http://www.blackpresidentialcandidatesexhibit.com/

March on the RNC: Dump Trump; Say No to the Republican Agenda; Stand Against Racist Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Attacks

March on the Republican National Convention July 18
Dump Trump,
Say No to the Republican Agenda,
Stand Against Racist, Anti-Immigrant, and Anti-Muslim Attacks,
We Demand Peace, Justice and Equality.

Activists from around the country will be converging on Cleveland, OH, July 18, the opening day of the Republican National Convention. Inside the convention hall, Republicans will promote their agenda of bigotry, racist discrimination, Islamophobia, war, and austerity. On the streets of Cleveland, we will demand Peace, Justice and Equality!

The organizers of this protest organized the mass marches that drew thousands at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, MN and the 2012 RNC in Tampa, FL. Many of us have been active in organizing the anti Trump protests that have been taking place across the U.S. The eyes of the world will be on the Cleveland RNC and we are eager to cooperate with other protest initiatives. The rally site, time, and march route will be announced as soon as possible.

We are in the process of putting together a list of the organizations that support this protest. Message us if you would like us to include your organization.

Join us! Help make history July 18 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC

https://twitter.com/wwpnatl

http://www.workers.org/

June 19, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: 414-395-0665 / wibailoutpeople.org / facebook.com/wibailoutpeople.org

Lamont Lilly, Workers World Party Vice Presidential Candidate in Milwaukee July 7 to Discuss “Building People’s Power” and Socialism

WHO: Lamont Lilly, Workers World Party Vice Presidential Candidate

WHAT: “Stop the Bradley Foundation” protest. And a community conversation on “Building Peoples Power,” sponsored by Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement that will also feature WWP Presidential Candidate Monica Moorehead via skype.

WHEN: Thursday, July 7, 2016

WHERE: Bradley protest at 1241 N. Franklin Pl., Milwaukee, 53202 at 4:30 p.m.

“Building People’s Power” community meeting at 724 N. 26^th Street, Milwaukee, 53233 at 7 p.m.  

WHY: Workers World Party, a revolutionary socialist party founded in 1959, is running Monica Moorehead for President and Lamont Lilly for Vice President. WWP is seeking ballot status in a number of states, including Wisconsin, and will run write-in campaigns in other states. Moorehead/Lilly supporters will be petitioning for ballot status in Wisconsin throughout the month of July. On June 15 the campaign issued the following statement:

“Our party, which has run presidential candidates in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, 2000 and 2004, entered the electoral process again this time to counter the two reactionary candidates of the major capitalist parties with a socialist message. We believe the responses of both Trump and Clinton to the Orlando tragedy only underscore the need for an alternative voice – one of, by and for the workers and oppressed – to be heard by the masses who are following this election charade with disgust. Both capitalist party front-runners have made a crass appeal to Islamophobia in their statements, with Trump reiterating his neo-fascist position of barring Muslims from entering the country and Clinton beating the war drums for the Obama administration.

“We have no faith in the one percenters’ “pay (billions) to play” electoral process. Our campaign makes an unequivocal break with capitalist business as usual. That is what millions of workers and oppressed are looking for. We see that all over, from the Madison upsurge to Occupy Wall St., from Black Lives Matter to the widespread support for Bernie Sanders, a self-defined ‘socialist’ – although from our point of view his ‘socialism’ is really a program to try to reform capitalism.

“Our ten-point program (http://www.workers.org/wwp/program/) calls for an end to the war on Black people and to racism, for immigrant rights, for economic justice, for women’s and LGBTQ rights, an end to imperialist war, reversing climate change, full employment, an end to mass incarceration and an end to capitalist exploitation and its replacement with socialism.

“Workers World Party is targeting the Bradley foundation to expose its role as a leading right-wing, pro-business ideological think-tank and, like the Koch family’s ALEC, a major architect of the neoconservative program of austerity, privatization, charter schools, resegregation and union-busting – and outright white supremacy as in The Bell Curve. The Bradley Foundation epitomizes everything our socialist campaign opposes.”

Mr. Lamont Lilly is a leading member of the Durham, North Carolina branch of Workers World Party and a member of WWP’s National Committee. As a journalist, an organizer and a speaker, Lilly has traveled widely to support movements against racism and war and for social and economic justice.

Lilly’s political commentary has been featured in Workers World newspaper, Truthout, Counterpunch, the LA Progressive, Black Youth Project, the Durham News, and Triangle Free Press. Lilly was awarded a 2015 Local Hero Citizen’s Award by Indy Week of Raleigh-Cary- Durham-Chapel Hill N.C. for “pushing for workers’ rights and police reform.” (full bio attached)

Monica Moorehead has been an activist and organizer for more than four decades. A member of Workers World Party since 1975, Moorehead now sits on the Party’s national secretariat and is a managing editor of Workers World newspaper. She was WWP’s candidate for president of the United States in 1996 and 2000; in 1996 she sought the nomination of the Peace & Freedom Party in California. Workers World Party

To schedule interviews with Mr. Lilly call: 414-395-0665.

More information on both events is available at: facebook.com/wibailoutpeople.org or wibailoutpeople.org

http://www.workers.org/

Monica Moorehead & Lamont Lilly 2016

Monica Moorehead & Lamont Lilly 2016

http://www.stopfbi.net/

Over 100 people from all over the Midwest gathered in Detroit to support Rasmea Odeh as she, her attorneys, and the prosecution appeared before Judge Gershwin Drain for a status conference on Monday, June 13, 2016.

After the conference ended, Rasmea joined the waiting crowd chanting her name, and Michael Deutsch, her lead attorney, addressed the media, explaining that a tentative date for a new trial has been set for January 10, 2017!

This is what the Rasmea Defense Committee has been anticipating ever since the appellate court decision a few months ago. Rasmea was convicted of a politically-motivated immigration charge in 2014, and sentenced to 18 months in prison and deportation last year. In February 2016, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Judge Drain, saying he had wrongfully barred the testimony of a torture expert that was critical to Rasmea’s defense. At the trial, Rasmea was not allowed to tell the entire story of Israel forcing her to falsely confess to alleged bombings in 1969, when she endured over three weeks of vicious sexual, physical, and psychological torture at the hands of the Israeli military.

Rasmea suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because of this torture, which, according to world renowned psychologist, Dr. Mary Fabri, caused her to suppress the horrible recollection of the arrest when she answered questions on her immigration application. Judge Drain excluded Fabri’s testimony from the trial, and disallowed any evidence about the rape and torture. Appeals court judges sided with the defense, and wrote in their opinion that if the judge cannot determine new legal avenues to exclude the expert testimony, Rasmea must be granted a new trial, which it appears will happen.

At the status conference yesterday, the government called for a “Daubert hearing,” which is used to challenge the validity and admissibility of expert testimony (in this case, Fabri’s), and also requested to examine Rasmea with its own expert. If the hearing is granted by Judge Drain, it will happen on November 29 of this year, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Two other positive developments occurred yesterday as well. Deutsch requested to have Rasmea’s “burdensome reporting requirements” to probation authorities reduced from once a week to once a month. Judge Drain did not object, commenting that his earlier concerns about her being a flight risk “have been alleviated.” He also suggested that he would be willing to ease travel restrictions and allow Rasmea to occasionally travel within the U.S. The government wants to speak to the probationary authorities before agreeing to the end of the travel ban.

And speaking of the government, we all remember the zionist, right wing ideologue Jonathan Tukel, the lead prosecutor on the case, who was handled deftly by Rasmea during his disrespectful cross examination of her, and who described us as “mobs and hoards [sic]” while trying to criminalize our organizing of Rasmea’s political defense. Well, he’s GONE. He is off the case, and we are happy that we do not have to deal with his racist arrogance any longer.

While waiting for Rasmea and her defense attorneys to join them, her supporters—who hailed from Chicago, Detroit, Dearborn, Ann Arbor, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, and even as far away as Texas, and included about a dozen leaders from the Arab Women’s Committee that Rasmea leads—rallied outside of the downtown courthouse for almost three hours, chanting and picketing and listening to solidarity speeches from organizers and activists who have traveled many times to be with Rasmea at previous court appearances.

Frank Chapman of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression opened the program with a pledge to continue to fight for #Justice4Rasmea and to “free all political prisoners in the U.S.” Linden Gawboy and Mick Kelly brought greetings from the Welfare Rights Committee (WRC) and the Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) in Minneapolis. Kelly called the case “a political trial carried out by an empire trying desperately to shore up an increasingly unpopular and unstable Israel,” and Gawboy’s WRC mobilized more people to pack the courtroom for Rasmea’s trial in 2014 than any other organization outside of Chicago.

Fariba Nourian, an Iranian-American with the Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition ended her statement with a quote from Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight. It is our duty to win!” Nadine Darwish, a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Loyola University-Chicago, discussed the importance of Rasmea’s life and work to students everywhere. And Detroit poet Tawana Petty (aka Honeycomb) joined Kristian Bailey, member of both the Black Youth Project (BYP) 100 and the National SJP, to talk about Black-Palestinian solidarity and recite a poem from the powerful video, WHEN I SEE THEM I SEE US.

As Rasmea herself stated during the press conference, “We want you to continue to help build our movement across the country as we seek justice. I need you now more than ever. It is together that we can win.”

And as we continue to chalk up victories, you can continue to help by donating to the defense, organizing educational events in your communities, staying in touch through justice4rasmea.org, and shifting the demand to Drop the Charges Now!

Rasmea Defense Committee,
led by U.S. Palestinian Community Network and CSFR
Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Audre Lorde Project, www.alp.org

We at the Audre Lorde Project are devastated by the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando which resulted in the murder of 49 queer and trans people (the majority of whom are Black, Latinx, and/or Afrolatinx), including Enrique Rios from Brooklyn. We send our deepest condolences to all of the families, lovers, and friends of the victims and all of the Southern queer and trans organizers who continue to fight for liberation in their name. We are with you in solidarity. We are constantly reminded that there is no separation from our need to heal and our need to organize for our continued survival. We need each other now more than ever.

Our community in New York City is struggling today as we reconcile with the constant reality that we are considered disposable by a racist, transmisogynist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic country. From our experiences on the ground as an organizing center for and by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Two Spirit, and Gender Non Conforming People of Color (LGBTSTGNC POC) we know that this massacre is not the exception, it is part of the economy of violence against LGBTSTGNC, Black people & People of Color, indigenous people, and immigrants. It makes explicit what the institutions of war, prisons, detention centers, and the police teach our communities every day: that we were never meant to survive.

Contrary to what the media and mainstream LGBT organizations and publications are depicting: the victims and survivors are Black, Latinx, AfroLatinx, Trans, Gender Non Conforming, undocumented, and working class. These identities matter. They matter because of the US occupation and militarization of Puerto Rico and Latin/South America due to US sanctioned economic violence. They matter because our communities have to make separate Latinx nights at clubs due to racism even within the LGBT community. They matter because Black and Latinx club sanctuaries and safe spaces (like Starlight in Brooklyn, Club Escuelita in Manhattan) are routinely shut down due to rampant gentrification and increased policing of our neighborhoods. They matter because Bayna Lehkiem El-Amin, a Black HIV/AIDS counselor and Ballroom community leader, has been demonized as a homophobe and is currently awaiting sentencing in Rikers for defending himself against an attack by a white gay man. They matter because there is an epidemic of murder of Black and Latinx Trans Women and Gender Non Conforming people and this tragedy is part of this ongoing colonial project.

The fact that only the race of the perpetrator and not the victims is being discussed is telling. Besides erasing the lived reality of Muslim LGBTSTGNC people, Black Muslims, and LGBTSTGNC people of color more generally, this promotes the xenophobic stereotype that Muslim people and immigrants are more “homophobic,” and become “radicalized” elsewhere. The culprit becomes the figure of the “Islamic terrorist,” and the heroes become the politicians, the police, and the military. We reject this deliberately racist framing. Individual perpetrators are part of a much larger system of militarization and colonization.

We recognize that terrorism is not imported, it is home grown in a culture that is deeply anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and anti-queer. It is of a culture where the Christian Right has attempted to pass over 200 pieces of anti-LGBT legislation across the country, it is a culture where 59 year old Mohamed Rasheed Khan was beaten on his way out of a Queens mosque this month, where an immigrant detention center in Santa Ana still detains and assaults many Latinx trans women who came to the US to escape US-backed political violence. In order to do justice to the victims of Orlando we have to address these problems at their root causes, not their symptoms. While the daily violences of settler colonialism (the continued occupation of indigenous land), of Christian supremacy, of anti-Black policing, of Islamophobia, of criminalization of gender non conformity, of immigrant detention and deportation are never elevated to the status of national tragedy, we must commit ourselves to abolishing these systems if we want to prevent Orlando from ever happening again.

Already the NYPD, along with other security forces across the country, has heightened security outside of our bars and Pride events. This has looked like armed cops in riot gear policing our safe spaces – cops who are carrying the same kind of weapon that Omar Mateen used in Orlando. Politicians (both Trump and Clinton alike) are calling for a harsher crackdown on “Islamic extremism.” Our allies are pledging to keep us safe as we assemble for Pride this month. But we ask: safety for whom? They call for increased policing, but never for affordable housing. Hate crimes legislation has been shown to fuel mass incarceration and disproportionately criminalize Black and People of Color survivors of violence. The Christopher Street Pier, a sacred space for LGBTSTGNC youth and poor people of color, is barricaded shut by NYPD during Pride. Calls for gun control never seem to include demands for demilitarization of the police.

In order to prevent the violence we witnessed in Orlando, it is more important than ever that LGBTSTGNC POC turn to each other for community safety rather than relying on systems that were never meant for us. It is more important than ever that we reject increased militarization at home and abroad. It is more important than ever that we uplift the experiences, politics, and movements of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx queer and trans people fighting for self-determination of our bodies, homes, neighborhoods, clubs, and lands.

It will be imperative that we look towards each other for our political survival, for our collective well being and safety. We honor the names of those lost in Orlando, as a reminder of the conservative backlash in this country and reminder we must continue to fight, to love, to build power and transform violence and colonization that has always deemed our bodies expendable.

In Solidarity,
Audre Lorde Project Members, Board, Staff, www.alp.org

The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color community organizing center focusing on the New York City area. 147 West 24th Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212-463-0342 * Fax: 212-463-0344