ACTION ALERT! TOMORROW THURSDAY!
#LetSarahTeach #SaveSpecialEd
Friends and allies,
Chicago Public Schools suspended special ed educator Sarah Chambers for speaking out against policies that harm our kids.
Call Rahm Emanuel & Frank Clark tomorrow (Thursday) all days. Demand to reinstate Sarah Chambers! Please call and share with your network! Thank you! An injustice against one, is an injustice against all.
Hosted by Durango Save the Kids
May 15 – 21, 2017
National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth
events all over the United States for the week
#NoYouthInPrison
#2017NoYouthInPrison
National Week Website: http://savethekidsgroup.org/noyouthinprison2017/
We are looking for groups and individuals around the United States to organize events.
During the 2017 5th Annual National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth organizations, groups, collectives, mosques, synagogue, community centers, bookstores, schools, clubs, churches, recreation centers, and temples, are organizing in their communities around the country daily events during the week aimed at raising awareness about the school to prison pipeline and ending the incarceration of all youth.
Another world is possible, and it begins with community based programs and alternatives such as rehabilitation, therapy, counseling, job readiness workshops, tutoring, more community programs and centers, and transformative and restorative justice programs in the community and in schools to address conflicts. Incarceration is not the solution, but the problem. Once youth are involved in the juvenile justice system, it is hard for them to get out of it. Please support youth and their futures and demand that no more youth are incarcerated no matter the crime/harm they have committed. Incarceration does nothing to address the needs of the community, those harmed, and the youth who have committed the harm.
For more info: Anthony Nocella 3156572911 or nocellat@yahoo.com
Listen to the Wed. April 26, 2017 edition of the Pan-African Journal: Worldwide Radio Broadcast hosted by Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The program features reports on France, the DPRK, Somalia and United States militarism. Other segments will review the contributions of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in honor of the 45th anniversary of his transition.
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Tuesday April 25, 2017
“…Le Pen could easily follow the same path as the current U.S. President Donald Trump who ran for office saying he would lessen tensions with the Russian Federation over Syria and place more emphasis on infrastructural projects while erecting trade barriers with other states. Nevertheless, Trump after gaining office, drew from the same coterie of Pentagon generals, intelligence operatives, bankers, oil magnates and ideological racists which have served as the administrators of imperialism for decades.
The Western industrialized states do not have the political or economic capacity to break with the reliance upon unequal terms of trade, militarism and the super-exploitation of labor. Racism and xenophobia are utilized to fortify the system of capitalism where the financial institutions determine the parameters of both domestic and foreign policy.
Until the workers and oppressed within the imperialist states can organize to effectively transform the status quo, there are relatively few prospects for a genuine qualitative improvement in living standards among those who have to toil for their existence. The ruling class has articulated no program for resolving the crises of joblessness, poverty and the burgeoning inequality within capitalist society. Consequently, these two candidates in France represent the duality of an unresolvable quagmire within a social system that has served its usefulness to humanity.”
The Palestinian prisoners’ movement participating in the hunger strike in Israeli prisons issued a new statement on 26 April, the 10th day of the hunger strike which began 17 April 2017, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day.
The over 1500 hunger strikers have a series of demands, including an end to the denial of family visits, the right to appropriate health care, the right to education in prison and an end to solitary confinement and “administrative detention,” imprisonment without charge or trial.
The following statement was released today in Arabic by the Palestinian Prisoners Movement on behalf of the strikers and is translated to English in full below:
In the name of God, the most merciful
“Those to whom hypocrites said, ‘Indeed, the people have gathered against you, so fear them.’ But it merely increased them in faith, and they said, ‘God alone is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs.’” – the Holy Qur’an
Statement issued by the Palestinian Prisoners’ National Movement
Follow-Up Committee for the Hunger Strike
As the battle of empty stomachs (the battle of freedom and dignity) continues in its tenth day, a wide-scale targeting of activists and strugglers on hunger strike is taking place at the hands of the forces of the occupation prison administration, fully supported by the government of the Zionist enemy. Its prime minister and officials daily declare their refusal to deal with the just demands of the prisoners as they raise the ceiling of racist incitement against the prisoners while promising further oppression and abuse. They do not take advantage of the lessons of the past, where the prisoners have trurned the tables of the prison officials, the intelligence agencies and the occupation state through their steadfastness, determination and struggle. This is another battle in a series of battles fought by the prisoners’ movement throughout its history. It is a landmark of steadfastness and struggle, emphasizing the course of resistance, unity, liberation and victory.
In this context, we are sending a series of messages through this statement to the striking prisoners and those ready to fight in this battle, to the Palestinian people everywhere, to the national and Islamic forces, and to all forces of freedom in the world, in which we affirm our need for support, solidarity, participation and unity as prisoners to confront the challenges imposed by the government of occupation. In this context, we emphasize the following:
First, to the heroic striking prisoners carrying out the battle of empty stomachs for the tenth consecutive day, we are all with you in support and not only with words. The occupation prison administration will be subject to the free will of the captives. We speak with insistence that we will proceed until the achievement of our goals. We are now at the stage of biting our fingers; we are together as brothers, mujahideen and comrades from the first cry. Support is on the way and the coming days will carry new actions to escalate the pace of the strike and achieve its goals. The message now is first to stand up, first to insist and first to adhere to the demands, all of us, and we will stand united to confront the executioner.
Second, all dialogue will be with the striking prisoners and we will not allow any interference whatsoever. We also warn against rumors circulating about the strike that aim to suppress the morale of the strugglers and attempt to limit the popular support for the strike and create a climate of confusion and hesitation. We call for refusing to circulate the news items that the occupation is attempting to broadcast and promote.
Third, we call upon the masses of the Palestinian people for even more support and solidarity through the daily struggle and clashes with the occupation in all locations. Every serious action and movement shortens the duration of the strike and makes it clear to the occupation that the prisoners are not alone. In occupied Palestine ’48 and in Jerusalem, it is possible to be in front of the prisons, and in the West Bank, in the places of engagement with the occupation forces, and in Gaza, which is steadfast every day, your support is critical, and outside Palestine, you are the call of the campaign and the voice of freedom, so that the Palestinian cause will prevail.
Fourth, we call upon the national and Islamic forces to unite under a comprehensive program for Palestinian, Arab and international support and to exert all efforts to support this strike of freedom.
In conclusion, we affirm that the coming days bear the promise of victory, “and those who do wrong will come to know by what overturning they will be overturned.”
Your brothers, mujahideen and comrades
Palestinian Prisoners’ National Movement
26 April 2017
The tenth day of the strike of freedom and dignity
Petition to Shut Down GC for May Day Moratorium
The increase in immigrant raids, bans & forced deportations urged immigrant activists to call a strike for this year’s May Day, demonstrating “A Day Without Immigrants.” Since the Haymarket affair in Chicago, 1886, May 1st has been a day for working-class protest and workplace actions. Coalitions across the country ask workers, in honor of immigrants, to strike this May Day and protest U.S. exploitation of labor, especially the 11 million undocumented.
Students and faculty, including Judith Butler, Cornell West, Etienne Balibar and GC Professor, David Harvey, call for a moratorium on all normal university operations across the U.S., including cancelling classes, closing offices, and postponing maintenance to participate in teach-ins, demonstrations, marches and protests.
We are asking the Graduate Center to close all operations on May 1st as part of the May Day Moratorium and say with one voice that we stand with workers, especially the 11 undocumented. It is essential that we take this stand as a University, rather than as individuals. We are stronger as a collective.
Please sign your name here if you support closing the Graduate Center on May 1 and the National May Day Call to Action. http://cunymayday.com/
“…Only this power, only the Soviets of Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, can solve the great question of the land in a non-bureaucratic way and not in the interests of the land owners. The land must not belong to the landowners. The peasant committees must take the land away at once from the landowners, while carefully guarding all the property against damage, and seeing to it that grain production is increased in order that the soldiers at the front be better supplied. All the land must belong to the whole nation, and its disposal must be the concern of the local Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. In order that the rich peasants—who are themselves capitalists—may not wrong and deceive the agricultural laborers and the poor peasants, it will be necessary for the latter either to confer, to combine, to unite separately, or to set up Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ Deputies of their own.
Do not allow the police to be re-established, do not let the state power or the administration of the state pass into the hands of the bureaucracy, who are non-elective, undisplaceable, and paid on a bourgeois scale; get together, unite, organize yourselves, trusting no one, depending only on your own intelligence and experience—and Russia will be able to move with a firm, measured, unerring tread toward the liberation of both our own country and of all humanity from the yoke of capital as well as from the horrors of war.
Our government, a government of the capitalists, is continuing the war in the interests of the capitalists. Like the German capitalists, headed by their crowned brigand Wilhelm, the capitalists of all the other countries are carrying on the war only for a division of capitalist profits, for domination over the world. Hundreds of millions of people, almost all the countries in the world, have been dragged into this criminal war. Hundreds of billions of capital have been invested in “profitable” undertakings, bringing death, hunger, ruin, and barbarism to the peoples and staggering, scandalously high profits to the capitalists. There is only one way to get out of this frightful war and conclude a truly democratic peace not imposed by force, and that is by transferring all the state power to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The workers and poor peasants, who are not interested in preserving the profits of the capitalists and robbing the weaker nations, will be able to do effectively what the capitalists only promise, namely, end the war by concluding a lasting peace that will assure liberty to all peoples without exception.”
V.I. Lenin, “Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Soldiers of the Izmailovsky Regiment,” April 23 [April 10 old style], 1917
By posted on April 24, 2017
This April 24 is the 101st anniversary of the Easter Rising in Ireland. Throughout the island, socialist republicans commemorate the event by wreath laying, marches with various flags of Ireland and rallies where statements reiterate the continuing struggle to build socialism in Ireland. The monumental impact of the Easter Rising lives on in the collective consciousness of oppressed communities worldwide.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sent a greeting which read in part: “Together, our people continue to march forward, for return, unity, liberation and socialism, for a liberated, united Ireland and a liberated, united Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Workers in the United States will remember Ireland’s socialist labor leader James Connolly as May Day demonstrations call for mass walkouts, protests and a general strike against capitalist attacks on the multinational working class.
This 1991 mural in Belfast marks the 75th anniversary of the Irish Rebellion. In foreground are the Republican signers of the proclamation of independence.
