A Weekend of Solidarity

Yesterday two events happened that celebrated the efforts of the people of Madison and protested against the continued attacks against the people of Arizona. Legislation is in the works that would drastically cut funding to public universities, cut individuals' access to health benefits, outright attack undocumented workers and their children, and more.

These events continue today with two rallies happening at noon:

Rally at the State Capital in Phoenix, Arizona.

Rally at the corner of Broadway and Campbell in Tucson, Arizona.

And for a live feed of the occupation of the Capital building in Madison check out USTREAM.

Turnout tomorrow to support Madison!

Please forward this event as widely as possible - to your teachers, coworkers, students, classmates, family, and friends.

Facebook Event: Solidarity with Madison

This is a great opportunity to show our support for the people of Madison, who are battling it out against just one of the latest and severest attacks on the rights and livelihood of workers. Let's stand with them and against the continued use of austerity measures.

Today's editorial from Socialist Worker "Time to show our power" highlights some of developments in this battle against austerity measures, which put the burden on workers.

THE BATTLE for Wisconsin's future has come to a crossroads--and the movement that has electrified the country with its opposition to Gov. Scott Walker's anti-labor assault needs to step up the fight to win.

Last week, the capitol building in downtown Madison took on the spirit and feel of Cairo's Tahrir Square as growing numbers of workers and students, first from Madison and then from around the state and the country, occupied the building and took over the grounds around it.

Their determined spirit--and action--pressured Senate Democrats to boycott a session where Walker and the Republicans were ready to ram through a proposal that would effectively cut state workers' wages by 5 to 7 percent and cripple public-sector unions by virtually destroying collective bargaining.

Check out the rest of the article at Socialist Worker.

Solidarity with Madison!

Revolts in Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to... Madison??? That's right. The people of Madison, Wisconsin have been protesting the recent legislation by Gov. Walker that would drastically cut employees' union bargaining rights as well as massive cuts to health care and income. Let's show our support for the people of Madison, and all peoples who fight against oppression, violence, and exploitation. Join us for a sign making party Thursday night at 8pm in the Gender and Women's Studies Building (925 N. Tyndall Ave). Questions? Call 520.302.4476 or email TucsonISO@gmail.com

Coffee with the Socialists

Join us for weekly political discussions including reviews of Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review articles.

Starting this Monday the 24th at 4pm at Espresso Art Cafe. Meet us in the back!

For more information email us or give us a call at 520.302.4476.

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Socialism 101: This isn't Obama's type of socialism!

You hear that Obama is a socialist, that people are rioting in France over pensions, that the Democrats are going to lose jobs because they want to raise taxes and that the Republicans will tank the economy because they do not want to tax the rich. Who is defending who? How are we to make sense of all of the rhetoric while we struggle everyday to pay our bills and go to work or school? Would a world where resources were shared based on need and not on a profit model be so bad? Would free education and health care destroy the moral fabric of our society? Wouldn't improving infrastructure and public transportation create jobs, improve our economy, and overall improve the quality of all of our lives?

Join us for our Socialism 101 meeting. Learn about what socialism really is and what people are doing around the globe to fight for a better world.

This isn't Obama's type of socialism!

When: November 11th, 7:30pm

Where: UA Main Library, A105 (group study area)

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the International Socialist Organization.

Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six

The COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE tour seeks to communicate about current struggles for justice and liberation, from nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena to women organizing inside prisons, from resistance to school privatization to disability organizing and cultural resistance. The tour also seeks to connect communities of liberation, and to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media.

This tour is for anyone interested in issues of health care, education, criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which systems of racism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression intersect with these struggles.

Sponsored by Haymarket Books, PM Press, Left Turn Magazine, Community Futures Collective, PATOIS, and other radical and independent media projects from around the US, the COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE TOUR is an exciting movement-building opportunity. Beginning August, 2010, the tour will bring performances, workshops, and inspiration to towns and cities in across the US.

Speakers for the Tucson event are Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Jordan Flaherty. See below for bios.

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester raised, Toronto matured, Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher. She is the 2009-10 Artist in Residence and part-time professor at UC Berkeley’s June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and the co-founder and co-artistic director of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color performing artists. She is a commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured nationally, including performances at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University.

The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has appeared in the anthologies Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She writes regularly for Bitch, Colorlines, Hyphen, Left Turn and Make/Shift magazines. The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, which she co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, will be published by South End Press in March 2011. Her second book of poetry, Love Cake, and first memoir, Dirty River, are forthcoming.

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer and mother. After a brief stint as a teenage armed robber, she became involved in prisoner support. In 1996, she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free books to prisoners nationwide. In 2000, she began concentrating on the needs and actions of women in prison, drawing attention to their issues by writing articlesand giving public presentations. Since 2002, she has worked with women incarcerated nationwide to produceTenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison andhas facilitated having incarcerated women's writings published in larger publications, such as Clamormagazine, the website "Women and Prison: A Site forResistance" and make/shift magazine. Her bookResistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009) is the culmination of over 7 years of listening to, writing about and supporting incarcerated women nationwide and resulted in this former delinquent winning the 2009 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award.

In 1995, she became involved with ABC No Rio, a collectively-run arts center on New York's Lower East Side, a move that resulted in changing her lifestyle from delinquency to social justice with an arts focus. In 1997, she organized a group of activist photographers to transform one of No Rio's upstairs tenement apartments into a black-and-white photo darkroom for community use. She has also participated in and curated numerous exhibitions at No Rio's gallery, many with themes addressing social and political issues such as incarceration, grassroots efforts to rebuild New Orleans, Zapatista organizing, police brutality and squatting.

In 2003, she collaborated with China Martens to createDon't Leave Your Friends Behind, a workshop addressing the specific (and often unacknowledged) needs of parentsand children in radical movements; and has co-facilitated discussions in Baltimore, New York City, Providence, Montreal, Minneapolis, Detroit and Boston. They are editing a handbook for allies of radical parents by the same name.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and community organizer based in New Orleans. He was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story to worldwide attention. His post-Katrina writing in ColorLines Magazineshared a journalism award from New America Media for best Katrina-related coverage in the Ethnic press, and audiences around the world have seen the news segments he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. His new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Sixwill be released this summer from Haymarket Press. For more information on the book, see floodlines.org.

Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit TV, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public Radio. He has been a regular correspondent or frequent guest on Democracy Now, Radio Nation on Air America, News and Notes, and many other outlets. As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty has been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as BlackCommentator.org andBlack Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Jordan is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a national publication dedicated to covering social movements. He has written about politics and culture for the Village Voice, New York Press, Labor Notes, Radical Society, and in several anthologies, including the South End Press books Live From Palestine and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation, the University of Georgia Press book What is a City, and the AK Press book Red State Rebels.

Anger builds over Arizona law

Angela Stoutenburgh reports from Arizona on the impact of a sweeping new anti-immigrant law--and the response it provoked from opponents who believe that "no human being is illegal."

April 26, 2010

Protesters march against SB 1070 outside the Arizona Capitol Building in Phoenix (Art Foxall | UPI)

WITHIN HOURS of Arizona's racist immigration bill being signed into law on April 23, thousands of people across the state began taking to the streets against SB 1070--the strictest immigration law in the country.

Phoenix, the state's capitol, saw several demonstrations over April 23-25, as hundreds--and in some cases, several thousands--of immigrant rights defenders turned out against the new law. As many as 2,000 students walked out of several Phoenix high schools in protest. Other demonstrations occurred in cities across the state, and furious immigrant rights supporters around the U.S. met and organized a response to this latest assault.

Ramon Garcia, an activist who traveled to Phoenix from Tucson to take part in a rally of several thousand on April 24, told Reuters, "I feel very strongly that the law is extremely unconstitutional and racist, and it violates both human and civil rights."

Another 3,500 protesters turned out the following day in Phoenix. Wearing T-shirts that read "Legalize Arizona" and carrying signs saying "We are human" and "We have rights," protesters called for the Obama administration to block the law by passing federal immigration reform, and for activists to carry out civil disobedience, if necessary, to oppose the unjust law.

As Dr. Warren Stewart, pastor of the First Institutional Baptist Church, told the crowd, "Some of us may have to go to jail if all else fails. Let's fill up and overflow [anti-immigrant Maricopa County] Sheriff Arpaio's jail. Overflow it with those for righteousness and for justice."

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon told the crowd: "We'll go to court. We'll go to the state courts, we'll go to the federal courts, and we'll go all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is unconstitutional, the law makes it unsafe for everyone and the law will harm us economically. Most importantly, it is just plain wrong."

SB 1070 was signed on April 23 by Gov. Jan Brewer. Brewer claims the law is a necessity because of a supposed "crisis" of undocumented immigration that, she says, "the federal government has refused to fix."

The law makes it a crime for immigrants to fail to carry identification papers. It also "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town or political subdivision...if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S.," according to a state government fact sheet.

In other words, Arizona police are now required to check the immigration status of anyone "suspected" of possibly being undocumented (although the law fails to specify exactly what a "reasonable suspicion" is). If police or other state officials don't follow up, the law also allows Arizona residents to sue the state for failing to abide by the letter of the law.

In addition, the new law makes it a crime for illegal immigrants to work or solicit work in Arizona or to pick up a day laborer for work if the vehicle impedes traffic. It also makes a day laborer subject to criminal charges if he or she is picked up, and the vehicle involved impedes traffic.

After signing the bill into law, Brewer claimed that its critics were "overreacting." But when asked what reasonable criteria could used to establish suspicion of someone's legal status, Brewer answered, "I don't know. I do not know what an illegal immigrant looks like."

That's precisely the problem. The law is an open invitation to racial profiling.

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ACTIVISTS ARE not sitting back while the law goes into effect. This legalized bigotry is prompting a groundswell of protests across the state and the country in defense of immigrant rights.

In Tucson, for example, two rallies took place just on the day the law was signed. Motorists downtown watched as students walked out of their schools and down Congress Street to congregate outside the Federal Building in the morning. Activists from the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Coalition of Human Rights) said that this protest was "no one group; it was everybody."

More than 500 people, mostly students, came out with signs and bullhorns, despite the fact that the call for a protest did not go out until 10 a.m. Many of the protesters had not even been aware of the demonstration until they received a text or a Facebook invitation, or heard that their classmates were going.

As students sang "Sí, se puede, sí, sí, se puede!" motorists in the streets honked their horns in rhythm to the beat, and students responded with loud cheers. Local Tucson police scuttled around in an attempt to redirect morning traffic.

One participant said that she was "glad to catch them by surprise." As one organizer told the crowd, "We will not let them take this moment away." As the students, some as young as middle school, cheered with their hands in the air, their voices were drowned out by passing city busses honking their horns in support.

Later the same afternoon, protestors rallied at Armory Park and marched to the Federal Building with students from Tucson High. Nearly 600 people marched down Congress Street, protesting Brewer's signature on the bill.

As organizers reminded participants to stay on the sidewalks, one shouted into a bullhorn, "We are not criminals. We are a community that demands respect! They hope that 1070 will divide our community. They are wrong. We are connected in ways they will never understand."

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COMMUNITY GROUPS, students and activists have been rallying and organizing against SB 1070 since the law was first proposed. One of the most visible protests occurred on April 21 as a group of nine students chained themselves to the Capitol building and were arrested.

Another protest took place at the Capitol building a day later, and many smaller ones have happened across the state, and even outside of the state. Many more are scheduled in the days and weeks ahead.

SB 1070 does not go into effect for 90 days after the legislature closes sessions. Activists must now keep up the pressure against the state as schools close for summer.

On April 25, the Rev. Al Sharpton, announced that his National Action Network would organize "freedom walkers" to challenge the Arizona bill, just as freedom riders challenged segregation decades ago. "We will go to Arizona when this bill goes into effect and walk the streets with people who refuse to give identification and force arrest," Sharpton said Sunday in New York.

U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is also calling on businesses and groups looking for convention and meeting locations to boycott Arizona--a call that is being taken up by many activists across the U.S.

The furor over the bill pressured President Barack Obama to criticize the law. He called it "misguided" and said that it threatens to "undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans." Obama promised to use the federal government's power to take on SB 1070.

But we can't wait on the federal government to challenge a law that will destroy lives from the day it goes into effect. This racist attack must be met with continued resistance locally and nationally. SB 1070 can become a lightning rod for building an immigrant rights movement that is already beginning to gain energy and momentum.