May 1, 2015

The Baltimore Rebellion

The Baltimore Rebellion
April 29, 2015

IT TURNED out to be Baltimore.

Ever since the African American residents of Ferguson, Missouri, took to the streets for weeks and months of defiance, the question hasn't been whether their resistance would spread, but when it would, and where it would appear.

Ferguson cast a spotlight on the epidemic of racist police violence, committed with impunity, that plagues communities across the country. But the response from government officials in charge of keeping people safe--particularly from the women and men who are supposed to "serve and protect"--has been, at best, all talk and no action.

At worst, the response from the political and media elite has been scapegoating and demonization of the very people suffering the brunt of the abuse and violence ...

Much more here: http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/29/the-baltimore-rebellion

April 29, 2015

MAY 1st - Shut it Down for Freddie Grey!

Just received via email from IAC Solidarity Center:

To: TBF
From: Baltimore People's Power Assembly <actioncenter@solid...
Subject: Natl Day of Action: SHUT IT DOWN FOR FREDDIE GREY ON MAY DAY - FRI, MAY 1!
Date: Apr 29, 2015 4:57 PM

AN URGENT CALL FROM BALTIMORE

Issued by the BALTIMORE PEOPLES POWER ASSEMBLY

National call to mobilize in cities across the U.S. and around the world for:
BLACK LIVES MATTER MAY DAY, FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2015

Every eight hours a police or vigilante murder occurs in the U.S against a person of color especially the youth!

We demand:

SHUT IT DOWN FOR FREDDIE GREY ON MAY DAY - FRIDAY, MAY 1ST!

TURN UP & STAND WITH THE PEOPLE OF BALTIMORE!

AMNESTY FOR ALL ARRESTED PROTESTERS!

JAIL KILLER COPS NOW! END RACIST POLICE VIOLENCE NOW!

#BLACKLIVESMATTER #BROWNLIVESMATTER

JUSTICE FOR FREDDIE GREY & ALL FAMILIES IMPACTED BY POLICE TERROR AROUND THE COUNTRY!

STAND WITH BALTIMORE ON MAY DAY!

Facebook Event Page:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1584670348457501/

Greetings sisters and brothers from the streets of Baltimore:

As we draft this appeal the city of Baltimore is being occupied by a regional mobilization of police and the National Guard. The mass outrage over the slaughter of Freddie Grey has grown from protest to resistance. Baltimore is the "new" Ferguson, and we need the intervention of all who have participated in the Black Lives Matter Movement on a national level and we need it now.

No police have been arrested for the murder of Freddie Grey.

No explanation for his death has been given except to say that it’s a “mystery!”

More than 300 people have been arrested for resistance – while the cops are still free and on paid leave.

We are calling on activists to turn this Friday, May 1st 2015, into BLACK LIVES MATTER MAY DAY.

We realize that May Day is just a few days away. However, if you can organize to take it to the streets, the highways and the bridges in the same way that you did last fall and winter, it would make a world of difference in the struggle for justice at this critical moment.

We applaud the longshore and warehouse workers union (ILWU) Local 10 in Oakland, Calif., as well as the longshore workers in Charleston, South Carolina for plans to shut the docks down on May Day in solidarity with struggle against racist police violence.

We believe that it’s important that the movement rise up again on May Day, International Workers Day. The young Black and Brown people who are being murdered by the police may not look like some dated stereotype of a worker, but they are part of the working class. You should not have to have a job or be in a union to qualify as being in the working class. It’s time to get beyond outmoded notions about who is and who is not in the working class. The truth is that the fastest growing demographic in the working class are unemployed or underemployed people of color, many of them undocumented migrant workers, women, LGBTQ people and those with disabilities. If the Black Lives Matter movement can rise up again this May Day, it might just be the beginning of something bigger; a game change that broadens the movement, as well as the way people think.

On Sat. May 2nd, we call upon all who are able to come to Baltimore. For more information, please go to the Peoples Power Assemblies Facebook page for updates.

Add us to your address book @solidarityweb.com

April 22, 2015

Toward Cyborg Socialism

by Alyssa Battistoni ~ 4/22/15

The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. It was also Lenin’s hundredth birthday. The coincidence was not intentional.

In fact, part of the point of Earth Day was to distance the nascent environmentalist movement from New Left critiques of consumer society, suburban development, and nuclear waste. In an attempt to avoid charges of “watermelon” politics — green on the outside, red on the inside — the message of the early environmental movement, as one Greenpeace slogan explicitly stated, was “I’m not a Red, I’m a Green.” As environmentalism went mainstream, green nonprofits grew rich and powerful on corporate donations and adopted conciliatory strategies aimed at greening the world one brand name at a time.

These days, environmentalism can rival the Left’s big-tent eclecticism: rugged wilderness fantasies, New Age mysticism, and middle-class romanticism exist side-by-side with indigenous anti-nuclear protests, campaigns against urban smog, back-to-the-land agrarian nostalgia, and entrepreneurial green tech. But lately, militant environmentalism is staging a comeback — as are state crackdowns. And even the most mainstream varieties of environmentalism are inching leftward. Climate change in particular has radicalizing potential, as more and more people are beginning to question the prevailing economic system’s destructive effect on the environment. But mainstream environmental groups aren’t going to offer a coherent critique of capitalism’s ecological consequences or do the work of theorizing alternatives.

It’s ridiculous that we still bracket climate change and water supplies as specifically “environmental” issues: the questions at hand are ones of political economy and collective action ...

more here ~ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/

April 20, 2015

Halliburton Boosts Job Cuts After Oil Crash

(Omaha Steve: I don't know if you are keeping track of all these cuts; Schlumberger has been cutting as well. Mostly it's fracking that's getting hit in the US).

Bloomburg Business
4-20-15

Halliburton Co. beat analysts’ estimates and accelerated the pace of job cuts ahead of a planned $34.6 billion takeover of Baker Hughes Inc.

Excluding certain items, the world’s second-biggest provider of oilfield services earned 49 cents a share in the first quarter, topping the 36-cent average of 32 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Shares rose 2.1 percent to close at $47.85 in New York.

Halliburton has now cut over the past two quarters a total of 9,000 workers, or more than 10 percent of its global workforce as the crash in oil prices forced drillers to cut back, according to Christian Garcia, interim chief financial officer. The company, which is selling assets to win approval for the merger, previously expected to cut as much as 8 percent of its workers. It employed about 80,000 at the end of last year.

“We are continuing to take a hard look at our operations,” Garcia told analysts and investors Monday on a conference call. “Additional actions will likely be required in the second quarter.”

More here - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-20/halliburton-profit-falls-as-crude-price-crash-slows-drilling

April 16, 2015

American Oxygen

http://shine.forharriet.com/2015/04/rihanna-gets-political-in-new-video-for.html#axzz3XUaq93jz

April 14, 2015

Can the working class still change the world?

Kyle Brown ~ April 14, 2015

IN HIS famous speech "Where Do We Go From Here?" Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the then-president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, Walter Reuther, saying, "Power is the ability of a labor union like the UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say 'Yes' when it wants to say 'No.'"

This question of power continues to be posed for activists today. Where does the power lie to defend the Occupy encampments and the movement when the most powerful state in the world decides to carry out repression? Where does the power lie for the Black Lives Matter movement to actually realize the popular chant "shut it down" in order to win some of its demands for justice?

With labor unions and strike action at historic lows today, it's understandable that few people immediately think of the working class as the answer to those questions.

But contrary to the popular view, held even among people on the left, the vast social changes that have taken place since King's time and before haven't eliminated the potential of the working class as the key social force able to transform society and pose a radical alternative to capitalism. In fact, the working class is still, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto more than 160 years ago, capitalism's potential "gravediggers." ...

More here: http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/14/can-workers-still-change-the-world

April 3, 2015

The Power of the People

I saw this on the "God" Facebook page, and then found a jpeg via Google. Applicable to religion or politicians - especially the ones who preach austerity for all but the 1%.

Such an amazing message captured in this meme: