January 20 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm The Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018: The People Persist

January 20 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

The Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018: The People Persist

n January 20th, 2018, We the People of New England will take to the streets again to show that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights. Rain or shine, we welcome everyone to our event, including families and people with disabilities.

Read the FAQ’s and see the Official Facebook Page for the latest updates

Speakers

The January Coalition is thrilled to announce our roster of confirmed speakers for the Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018. Our speakers are all amazing women from a broad range of experiences, and they reflect the many identities and issues that intersect with women’s rights.

Don’t recognize some of the names? We’ll be profiling our speakers and their accomplishments individually in the days to come, so keep checking back!

Elected Officials:
Marc McGovern, Mayor of Cambridge
Maura Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts
Marjorie Decker, State Representative
Sumbul Siddiqui, Cambridge City Council

Community Speakers:
Rhoda Gibson, MassADAPT
Valentine Moghadam, Northeastern University
Laura Rotolo, ACLU Massachusetts
Nichole Mossalam, CAIR Massachusetts
Andrea James, Families for Justice As Healing
Tina Chéry, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
Michelle Cunha, Massachusetts Peace Action
Savina Martin, Poor People’s Campaign
Eva Martin Blythe, YWCA Cambridge
Tray Johns, #Fedfam4life
Aleksandra Burger-Roy, NEIC
Freedom for All Massachusetts (speaker TBA)

MC: Zayda Ortiz, Indivisible Mystic Valley

More logistical information is coming soon! Accessibility information will be posted here: https://www.facebook.com/events/862995990536253/permalink/884560728379779/

STATEMENT OF VALUES:

1) We are a coalition of diverse social justice, human rights, disability rights, women’s rights, and peace organizations that are coming together on the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration to voice our opposition to an administration that is systematically eroding the rights of women and other marginalized people, dismantling and destroying our democracy, and putting the entire world at risk.

2) We have come together to affirm our common values, and we seek to ensure the rights of all people to liberty, dignity, and equal protection under the law.

3) We are dedicated to the guarantee of these basic human rights for all individuals, regardless of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, race, age, religion, nationality, immigration status, disability, economic status, geographical residence, health status, culture, and political affiliation, not just in the United States but across the planet.

4) We believe that we are strengthened as a society by our diversity, and we are committed to protecting and passing laws that protect and sustain the rights of all people in our multicultural and multiethnic society.

5) We are united to resist the harmful consequences of President Trump’s administration on women, other marginalized groups, and the planet itself.

6) We envision this event as an occasion to recognize the resistance efforts undertaken thus far, and to further mobilize our collective energies for the year ahead.

---

Co-Hosts and Endorsers

List of groups co-hosting the event, in alphabetical order:
Boston Persists—Events for the Resistance
Cambridge Area Stronger Together
Cambridge-Somerville for Change
Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church
Human Rights Festival
Indivisible Mystic Valley
Indivisible Somerville
March Forward Massachusetts
Massachusetts Peace Action
Massachusetts People’s Budget Campaign
New England Independence Campaign
Not One Penny — Tax March
We Unite Organizations
… more coming soon!

List of groups endorsing the event:
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
MassADAPT
PowerMASS
Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice, and the Environment
… more coming soon!

If you would like to volunteer or join us as a cosponsor, please contact us at januarycoalition@gmail.com.

We need your help (including your money) to put on a great event!  We need $10,000 to cover the costs of a stage, sound equipment, portable restrooms, a generator, etc. and have raised $3,550 as of January 15.  Every grassroots penny comes from YOU.  Donate on Paypal or on Eventbrite.

 

Make checks payable to Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund, write “Women’s March 2018” on the memo line, and mail to MAPA EF, 11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138

FacebookTwitterCopy Link

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Smedley VFP Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to smedleyvfpforum+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to smedleyvfpforum@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smedleyvfpforum/CAEUbeDWdOEDH-_7vqHLFE-0Qth4XjZq1KPSOYzTUZfXsVeMonA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s 

Lucille In Mind

  

 By Bradley Fox, Jr.  

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlowe on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able unlike my older brother, Prescott, to call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You, Sweet Little Sixteen, Let’s Have A Party, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Bo Diddley, Peggy Sue and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family, Buell Kazell, Jimmy Rodgers, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country), the blue grass music , and the protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know Chicago, blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and of course Mississippi John Hurt. But those guys basically stayed in the South and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they had made their own pacts with the devil. Praise be.               

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

The Lady In The Bell Jar-The “One Life: Sylvia Plath” At The National Portrait Gallery

The Lady In The Bell Jar-The “One Life: Sylvia Plath” At The National Portrait Gallery

By Frank Jackman

I have known the name Sylvia Plath for a long time, maybe since the time of her suicide when I was still in high school and my senior year English who was a great influence on all her charges especially about literature was pretty broken up about that tragic event. While I may have known about Sylvia Plath and her well-known (and still well-known) book The Bell Jar and of her poetry in those days what she had to say, what poetry she wrote did not “speak” to me.

How could such a sensitive soul (but also much else as the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery points out including a sense of humor, a wry sense) speak to a hard-bitten corner boy whose literary heroes if he had any centered on guys like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Tough guys writing for a tough hard-shell world. Even later, college later, when I had a girlfriend who was crazy for whatever Ms. Plath wrote (she did her senior thesis on Ms. Plath if I recall) and who endlessly coaxed me to at least read The Bell Jar I bucked her. (Needless to say that relationship did not last too long). It was not until later, not until after a whole bunch of Army experiences during the Vietnam War kind of broke a lot of my youthful prejudices did I finally read her work. That is when I got why that Plath-crazed young women was so insistent that I take the plunge. And it is not too late for you as well.   

    

 

SW Feature: THE DEPORTATION OF SIHAM BYAH-Free Her Now-Read On

Catch up with this week's top articles with SocialistWorker.org's Weekend Edition Can't see images? Click here... SW Feature: THE DEPORTATION OF SIHAM BYAH Siham Byah was stolen away from her family  N. Montalvo and Kay Sweeney | A 40-year-old single mother and longtime freedom fighter in Boston was deported without warning shortly after Christmas. Why am I in this cell?  Siham Byah | Read excerpts from letters by Boston activist Siham Byah while she was held in terrible conditions at ICE facilities before her secret deportation. I need my mom, my family and my home  Naseem Byah | The 8-year-old son of a detained Boston activist makes a heartbreaking appeal to the authorities who took his mother away. text SocialistWorker.org P.O. Box 16085, Chicago, IL 60616 773-583-6725 https://socialistworker.org SHARE TWEET FORWARD You received this email because you signed up on our website. Unsubscribe from SocialistWorker.org Alerts

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:bmdc-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>

Resist Deportations! Save DACA and TPS as the deadline looms! Permanent residence for all undocumented migrants! Friday, Jan. 19, 5:00 - 7PM Park Street T stop, Boston MA

This announcement went out with the wrong date...

Resist Deportations! Save DACA and TPS as the deadline looms!

Permanent residence for all undocumented migrants!

Friday, Jan. 19, 5:00 - 7PM
Park Street T stop, Boston MA

The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to
levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only
the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Over 1 million migrants
covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) and
the Temporary Protective Status program (TPS) now face deportation.
Prospects for a bipartisan agreement to protect these folks and prevent
a government shutdown on Friday have faded.

Washington is leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and
living conditions. From attacks on healthcare, women, and LGBT folks, to
attacks on our environment and education, to perpetual wars, working
people are under fire. The leading edge of this assault is the
criminalization and attacks on Migrants. Millions of youth and decent
hard working people are under attack! The powers in Washington have no
solutions that benefit us as working people. Our only choice is to build
a fighting movement. Enough is enough! An injury to one is an injury to
all! Join us on Friday. Demand an end to the deportations. Jobs,
healthcare, education, and human rights for all!.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1831086873579118/

_______________________________________________
Act-MA mailing list
Act-MA@act-ma.org
http://act-ma.org/mailman/listinfo/act-ma_act-ma.org
To set options or unsubscribe
http://act-ma.org/mailman/options/act-ma_act-ma.org

Strategic Stability after the end of Strategic Arms Control | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

https://www.belfercenter.org/event/strategic-stability-after-end-strategic-arms-control

Strategic Stability after the end of Strategic Arms Control | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs www.belfercenter.org Speaker: Ambassador Linton Brooks Russian violation of the INF Treaty means that it will be politically impossible to replace New START when it expires and even an extension may be difficult.  As a result, by 2026 at the latest and perhaps as soon as 2021, there will be—for the first time in half a century—no formal agreement regulating nuclear relations between Russia and the United States.  This presentation will discuss the resulting consequences for strategic stability and how they might be mitigated.  It will conclude that serious examination, both internally and bilaterally, should begin soon.

-- 

Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action

11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138

w: 617-354-2169

m: 617-466-9274

f: /masspeaceaction  t: @masspeaceaction

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MAPA Nuclear Disarmament" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mapa-nuclear-disarmament+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mapa-nuclear-disarmament@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mapa-nuclear-disarmament/CAKfC%2B3u5M60-iptf3QmH%2BR3oC2aDnsbEH9ewtTKOZZgMS%2Bw35w%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

From The Partisan Defense Committee-32nd Holiday Appeal Fundraiser For Political Prisoners In New York City January 27, 2018

From The Partisan Defense Committee-32nd Holiday Appeal Fundraiser For Political Prisoners In New York City January 27, 2018 

In Honor Of The Late Radical People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart-Support And Donate To The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal For Our Political Activists Inside The Prison Walls

In Honor Of The Late Radical People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart-Support And Donate To The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal For Our Political Activists Inside The Prison Walls 

By Frank Jackman

I know, as I have recounted elsewhere about my personal situation during my military service, so-called, my military resister time, during the Vietnam War, that the holidays are tough times for our political prisoners, hell all prisoners, but today we write on behalf of our fellow activists behind the walls. A place where we outside the walls may find ourselves under the regime of whatever party in power. (After all Lynne Stewart and Chelsea Manning among others, for example, were in jail in Obama time.) And nobody on the outside working for social change is exempt as the case of the late radical super people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart demonstrated. So be very generous this year in aid of those on the inside who will garner strength knowing that those outside the walls today are standing in solidarity. I know in my time I did from such support in my time.    

********

Workers Vanguard No. 1124	15 December 2017

The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

---

32nd Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

This year’s Holiday Appeal marks the 32nd year of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and imperialist depredation. This program revived a tradition initiated by the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary (1925-28). This year’s events will pay tribute to a former stipend recipient, Lynne Stewart, who succumbed to the effects of metastasized breast cancer last March. A courageous radical lawyer who defended numerous poor people and fighters for the oppressed, including the Ohio 7, Stewart had been incarcerated for her vigorous defense of a fundamentalist sheik who was convicted in an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks. We honor her by keeping up the fight for the freedom of all class-war prisoners. The PDC currently sends stipends to 12 class-war prisoners.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia, condemning him to life in prison with no chance of parole. Last year attorneys for Mumia filed a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) seeking to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his frame-up conviction. On September 7, Judge Leon Tucker ordered a private review of the complete file of the prosecution by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office of Mumia’s case, looking for evidence of the personal involvement of then D.A. Ronald Castille, whose refusal as a judge to recuse himself during Mumia’s PA Supreme Court appeal is the basis for this PCRA. After a two-year battle, Mumia was finally able to begin lifesaving treatment for hepatitis C. In May, lab tests showed that he was free of this life-threatening illness. But the drawn-out period during which he was refused treatment left him with an increased risk of liver cancer.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its Native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. The lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have repeatedly denied Peltier’s appeals while acknowledging blatant prosecutorial misconduct. Before leaving office, Barack Obama rejected Peltier’s request for clemency. The 73-year-old Peltier is not scheduled for another parole hearing for another seven years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions including a heart condition for which he had to undergo triple bypass surgery. He is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 40th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. Collectively known as the MOVE 9, two of their number, Merle Africa and Phil Africa, died in prison under suspicious circumstances. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Now Laaman and Manning face prison torture where they are isolated in solitary confinement for extended periods. Manning has been deprived of necessary medical attention. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, who died in prison last year, were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. They were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and Poindexter has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that crucial evidence, long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.