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Social Movements

Fight For $15 And Movement For Black Lives Join Forces On Anniversary Of MLK’s Assassination

April 8, 2017 Maha Ahmed, www.inthesetimes.com , ,
By Maha Ahmed for In These Times - Protesters rallied at three locations in Chicago: Federal Plaza, a McDonald’s at the intersection of Adams Street and Wells Street, and the Illinois Policy Institute, a right-wing policy research organization, located in the heart of the financial district. At each place, members from Fair Economy Illinois, Black Lives Matter (BLM) Chicago, Fight for $15 and a community advocacy group called ONE Northside spoke about the history and legacy of King’s assassination in the context of current organizing. Among those who shared their stories were fast-food workers and faith leaders. In addition to targeting President Donald Trump, the Chicago action also specifically called out Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner.

10 Ways Movements Can Encourage And Support Whistleblowers

April 1, 2017 Anthony Kelly, www.wagingnonviolence.org ,
By Anthony Kelly for Waging Nonviolence - Whistleblowers from within institutions, corporations, government departments, police or military can be critical to movement success, and their testimony is often the key to exposing and resisting injustice and creating change. Institutions clamp down on and deter whistleblowing for good reason. Whistleblowers can shake major institutions. They can feed vital information to movements, can warn activists about impending threats, can expose corruption, public health dangers and reduce the power of governments and deep state agencies. Disclosing secrets and releasing information poses high risks and personal costs and always takes a fair degree of courage.

Grassroots Movements Bring Fresh Air To Democracies: Analyst

March 31, 2017 Staff, www.telesurtv.net , , ,
By Staff of Tele Sur - According to Bianchi, from the Latin American Network for Political Innovation, the situation in Ecuador is critical, as a right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso faces a political battle against Lenin Moreno, the successor of left-wing President Rafael Correa and part of the so-called Pink Tide of progressive governments in the region. “We can go towards more conservative governments that are implying — and now we know that it’s happening — a reversion of rights,“ said Bianchi, likening the political scenario in Ecuador to the elections in Argentina that brought businessman Mauricio Macri to power, leading to a wave of neoliberal measures.

Lessons From The Youth Movement Of The 1960s

March 29, 2017 Staff, www.oaklandsocialist.com , ,
By Staff of Okland Socialist - In 1964, UC Berkeley exploded around what became known as the “Free Speech Movement.” In a speech at that campus in December of that year, Mario Savio, the best know leader of that movement said, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

We Need Popular Participation, Not Populism

March 25, 2017 Hilary Wainwright, www.redpepper.org.uk
By Hilary Wainwright for Red Pepper - The struggle for the vote for workers and for women was resisted at every stage, and when universal suffrage was finally won, every effort was made to blunt and control its impact through institutional devices. These included second chambers, disproportional electoral systems, executive powers and, most importantly, a rigid separation of politics from economics. Any historical study shows us that the elites, political and economic, fear the demands, desires and collective power of the people. Hence it must be mediated and dissipated before it touches on the centres of power. The end result is minimalist democracy: periodic votes choosing different leaders.

Reason And Justice Address Realities

March 24, 2017 Ralph Nader, www.blog.nader.org ,
By Ralph Nader for The Nader Page - Consider the immense public attention to health insurance and health care and the recent struggles over Obamacare and now Ryancare. Conspicuously absent from the dialogues that pundits, politicians and reporters carry on is that the third leading cause of death in the U.S. is “medical error.” According to a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine report last May, over 250,000 people lose their lives yearly in U.S. hospitals from “diagnostic errors, medical mistakes and the absence of safety nets” to stop hospital-induced infections, incompetent personnel, dangerous mixes of prescribed drugs and more. Yet in the debate surrounding the health care industry...

Why The Resistance Must Do More Than Resist

March 24, 2017 Ira Chernus, www.commondreams.org ,
By Ira Chernus for Common Dreams - The resistance is a huge movement—yuge! At least that’s how it feels when you are in it. And it’s true that the United States has not seen anything like this since the Vietnam war days. Still, Trump and the Republicans in Washington roll on, with some new horror every day. Maybe the resistance isn’t yuge enough yet. It has plenty of chance to grow, though. The potential is clearly there. Let’s look at the numbers. Over 4 million people showed up for a Women’s March somewhere in the U.S. And I know plenty of people who totally sympathized with the March but never got there. Let’s assume that for every Marcher there was one person who wasn’t there but is involved in some kind of resistance action now.

The Resistance Must Be Digitized

March 18, 2017 Joseph Torres, www.freepress.net ,
By Joseph Torres for Freepress - Over the past two months, millions of people have taken to the streets to challenge our nation’s authoritarian new president. From the women’s marches that took place across the country and around the world to the mass protests against the Muslim ban and immigration raids, people are resisting the neo-fascist agenda President Trump is unleashing on our nation. A primary reason why millions have been able to mobilize so quickly is because they have the ability to use the open internet to communicate to the masses and organize a resistance. That’s why protecting the Net Neutrality rules that keep the internet open is more critical than ever. As authoritarianism rises...

Sustaining Fires Of Standing Rock: A Movement Grows

March 17, 2017 Roy Eidelson, www.counterpunch.org ,
By Roy Eidelson for Counter Punch - Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations.

A Movement For ‘Sanctuary Campuses’ Takes Shape

March 16, 2017 Dulce Morales, www.otherwords.org , , ,
By Dulce Morales for Other Words - With spring midterms on the horizon, this time of year is often stressful enough for college students. Yet for some students this year, the stress goes far beyond the normal pressures of tests and quizzes. For many immigrant students and their families, it’s now an issue of safety. Two executive orders recently signed by Donald Trump are to blame. The first is an updated version of the so-called “Muslim ban,” which restricts travel from six Muslim-majority countries. The other gives local officials more power to detain undocumented immigrants and makes it easier to deport them. Travel bans will do next to nothing to keep out terrorists...

8 Lessons From Barcelona En Comú On How To Take Back Control

March 14, 2017 Oscar Reyes and Bertie Russell, www.opendemocracy.net , , ,
By Oscar Reyes and Bertie Russell for Open Democracy - After 20 months in charge of Barcelona, here are eight things we have learned from Ada Colau and Barcelona en Comú. We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city, we’ll have the power to transform it.” – Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona. On 24 May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú was elected as the minority government of the city of Barcelona. Along with a number of other cities across Spain, this election was the result of a wave of progressive municipal politics across the country, offering an alternative to neoliberalism and corruption.

This Is Not Your Grandparents’ Resistance

March 4, 2017 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org
By David Swanson For Let's Try Democracy - I want to disagree, in part, with a recent recommendation that John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down be used as a guide to resisting the outrages of the Trump regime. I think you could present the basic plot to an average middle school student today, and they would point out the fundamental flaw quite quickly. Here's the plot. Nazis armed with machine guns take over a small Norwegian town that has a 12-member army, instantly killing 6, injuring 3, and sending 3 into hiding. The Nazis want all the townsfolk to cooperate, including by working in a coal mine so that coal can be shipped out to help the Nazis in the war, as well as -- of course -- generally providing food, shoveling snow, and keeping things running in the town. The townsfolk bitterly resent the occupation.

Our Causes Are Connected, Our Movements Should Be Too

March 3, 2017 David Swanson, www.worldbeyondwar.org
By David Swanson for World Beyond War - Global corporations and international government alliances are pushing war, environmental destruction, economic exploitation, defunding of schools and housing, hateful divisive ideologies, and reductions in rights and liberties as a package wrapped in shiny foil, tied with a bow, and advertised in hundreds of different advertising media. . . and in this corner we have local and national organizations, segregated by race and other demographics, raising pitiable sums to fund nonprofit work, each to work against one or another particular item out of the package. Occasionally a movement will propose to take on two or three items at once but be shouted down with cries of “WHAT IS YOUR ONE DEMAND!?”

A Mood Is Not A Movement: Five Ideas For The Anti-Trump Forces

February 28, 2017 Richard Rubenstein, www.warisacrime.org ,
By Richard Rubenstein for War Is A Crime - Comrades and friends, I am not writing to advise you how to resist the Trump regime. There are as many action proposals in circulation as there are anti-Trump groups, with “resistance” the buzzword of the moment. But resistance against what, exactly, and for what purposes? Most of the tactical proposals I have seen are strangely devoid of political content. It seems that anti-Trump is more a mood than a movement with shared aims. It is a negative sentiment shared by most of the identity and interest groups that formed part of the Democratic Party coalition (or, as the President himself would put it, by the losers) during the 2016 election. The spread of public protests against the new regime’s immigration ban and other initiatives is heartening to those who oppose these measures. Yet, protest by itself doesn’t create a movement.

It’s Time To Claim Our Highest Vision: Let’s Embrace The Great Turning

February 27, 2017 Chris Moore-Backman, www.truth-out.org , ,
By Chris Moore-Backman for Truth Out - Across the nation, activists, organizers and newly enlivened social change onlookers are hungry for a shared, coherent sense of direction. George Lakey's recent 10-point strategy for nonviolent resistance to the new Trump administration offers an excellent beginning to an absolutely critical conversation about comprehensive movement strategy. But our many social change movements, which together have begun to comprise the macro "movement of movements" Lakey describes, may have a short window of time to get our strategic ducks in a row. The new administration has demonstrated a determined will to consolidate power, and to do so quickly. Fascistic executive orders; the systematic delegitimization of existing institutions, checks and balances; unfettered propaganda (aka "fake news"); and the normalization of bombastic and hateful rhetoric are stark early-warning signs of totalitarian takeover.
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