events growing up that had formed him, events that had as he had told Laura on
more than one occasion almost destroyed him. So that was where he started,
started to try to find out why he could not relax, had to be “doing and making”
as Laura called it under happier circumstances, had to be fueling that fire in
his head. Realized that afternoon that as kid in order to survive he had
learned at a very young age that in order to placate (and avoid) his
overweening mother he had to keep his own counsel, had to go deep inside his
head to find solace from the storms around his house. For years he had thought
the driving force was because he was a middle child and thus had to fend for
himself while his parents (and grandparents) doted respectively his younger and
older brothers. But no it had been deeper than that, had been driven by feelings
of inadequacy before his mother’s onslaught against his fragile head.
As Sam traced how at three score and ten he could point to
various incidents that had driven him on, had almost made him organically
incapable of having a not ever active brain, of going off to some dark places
where the devils would not let him relax, that kept him going around and around
he realized that he was not able to relax on his own, would need something
greater than himself if he was to unwind. Laura had emphatically told him that
he would have to take that journey on his own, would have to settle himself
down if he was to gain any peace in his whole damn world. Sam suddenly noticed
after Laura had expressed her opinion that she had always been the picture of calm,
had been his rock when he was in his furies. Funny he had always
underestimated, always undervalued that calmness, that solid rock. He, in
frustration, at his own situation asked Laura how she had maintained the calm
that seemed to follow her around her world.
Laura, after stating that she too had her inner demons, had
to struggle with the same kind of demons that Sam had faced as a child and that
she still had difficulties maintaining an inner calm, told Sam that her daily
Buddha-like meditations had carried her to a better place. Sam was shocked at
her answer. He had always known that Laura was drawn to the spiritual trends
around their milieu, the “New Age stuff” he called her interest since it seemed
that she had taken tidbits from every new way to salvation outside of formal
religion (although she had had bouts with that as well discarding her Methodist
high heavens Jehovah you are on your own in this wicked old world upbringing
for the communal comfort of the Universalist-Unitarian brethren). He had
respected her various attempts to survive in the world the best way she could
but those roads were not for him, smacked too much of some new religion, some
new road that he could not travel on. But he was also desperate to be at peace,
a mantra that he was increasing using to describe his plight.
Then Laura suggested that they attend a de-stress program
that was being held at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as part of what
was billed as HUB-week, a week of medical, therapeutic, technological and
social events and programs started by a number of well-known institutions in
the Boston area like MGH, Harvard, MIT and others. Sam admitted to being
clueless about what a de-stress program would be about and had never heard of a
Doctor Benson who a million years before had written a best-selling book about
the knot the West had put itself in trying to get ahead and offered mediation
as a way out of the impasse. Sam was skeptical but agreed to go.
At the event which lasted about two hours various forms of
meditative practice were offered including music and laughter yoga. Sam in his mind
passed on those efforts. The one segment that drew his attention, the first
segment headed by this Doctor Benson had been centered on a simple technique to
reduce stress, to relax in fact was called the relax response. Best of all the
Doctor had invited each member of the audience to sample his wares. Pick a word
or short phrase to focus on, close your eyes, put your hands on your lap and
consecrate, really try to concentrate, on that picked term for five minutes
(the optimum is closer to ten plus minutes in an actual situation).
Sam admitted candidly to Laura that while attempting
fitfully focusing on one thing, in his case the phrase “at peace,” he had suffered
many distractions but that he was very interested in pursuing the practice
since he had actually felt that he was getting somewhere before time was
called. Laura laughed at Sam’s response, so Sam-like expecting to master in
five minutes a technique that she had spent years trying to pursue and had not
been anywhere near totally focused yet. He asked her to help him to get started
and they did until Sam felt he could do the procedure on his own.
We now have to get back to that “other shoe” dropping though.
Although Sam had expressed his good intentions, had felt better after a while
Laura had felt that he needed to go on his journey without her. She too now
felt that she had to seek what she was looking for alone in this wicked world
despite how long they had been together. So Laura called it quits, moved out of
the house that she and Sam had lived in for years. Sam is alone on his journey
now, committed to trying to find some peace inside despite his heartbreak over
the loss of Laura. Every once in a while though in a non-meditative moment he
curses that fire in his head. Yeah, he wished he could have put out that fire
in his head long ago.
In Boston-Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!--Join The Resistance
Q
Stand Up for Immigrants on May 1st!
View this email in your browser
Strike and Protest on May 1st in Boston!
An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
We need to disrupt “business as usual” to defeat Trump’s agenda. Working people have the potential power to strike a blow at Trump and his billionaire backers by shutting down their profits on May 1.
Alongside immigrant organizations and labor unions, we will take action against the deportations, Trump’s wall, the Muslim ban, anti-union laws and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. We will oppose any retaliation by employers or schools against workers or students who strike or walk out on May Day.
Join us for this powerful protest on May 1st in Boston!
Change the food menu
