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Georgia

Festival Brings Atlanta’s Community And Organizations Together

Atlanta, Georgia – On Saturday, February 22, over 40 organizations and vendors came together for Community Connect Fest in the West End. Hundreds of community members kept the venue full throughout the time of the event. Attendees got to meet and learn about dozens of the organizations working to make a difference around Atlanta. The event, organized by the Atlanta Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, aimed to connect fighting organizations to people who want to get involved.

Thousands Take To The Streets In Defense Of Immigrants Rights

Immigrants and their communities are leading the fight against the Trump administration’s attacks on democratic rights. Since Trump unleashed a series of ICE raids in his first days in office — ordering ICE and the police to arrest over 1000 people per day — thousands of people in the cities most targeted by the anti-immigrant offensive are taking to the streets, walking out of their schools, and shuttering businesses to show that immigrants won’t be criminalized and made to live in constant fear of deportation. The raids come on top of a barrage of anti-immigrant attacks launched by Trump on his very first day in office.

Members In Motion Changed The Game In Daimler Contract Campaign

Inspired by the success of the Big 3 strike, United Auto Workers members at Daimler Truck North America ran a very different kind of contract campaign this year than we ever had before. The 7,300 members at DTNA’s four North Carolina plants and parts distribution centers in Atlanta and Memphis were very active, informed, and involved in the bargaining process. This is not how the union had done things in the past. Here’s what we did differently, and some ideas on how to keep members in the loop and in motion for an effective contract campaign.

‘Cop City’ Leads US Buildup In Police-Training Bases

After years of intense opposition that left one protester riddled by police bullets, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City is set to begin operations in the next few weeks. The city’s police chief hosted a tour of the campus last week and training programs are expected to start during the first quarter of 2025. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, as it is officially known, is an 85-acre campus with a price tag of at least $110 million and another $1.7 million recently approved by Atlanta’s City Council for its security. Most infamously, it includes a mock city, for which the site gained its Cop City nickname, for “real-world” training that includes a convenience store, two-story house, apartment and commercial-style building.

Threat Of Amazon Workers’ Strike Spreads During Peak Holiday Season

Thousands of workers at Amazon are threatening to strike at the company after giving the company a deadline of 15 December to agree to begin negotiating a first contract with the union representing employees. The strike threats, which started in New York, have now spread to Chicago and Atlanta. They come during Amazon’s peak holiday season and after the company experienced record sales during its 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. The workers at the company’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island became the first Amazon warehouse in the US to win a union election in March 2022.

Will International Solidarity Turn The Tables For Striking Gaming Workers?

Four thousand workers at the online gaming company Evolution in Tbilisi, Georgia, walked off the job in July protesting low wages, dangerous working conditions, and harassment. Four months in, their strike is one of the largest and longest that this Eastern European country has ever seen. In August, some strikers sewed their mouths shut with a needle and thread in a hunger strike that resulted in multiple hospitalizations. A union victory would represent not only a sea change in the Georgian labor movement, but also a major breakthrough in beating back employers who scour the globe for cheap, non-union labor. Companies outsource expecting that workers won’t fight back.

Why All Hurricanes Should Be Named ‘Jim’

The devastation effectuated by Hurricane Helene represents yet another elucidation of a quintessential climate crisis that is right here and right now. It demonstrates that climate change is not a conclusion that awaits us, but a set of present day precarities taking and altering lives right now. According to initial assessments, Helene could cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $175 billion , and of course, there is no way to quantify the estimated 230 lives that were taken, thus far, with the death toll expected to rise. Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm, continued this season of carnage and calamity with a death toll of approximately 20 people and an estimated $50 billion in damages.

The State Is Wielding Grand Jury Subpoenas Against Cop City Activists

With each passing day, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (dubbed “Cop City” by opponents) inches toward completion. It’s been just under a year since the last Stop Cop City mass mobilization march attempted to breach the site, but the struggle against the militarized police training facility continues. Activists are organizing ping pong ball drops at city council meetings, pursuing legal remedies to recover what remains of the Weelaunee Forest, and continuing to hold teach-ins and small-scale protests. Organizers wait with bated breath for the resolution of the 61 pending RICO cases against activists.

Major Chemical Accidents Are Alarmingly Common In The US

Investigators have been busy at the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency tasked with determining the root causes of major chemical accidents at industrial facilities. In Georgia, fallout is continuing more than two weeks after a massive chemical fire erupted at the BioLab pool and spa supply facility in Conyers, just outside of Atlanta. The fire created a toxic plume of chlorine gas that forced 17,000 people from their homes just days after Hurricane Helene hit the state. In the suburban petrochemical corridor east of Houston, Texas, the Chemical Safety Board is investigating the toxic release of hydrogen sulfide at an oil refinery that left two contract workers dead and 35 others injured on October 10.

Georgia Drops Money Laundering Charges In Cop City RICO Prosecution

Atlanta, GA — Money laundering charges against three Atlanta Solidarity Fund defendants, who are among the 61 people indicted in a sprawling conspiracy lawsuit against Cop City protesters, have been dropped as of Tuesday. Last year Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean and Savannah Patterson were indicted as part of Georgia’s wide-reaching Racketeering Influenced Criminal Organization, or RICO, case that the state filed against opponents of the multi-million dollar police training compound known as Cop City. The three organizers were arrested and charged during a raid on their home by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta Police Department in May last year.

Atlanta Activists Protest Trump/Vance Campaign Event

Atlanta, GA – On August 3, a coalition of local activists and community members gathered at Georgia State Convocation Center to protest a high-profile rally for former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator JD Vance. The demonstration, organized by the Atlanta Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America, was called in response to the extreme right-wing agenda promoted by Trump, Vance and the Republican Party as a whole. The protesters gathered directly outside the venue, facing off the thousands of MAGA supporters from around the Southeast, as evidenced by the number of people with wearing LSU and Alabama caps, who were unable to secure a spot inside.

The Goal Is To Attack A Movement

The Georgia Attorney General’s office appears to have made a major blunder in the ongoing prosecution of 61 Stop Cop City activists—one that could potentially cost the state its case altogether. According to a motion filed by attorneys for three defendants who run the nonprofit Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF), Georgia Deputy Attorney General John Fowler’s prosecutorial team has extensively and brazenly violated multiple defendants’ right to attorney-client privilege. This motion is just the most recent episode in the RICO case that has been denounced by activists and legal experts as a political prosecution intended to punish and intimidate those in the Stop Cop City movement.

US Imposed Sanctions On Georgia And Nicaragua For Laws that Copy US Laws

Politicians in the small Caucasian nation of Georgia have been sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms,” simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics. Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions for doing the same. Although the two countries are very different, there are striking similarities in the ways that Washington and its allies have striven to undermine their sovereignty. In both cases, legislation to limit foreign influence followed coup attempts against popularly elected governments. The governing Georgian Dream Party, having won three elections since 2012, has survived two U.S.-orchestrated coup attempts since 2020.

Morehouse Students Show Solidarity With Gaza During Biden Speech

Advisers for U.S. President Biden reportedly saw Morehouse College, a historically Black men’s college in Atlanta where he gave the commencement address Sunday, as a school where the president was unlikely to face protests over his continued support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has been the subject of mass demonstrations led by students at universities across the country over the past month. But students and faculty made clear at the ceremony that many of them, like others in higher education, are intent on sending Biden a strong message of disapproval over his Israel policy. A number of faculty members and students wore keffiyehs, the traditional scarves worn in parts of the Middle East including Palestine, and by some supporters of Palestinian rights to show solidarity with civilians in Gaza.

‘I Was Arrested For Trespassing On My Own Campus’

In recent days, we’ve seen police sweep multiple Gaza solidarity encampments. One of the most violent crackdowns occurred at Emory University in Atlanta, where state and local police swooped in hours after the tents had been erected, arresting almost 30 people while using tear gas and rubber bullets. Students have been protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, the school’s connection to the carnage, and Atlanta’s planned police training center Cop City. “This local resistance is a vivid tableau of a global struggle for liberation. At its core, the fight against Cop City is interconnected with global movements against oppressive state practices, most notably the Palestinian struggle for liberation from illegal occupation, apartheid, and systemic violence,” said student organizers in a statement shortly before the crackdown.