Ofer Cassif, a Communist Party member of the Israeli Knesset, has been expelled for criticizing Netanyahu's war against Gaza. Here, he is seen at a demonstration holding a sign that says, 'Anti-fascism is a Jewish and an Arab value.'
Most of you will have seen recent news media reports of an Hamas attack on Israel, resulting in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issuing a formal declaration of war:
It doesn't change much on our side. The #dotcons stoke division, manipulate democratic discourse, suppress #democraticMovements and #antiwar voices etc, but we wonder whether it is possible to consolidate corporate power without #politics of #division and #repressing democratic processes.
Today in Labor History October 1, 1964: The Free Speech Movement began on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, when activist Jack Weinberg was arrested for refusing to show his identification to the campus police while standing at an illegal political literature table. Thousands of students spontaneously surrounded the police car, which remained there for 32 hours, with Weinberg inside. Protesters used the car as a speaker's podium. The Free Speech Movement lasted for two years and was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students were fighting for, and won, the right to have public political activities on campus, particularly in support of the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War Movements.
Today in Labor History September 14, 1918: Labor leader and Socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for opposing World War I. During his sentencing he said “. . . while there is a lower-class I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free . . .” While in prison, Debs became the first person to run for U.S. president while behind bars, winning nearly 1 million votes.
Today in Labor History September 12, 1918: Eugene V. Debs, Labor leader and socialist, was sentenced to 10 years, under the Sedition Act, for opposing World War I. While in jail he received one million votes for president. In the late 1800s, he led several railroad strikes and helped found the American Railway Union. In 1905, he cofounded the IWW, along with Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, James Connolly, and others. He ran for president as a socialist five times in his life.
Today in Labor History September 4, 1949: The Peekskill riots at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York. A mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks. Police arrived hours later and did little to intervene. Thirteen people were seriously injured, Robeson was lynched in effigy and a cross was burned on the hillside. Robeson was well known for his strong pro-trade union stance, civil rights activism, communist affiliations and anti-colonialism. He also had been increasingly vocal against the Ku Klux Klan and other forces of white supremacy. The concert was a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress. Just prior to the riots, Robeson had spoken at Soviet-sponsored World Peace Conference in Paris, where he said the following:
“We in America do not forget that it was on the backs of white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong.... We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the People's Republics.”
Today in Labor History September 3, 1915: Australian Wobbly (IWW member) Tom Barker was arrested for his anti-war poster. Later that month, 12 other IWW leaders got 5-15 years, each, for opposing World War I. Prior to this, he was forced out of New Zealand for helping to organize the Aukland General Strike. After the Australian authorities arrested him, he was deported to Chile, before traveling the world helping to organize workers.
Today in Labor History August 30, 1974: A powerful bomb exploded at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Tokyo. 8 died and 378 were injured. The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, a radical far-left organization carried out the attack because they were supplying the U.S. during the Vietnam War. The EAAJAF was an anarchist-inspired group that espoused revolution against the Japanese state, corporations, and symbols of Japanese imperialism. They committed a series of bombings during the early 1970s until the Japanese authorities arrested most of its membership in 1975. Several members were sentenced to death
The EAAJAF lacked centralized leadership. Members chose to work by day as normal corporate employees and prepare their operations by night, donating half their income to the cause. In contrast, other groups, like the Japanese Red Army, raised funds through illegal means including bank robberies. As they studied the history of aggression by Japan against Korea and the Ainu, the EAAJAF acquired its personal "anti-Japanese ideology." They considered not only those in power, but also Japanese corporations and laborers as "perpetrators of imperialist aggression" and believed that they were acceptable targets for attack.
Today in Labor History August 29, 1970: LAPD brutally attacked 10,000 Chicano antiwar demonstrators, killing three, including journalist Ruben Salazar. The attack led to a week of rioting. Salazar was portrayed under the name "Roland Zanzibar" in Oscar Zeta Acosta's 1973 novel “The Revolt of the Cockroach People.” Oscar Zeta Acosta, himself, was portrayed in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” as his “Samoan attorney.” Salazar wrote for the L.A. Times and was the first mainstream journalist to cover the Chicano community. He covered the 1965 U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republican, as well as the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City. He often wrote critically about how the local L.A. government treated Chicano people, particularly during and after the school walkouts.
Today in Labor History August 23, 1900: Folk and protest singer Malvina Reynolds was born in San Francisco, California. She is most famous for her song, "Little Boxes," a satire on suburbia, inspired by the tacky sprawl of housing in Daly City, just outside of San Francisco. And used as the theme music for the TV series “Weeds.” As a teen, the city’s elite Lowell High School refused to give her a diploma because her parents opposed US participation in World War I.
Today in Labor History August 15, 1906: W.E.B. DuBois demanded equal citizenship rights for African-Americans during the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, saying, "We will not be satisfied to take one jot or little less than our full manhood." Founders of the movement named it for the “mighty current” of change they hoped to achieve. DuBois made his famous statement at Harper’s Ferry, sight of the failed insurrection led by John Brown, in 1859. For a wonderful speculative fiction story based on the premise that John Brown had succeeded in his raid, with the help of Harriet Tubman, read Terry Bisson’s “Fire on the Mountain” (1988).
In addition to cofounding the Niagara Movement, DuBois also cofounded the NAACP. He devoted his life to fighting racism, segregation, Jim Crow and lynchings. DuBois opposed capitalism and blamed it for much of the racism in America. He was also a prolific writer, an anti-nuclear and peace activist, and a proponent of Pan-Africanism.
Today in Labor History August 14, 1846: The authorities jailed Henry David Thoreau for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican War. Aside from this early act of American civil disobedience and war resistance, Thoreau also wrote, “Walden.” His essay, “Civil Disobedience,” influenced generations of activists and writers, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy, Yeats, Proust, Hemingway, Upton Sinclair and Martin Buber.
Today in Labor History August 1, 1917: IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana. Little was a Cherokee miner and member of the IWW. He went to Butte during the Speculator Mine strike to help organize the miners. Little had previously helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He had participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” On August 1, 1917, vigilantes broke into the boarding house where he was staying. They dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car and then hanged him from a railroad trestle.
Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a strike breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing.
Today in Labor History July 27, 1918: Miner and union organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot by a hired private cop outside Cumberland, British Columbia sparking Canada's first General Strike. He was a labor activist and a member of the Socialist Party of Canada. Additionally, he was an antiwar activist who said that workers of one country should not be employed to kill workers of another country because of capitalist conflict. “War is simply part of the process of Capitalism,” he said. “Big financial interests will reap the victory, no matter how the war ends.” However, in spite of his protests, he was still drafted to fight in the First World War. In order to avoid conscription, he fled into the mountains, where he was murdered by a cop in 1918. Canada’s first General Strike began in response.
Quote from article: Every nation’s single biggest long-term asset is a well-educated populace, and student debt diminishes that.
Every other advanced democracy on the planet understands this.
That’s why student debt at the scale we have in America literally does not exist anywhere else in the rest of the developed world.
American students, in fact, are going to college for free right now in Germany, Iceland, France, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, because pretty much anybody can go to college for free in those countries and dozens of others.
“Student debt?” The rest of the developed world doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
@sharonecathcart
🥥 Author #ThomHartmann has until recently been a voice in the wilderness.
He points out how #CivilRights, #WomensRights, #GayRights, #AntiWar movements in the '60s and '70s so frightened #conservatives.
They moved heaven and earth to take over the courts, diminish the middle class, destroy public education, privatize the commons, co-opt the vote, and shift income to the wealthiest.
We in the US can't have nice things because of the last 50 years of creeping fascism. 🥥
Today in Labor History June 20, 1893: Eugene Debs formed the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the first unions to organize by industry and regardless of race (along with the Knights of Labor and IWW). Within a few months the union was leading an 18-day strike against the Great Northern Railroad, successfully forcing management to reverse three wage cuts, despite the fact that the nation was in the midst of a terrible depression. The victory set the union on a remarkable course in which it averaged 2,000 new members a day. Debs was jailed during World War I for making antiwar speeches. He ran for president from jail, as a socialist, and won 4% of the vote. Debs was also a founding member of the IWW, in 1905. The photograph shows union leaders who were jailed during the 1894 Pullman Strike, including Debs.
@thegibson
Have you gotten to the part where they shadowban #antiwar activists (as far back as #Syria, 2015), JulianAssange supporters, freedomSoftware advocates, blocked news in #Australia when an attempt to tax them. To be fair the #LinkTax idea was dumb, but it was the speed at which govt yeilded that said it all.