http://www.workers.org/

From “No THAAD Task Force” / no-thaad@mail.com

Hello Friends – Juyeon Rhee was just blocked at the first leg of her flight to Korea, La Guardia.  We need to act right away and flood the Blue House (President Moon Jae -in) with our calls to lift her ban.  I am copying in the sample email below, again, and attaching it.  PLEASE USE THIS ONE AS IT HAS SLIGHT MODIFICATIONS and then get the word out to everyone you know who would be supportive.  Many thanks   — Ramsay Liem

__________

Sample Rapid Response.  Feel free to modify according to your own views.

Send to:

president@president.go.kr  and

webmaster@president.go.kr

bcc: limwolsan@gmail.com

bcc: liem@bc.edu

In Subject Line put – Lift the Entry Ban on Juyeon Rhee Immediately

Sample Text

Date and Time

President Moon Jae-in

Blue House

Seoul, ROK

Re: Lift the Entry Ban on Juyeon Rhee Immediately

Dear President Moon Jae-in

I am writing to strongly protest the ban imposed this morning on Ms Juyeon Rhee today at LAGuardia Airport, New York,  preventing her from boarding her Delta flight to Incheon. The ban was imposed by South Korean officials.  Juyeon Rhee is the coordinator for the Stop THAAD in Korea (STIK) peace delegation visiting your country and hosted by the National People’s Action to Stop the Deployment of THAAD in South Korea (NPA).  The STIK delegation includes prominent peace activists Jill Stein, 2016 U.S. presidential candidate for the Green Party, USA, Medea Benjamin, founder of CODEPINK, Reece Chenault, National Coordinator for U.S. Labor Against the War, and Will Griffin, Veterans for Peace and STIK.

The delegation arrives with the endorsement of more than 80 U.S. and international organizations and 270 individuals including such widely respected peace advocates as Professor Noam Chomsky, author and social critic, Daniel Ellsberg, Women for Genuine Security member, Gwyn Kirk, Academy Award-winning director, Oliver Stone, religious scholar and public intellectual, Cornel West, and former U.S. State Department official and Army colonel, Ann Wright.

I am deeply troubled by the actions of your authorities to prevent Juyeon Rhee from entering your country especially in view of the welcome promise of your administration to seek peaceful and negotiated settlements to longstanding conflicts and to recommit the nation to open dialogue and respect for democratic processes.  Ms Rhee has demonstrated a life-long commitment to the desire of all Koreans for a peaceful resolution to decades of conflict and to U.S. policies that respect the sovereignty of the Korean people and value equally the human needs of all Americans.

In the spirit of the candlelight revolution I urge you to fulfill your pledge to eradicate problems left over from the previous administration, champion democratic rights including freedom of expression without fear of reprisal, and immediately lift the travel ban imposed on Juyeon Rhee by the previous administration.

Sincerely,

Please be sure to include your affiliation with your signature and your email address, if possible.  It will strengthen your message.

Peoples Power Assemblies

http://peoplespowerassemblies.org/

About Peoples Power Assemblies

Peoples Power Assemblies organize to empower workers & oppressed people to demand jobs, education & healthcare while fighting against racism, sexism & LGBT bigotry.

Mission

We must begin the struggle for people’s power

The only way we are actually going to have justice and build equality in this society — the only way we are going to build a society based on solidarity instead of profit — is to begin the struggle for power. That is why we have been talking about People’s Power Assemblies.

The U.S. imperialist ruling class wants to maintain the status quo — that is what the government is there for. The bosses will send their cops against strikes and people who mobilize in the streets to fight for their needs.

We have to elect a new power. We have to show people and build confidence in their ability to fight. If you have a next-door neighbor who has been paying on a house for 30 or 40 years, and the sheriff shows up at their door saying the bank has foreclosed, the only way you can stop that from happening is to join with that neighbor of yours and you take over that home.

If the city is closing a school because government officials say they no longer have the money to keep it open, then you join with the teachers, students and family members and say, “We will not let you close and foreclose on these children’s education.”

If a victim of police brutality is ignored by the city council and no one in the so-called halls of justice is paying any attention to them, you erect the type of organization that is designed to and will help them raise struggle. That is what organizers have done in cities like Baltimore and Oakland.

Over time this builds confidence in people, not just in the individual ability to struggle, but in their neighbors and in the organization itself.

It is time for us to make it very clear that things are only going to get worse. And the only way we can stop things from getting worse — the only way we can win a society that we dream for, not only for ourselves, but for our children and our grandchildren and the children that we don’t know, not only here but around the world — is to overthrow this brutal system.

We start organizing in the streets and we build that type of organization. As soon as we get to that point at our local level, at our street level, at the block level — we take it to the seat of power in this country; we take it to Washington, D.C. We erect the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King. We go there and we shut Washington, D.C., down and refuse to leave until our demands are met.

All power to the people! Build Peoples Power Assemblies!

Blacksburg, VA

http://www.rfc.org/

I’m excited to let you know that we anticipate that this Sunday, July 23^rd, 60 Minutes will rebroadcast their groundbreaking story examining the controversial trial and executions of my grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It will air at 7:00 pm ET/PT on CBS.

The report features interviews with my father Robert and my uncle Michael, who were six and 10 years old when their parents were killed. It also highlights the evidence showing Ethel was not a spy and her execution was wrongful, which led to our nationwide campaign last year asking President Obama to exonerate my grandmother.

If you’re unable to watch live, the segment will be available on the 60 Minutes website for several weeks after the broadcast.

• 60 Minutes
• Sunday, July 23rd
• 7pm ET/PT on CBS
• http://www.cbsnews.com/60-minutes/

Please tune in, and invite your friends to do so as well! An email you can share is below.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Meeropol
Executive Director

=================================

Subj: Watch Ethel Rosenberg’s sons on 60 Minutes this Sunday!

This Sunday, July 23rd, at 7:00 pm, 60 Minutes is expected to air a story examining the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I think you’ll want to see this!

The Rosenbergs were young parents and left-wing activists who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed by the U.S. government in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy Era. They were accused of giving “the secret of the Atomic Bomb” to the Soviet Union.

60 Minutes filmed the segment in the wake of the groundbreaking evidence showing Ethel was not a spy and her execution was wrongful, which launched the nationwide campaign asking President Obama to exonerate Ethel. The report features interviews with Rosenberg sons Robert and Michael Meeropol and others. It explores the Rosenbergs’ controversial trial and execution for the so-called “crime of the century.”

If you’re unable to watch live, the segment will be available on the 60 Minutes website for several weeks following the broadcast.

• 60 Minutes
• Sunday, July 23rd
• 7pm ET/PT on CBS
• http://www.cbsnews.com/60-minutes/

I hope you’ll tune in.

http://www.rfc.org/

Saturday, July 15, 2017 By Lamont Lilly, Truthout | Interview

Ashley Yates is co-founder of the Ferguson-based grassroots organization Millennial Activists United (MAU). Originally from Florissant, Missouri, Yates was one of the early on-the-ground organizers following the unjust police murder of Mike Brown on August 9, 2014. In 2015, she was a Black Lives Matter representative at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

As one of the more vocal activists at the forefront of the Ferguson Rebellion, Yates’s many contributions have helped provide key leadership to a new generation of young freedom fighters and Black abolitionists. Affectionately described by CNN as a “disruptor of the status quo,” Yates’s thoughts and critiques on racism and state violence have been featured on NPR, Democracy Now!, The Huffington Post and MSNBC. In this interview, Yates discusses Assata Shakur, Black woman leadership and the recent housing developments in Oakland, California.

“…Being able to witness this for myself was so powerful. It really put a lot of things into perspective for me. It was a reminder of why it’s so important to create these relationships, to learn from each other.

One of the things I found out while I was down there [Brazil] is that, in addition to Israel, Brazil has also been a training site for US law enforcement. We’re talking about the LAPD, the FBI and the Chicago Police Department, [which] flew down to share tactics and information with Brazilian authorities and state police. We certainly cannot ignore these international partnerships that perpetuate our oppression, both locally and globally. If our oppressors are organizing globally, we should be organizing globally just as hard for our liberation…

…How can we talk about resistance without mentioning the Stonewall Rebellion? How can we talk about the Black Liberation Movement without mentioning James Baldwin? We can’t! I can’t imagine a movement without Black queer people, whether we’re talking 2014 or 1965.

In reference to Black women in general, we’ve been pushing back against that narrative since Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells. It’s a shame that Black women still have to be invited to a table that we helped create. As Solange [Knowles] would say, we’ve earned our seat at the table. Shit, we’ve earned several seats. Without Black women, there wouldn’t be no damn seats, no table, no nothing…”

Black Lives Matter activists gather in McKeldin Square in Baltimore, Maryland on January 15, 2015. (Photo: Dorret / Flickr)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41279-exclusive-interview-mumia-abu-jamal-speaks-about-black-lives-matter-and-police-violence

Sunday, July 16, 2017 By Tasasha Henderson, Truthout | Interview

In his new book Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, author and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal explores this question over 75 essays, spanning from the late 1990s to 2017. Each essay explores the violence of policing and the criminal legal system, whether from a historical perspective or through the stories of people who have died by the hands of police. In the first essay, “Hate Crimes,” Abu-Jamal questions the legitimacy of the idea of hate crimes, pointing out that police are never charged with a hate crime when they brutalize and kill Black and Brown people. Abu-Jamal’s essays discuss the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, the killing of Tamir Rice by Cleveland, Ohio, police officer Timothy Loehmann, and what the aftermath of these slayings reveals about how the United States views Black people. His conclusion is perfectly summed up in the first two lines of his October 2015 essay titled, “Tamir Rice of Cleveland” — “Question: When is a child not a child? Answer: When it’s a Black child.”

Abu-Jamal spoke with Truthout about some of the issues he engages with in Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, including police violence and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

“…Look, we can look at Trump as the Great Boogeyman, or we can soberly examine the roles of Clinton and Obama, where the former perfected the machinery of mass incarceration, and the latter tinkered with it, just as he all but ignored the greatest loss of Black wealth (i.e. criminal mortgage thefts of Black homes) since Reconstruction. We must develop a deeper, refined analysis that gives us all a clear vision of the inherent repression of the state against Black life, a historical continuum that shows no sign of abatement. Or we can play “Republicans bad/Democrats good” like children looking for shadow plays.

The system is bad; we need deep reconstruction to make new ways of living, growing and becoming possible.”