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Monthly Archives: August 2020
Waupaca, Wisconsin Protest Demands Equality and Builds Unity
By the Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement
WAUPACA, WISCONSIN, AUGUST 9, 2020 — Dozens from across Wisconsin came to defend Black Lives Matter community activists while building a broad based People’s United Front to oppose racism and raise other people’s demands.
A diverse array of multinational workers, youth and students from Fon du Lac, Oshkosh, Appleton, Neenah, Green Bay, Manitowoc County, Madison, Milwaukee and numerous other cities participated in the “Rally For Equality: Build Unity!” event.
A mass rally took place at a downtown park followed by a strong, disciplined march down Main Street in Waupaca and then returning to the park. During the march armed right-wing goons and police attempted to menace the protesters but the protesters held their ground.
At the event, besides signs in support of Black Lives Matter, many participants raised concrete demands including a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures; money for public education and not cages, cops and war; union jobs not racist union busting; and money for free healthcare not U.S. wars.
Speakers included members of Jonathon Tubby’s family. Tubby was a youth murdered by the Green Bay police on October 18, 2018. Other labor and community and Waupaca residents spoke at the main rally before the march.
Self-Defense Is A Human Right!
Waupaca is a town of 6,000 people in central Wisconsin, an area known for environmental activities, a massive foundry and other industrial and manufacturing plants such as paper mills. The world renowned University of Wisconsin Stevens Point is an hour from Waupaca.
Over this summer, many courageous community activists have physically defended themselves and their children against racists in Waupaca and other right-wing goons that have come to the city with the goal of terrorizing the population.
Community members in Waupaca who organized Black Lives Matter events were and are being attacked verbally on social media; some having their home addresses published. At one protest, a right-wing goon tried running over protesters. On August 1, 2020 an armed protester on site at a protest to defend participants was tackled by cops and subsequently was locked up in jail over a weekend and has been charged with multiple felonies and other charges.
Meanwhile right-wing racist armed goons such as the 3 Percenters are walking the streets, driving erratically through the city with loud racist music, tearing down Black Lives Matter signs and engaging in other terrorism against progressive activists have gone untouched by police.
Community residents in Waupaca in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, are defending themselves in the city against racist goons by any means necessary with support from many quarters.
Fighting Back!
Just days before the August 9 protest, almost 1,000 United Steelworkers at a plant in Wisconsin Rapids (an hour from Waupaca) were given notice that the bosses planned on shutting down a major mill that’s been in operation for over 100 years.
In addition to this devastation – in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic – the Waupaca area, as across the state, has been devastated by the unrelenting racist capitalist austerity over the past decade in Wisconsin. Much of what poor and working people wrested in class struggle over the past 100 years in Wisconsin is now gone. Millions of poor and working people in the state have fought union busting, environmental destruction, attacks on women and the LGBTQ community and much more. Wall Street forces – in particular the banks – have wrested billions in concessions from poor and working people in Wisconsin in the last decade alone through methods such as increased debt service, public sector workers wage and healthcare cuts, the elimination of collective bargaining and Jim Crow right-to-work (for less) laws.
This horrific theft by the capitalists and their vile political servants has come primarily at the expense of a range of public services and public K-12 and higher education. And police across the state in the past decade have murdered dozens of Black, Brown, Indigenous and white workers. And the police of course protect the rich while they engage in plundering poor and working people and destroying the earth.
Organizations, such as the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, fund numerous right-wing organizations in Wisconsin such as the Americans For Prosperity which has an office in Wausau, a short distance northwest of Waupaca. Bradley leaders also have a decades-long alliance with the John Birch Society in Appleton, 40 miles southeast of Waupaca.
Bradley’s “capitalism with the gloves off” approach has turned Wisconsin into a model for Jim Crow austerity in many other states and now federally with the Trump administration. A major focus of Bradley is to eviscerate working class bases of organization such as unions, community and student organizations, to ensure billions in debt service to the banks and that corporations can operate with “flexibility” and “freedom” (no unions, minimal or no safety regulations etc.). Bradley also operates fundamentally with a eugenics ideological base so it’s no mistake that numerous academic and other studies conclude that people of African descent in Wisconsin have the worst quality of life in the United States. The former Chairperson of Bradley, Michael Grebe, goes back to the Reagan administration, formerly chaired the national Republican Party and chaired Scott Walker’s gubernatorial and recall campaigns. Grebe and Bradley for decades have helped “groom” the likes of Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, James Sensenbrenner, Robin Vos, Scott Fitzgerald and a host of other political servants of Wall Street. The Board of Bradley is stocked with union busting attorneys, corporate vultures, bankers and also Art Pope of North Carolina who assisted in bringing racist anti-worker “southern methods” to Wisconsin in the last decade in particular.
This has all resulted in a situation where in particular the life choices for working class youth in semi-rural, rural and urban areas of Wisconsin have been curtailed dramatically. Black, Brown and Indigenous youth are of course experiencing even more barbaric and cruel conditions. Instead of free education, union jobs, free childcare and other necessities, right-wing politicians in Wisconsin and their Wall Street masters are responsible for hundreds of thousands of youth facing potential futures of low-wage non-union jobs, jails, drug addiction, sex trafficking, dying for Big Oil in the military, having their peers murdered by cops and other horrific outgrowths of the profits-at-all-costs capitalist system.
In this environment, youth and students and their allies across Wisconsin are becoming leaders in building a better world by organizing protests, developing relationships and more. They refuse to live in a capitalist world of racism, endless wars, police terror, sexism and bigotry. Despite the numerous very serious challenges facing them, participants joining the August 9 rally and march in Waupaca all joined in solidarity with this vision. They continue the hard work of building the necessary unity and solidarity to win a better world for all poor and working people.
Members of the Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) were also on site to invite participants to an August 17 protest against the DNC in Milwaukee.
Photo and video coverage of the August 9 Waupaca event (and many other BLM and related events in Wisconsin): https://www.facebook.com/wibailoutpeople.org/ and https://wibailoutpeople.org/
August 9, 2020 Waupaca, Wisconsin
August 14, 2020: Break the Silence in the Burbs – Waukesha
Tell Congress the U.S. Should Stay out of Nicaragua!
An orchestrated plan financed by the United States to launch a government transition in Nicaragua over the next two years was leaked in a document from the US embassy and released July 31, 2020, by Nicaraguan journalist William Grigsby on his political analysis program “Sin Fronteras”, on Radio La Primerísima. Grigsby says the new coup plan is in response to the fact that the US realizes President Daniel Ortega will likely win the November 2021 elections. The 18 page document is RFTOP No: 72052420R00004, with the title RAIN or Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua.
Click here to see the document: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rlp680/files/uploads/2020/07/31/aid-mayo-2020-ingles.pdf
The document is called a “Terms of Reference” document and is being used to contract a US company to take charge of carrying out the planned removal of the government. The company chosen by USAID will head the plan to try to disrupt public order and do other actions (violent and otherwise) before, during and/or after the 2021 elections. The funds to implement this plan are or will be allocated through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Waukesha, WI, August 22, 2020: Racial Equity Rally and March
Oshkosh, August 17, 2020: Protest the Racist, Anti-Worker Trump!
Leaflet: Anti Trump Protest Oshkosh WI LEAFLET August 17 2020
525 W 20th Avenue, Oshkosh (Basler Flight Service) – 4 P.M.
Donald Trump confirmed that he will be making a visit to Oshkosh on Monday, August 17 – the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Time and location details to be determined, so stay tuned!
Freedom Inc: We Fight To Abolish Police & Prisons!
Abolition comes from the same blood as the initial removal of the institution of slavery. We use the language and central ideas of abolition when we approach policing because of policing’s connection to historical systems of violence, disenfranchisement, and trauma against people in the diaspora – systems which began in, and continue to reflect, slavery. Freedom Inc. wants to challenge the idea of policing and prisons as a necessary part of society, and we’re doing that through abolition.
Reform says that a system can be fixed, but we say that the system is flawed and oppressive at its core. Policing is a capitalist tool of punishment and control, which exists only to protect the people in power. Reform is not possible because police and prisons are crucial to upholding a violently racist, heteropatriarchal, classist, ableist status quo. Reform is not possible because black people exist outside of cultural citizenship, and we can never benefit from a structure that has always and will always exist to control us. We cannot use the systems that harm us to heal the wounds that they inflict.
The way we dismantle these destructive systems is by investing around them. Abolition relies on a well-supported grassroots infrastructure. #Defund is how we dismantle the police, and shrinking this adversarial system by pouring funds into the community results in a direct investment in the areas where inequality festers. When we use the budgets of police departments to heal our communities, we see that support and #CommunityControl are the answer, not policing. When our communities are well-supported, the problems that our society tries to solve with police disappear. Defunding helps us imagine a world where policing and prisons aren’t necessary.
This community investment exposes all the ways that systems of policing serve ideology, not people. The ideology that shapes our penal systems is informed by whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism. When these structures are allowed to determine criminality, what is “criminal” overlaps with what is “unsavory” in terms of gender, race, and class. Much of what white patriarchy has decided is criminal can be solved with investment, not punishment. Abolition is the commitment to education, assistance, healthcare, and infrastructure that heals, not harms, our communities. Abolition is the declaration that our needs are not criminal, and that we deserve kindness, not capital punishment.
Detroit Marches to Halt State Repression
Frank Nitty, Tory Lowe Arrested (Now Released) Marching in Rural Indiana
Frank Nitty marching in Indiana, with Indiana State Police blocking the group’s forward progress. Images from Nitty’s Facebook live video.
By Jeramey Jannene – Aug 12, 2020
Activists Frank Nitty and Tory Lowe were arrested while walking on the side of a highway in rural Indiana. But the two have been released and Nitty is already back on Facebook.
Nitty had been working on a plan to march to Washington DC in time for a Martin Luther King Jr. rally on August 28th, since July and set out nine days ago with a support group of a couple dozen supporters in tow. He had hoped to go approximately 30 miles per day, arriving in time to commemorate King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
The activist, one of the leaders of Milwaukee’s racial-justice protest movement, posted on his Facebook page earlier Wednesday “only a few days left in Indiana.” Narrating his Facebook Live videos he has said the group has been subject to threats and verbal assaults while marching. Today he said people have swerved at them, pointed guns at them, thrown food and shoes at them and called them racial slurs.
Lowe, another leader in the movement, filmed a portion of the interaction with Indiana law enforcement personnel before being arrested.
The group was marching on the shoulder of a four-lane highway while support vehicles shielded them in the right-hand lane. Lowe approaches Nitty and others already talking with a plainclothes member of the Indiana State Police.
“You’ve got traffic backed up for 67 miles,” said the officer. “That’s a huge concern for safety.” He gave the group the option of the vehicles and marchers both being on the shoulder.
Nitty explained that the group used the vehicles for safety and that people should just pass them in the left-hand lane. “If you want to provide safety then you block the roads for us,” said Nitty.
“Why is your mouth quivering,” said Lowe to the officer. “You’re being aggressive for no reason.”
After Nitty did not comply with an order to leave the roadway, instead attempting to have the officer speak to his attorney, he was asked to turn around and did so. Officers then handcuffed him.
The officer said the group was engaged in “disorderly conduct” by standing on the road.
“It’s an unlawful arrest,” said Lowe, who tried to intercede in Nitty’s arrest repeatedly.
Lowe was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct and then his video stops.
Nitty, who was also broadcasting the entire interaction, handed his phone to another member of the group before being handcuffed.
Nitty, Lowe and another member of the group were booked into Kosciusko County Jail in Warsaw, IN. The group was marching on Indiana Highway 30, near Indiana Highway 13 and Princeton, IN.
By 7:00 p.m. Nitty was already out of jail. Indiana records do not show Lowe in custody. The activist planned to next go to Fort Wayne before leaving Indiana.
“It’s normal, I’m Black,” said Nitty of the experience.
Nitty was previously arrested while marching on the Hoan Bridge in early June, but never charged.
IFCO congratulates this year’s graduates of ELAM, the Latin America School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba
