#Not1More, The Deportation Campaign

After 19 people were arrested for protesting, the #Not1More deportation campaign has launched a hunger strike outside of the White House.

Here's a link to the group's website: http://www.notonemoredeportation.com

Here's a link to the news brief from democracynow.org:

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/18/headlines#4187

About the struggle:

NotOneMoreDeportation.com is a project of NDLON meant to foster collaboration between individuals, organizations, artists, and allies to expose, confront, and overcome unjust immigration laws.

As the immigration debate continues, #Not1More enters the discussion from the place that touches people in concrete ways and can offer tangible relief. By collectively challenging unfair deportations and inequality through organizing, art, legislation, and action, we aim to reverse criminalization, build migrant power, and create immigration policies based on principles of inclusion.

Growing from organizing with day laborers whose self expression is a form of self defense, from the global call of AltoArizona to condemn institutionalized racism, and from the courageous No Papers No Fear Ride for Justice (aka Undocubus), #Not1More accompanies and galvanizes the determination of millions of immigrants who have endured suffering and now are exercising the right to remain in the place they call home.

In recent years, the terms of the immigration debate have been poisoned and a crisis created as deportations, incarceration, and criminalization of immigrant communities has escalated at unprecedented rates. But at the same time record numbers of people are refusing to be victims and instead are drawing an entirely different picture by taking a stand for themselves, for their families, for our communities, and for all of us.

#Not1More weaves together all of our voices in a central location so that local efforts to stop deportation and build community are strengthened and accompanied by cultural creations that illustrate the ugliness of criminalization and the beauty of our communities.

Together we say: not one more family destroyed, not one more day without equality, not one more indifferent reaction to suffering, not one more deportation.

No human being is illegal. Educate yourself and act in solidarity for all people and the planet!

In Solidarity With International Women's Day (March 8th and Everyday!)

Why is No One Covering the Violence in Venezuela?

Dear International Editor: Listen and understand. The game changed in Venezuela last night. What had been a slow-motion unravelling that had stretched out over many years went kinetic all of a sudden. What we have this morning is no longer the Venezuela story you thought you understood. Throughout last night, panicked people told their stories of state-sponsored paramilitaries on motorcycles roaming middle class neighborhoods, shooting at people and storming into apartment buildings, shooting at anyone who seemed like he might be protesting.


Courtesy of: Caracas Chrionicles


Read the rest here: caracaschronicles.com/2014/02/20/the-game-changed/

The Struggle to Protect the Sacred San Francisco Peaks Continues

After years of battle, The Arizona Snowbowl recently set United States precedent by becoming the first ski resort in the country's history to make fake snow out of reclaimed wastewater. Disregarding environmental and deep social concerns, the USFS continued a long legacy of federal entities marginalizing ecosystem health and American Indian belief systems when they ok'd the plan. It seems the case was in a poor state after the final ruling, until this most recent news out of Flagstaff. This is a definitive opportunity for actualized sustainability across justicew driven grounds socially, environmentally, economically and politically. That is, if this newest lawsuit can take root, and bring the spotlight back on the foul play and further oppression facilitated by the action's of the Arizona Snowbowl.


From the AZ Daily Sun:


The Hopi Tribe can proceed with its legal bid to halt snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks after the Arizona Supreme Court sided with it Tuesday. In a procedural victory, the tribe has won the right to proceed with its lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff challenging the city’s 2002 decision to sell reclaimed wastewater to the Arizona Snowbowl ski area, on assertions that the water sale works against the public’s interests. Judges at the Arizona Court of Appeals last April had overturned a 2011 ruling by former Coconino County Superior Court Judge Joe Lodge.


The city had asked the supreme court to review the appeals court ruling, but the petition was denied Tuesday. The Appeals Court ruled that the tribe can raise questions about whether making snow causes a public nuisance — or something that “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property by an entire community or neighborhood or by a considerable number of persons,” in the eyes of the law. Further, the court found the tribe was actually a little too early in filing its lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff in 2011 (before snowmaking had started in December 2012), and that it was raising new arguments not heard before in other lawsuits intended to bar snowmaking.


“The Hopi Tribe, as well as many others, has always maintained that snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks is simply wrong. Using wastewater harms the use and enjoyment of these areas and degrades the pristine nature of the Kachina Peaks Wilderness Area,” said Hopi Chairman LeRoy Shingoitewa last April.


“We look forward to presenting our environmental and public health evidence to the court.” Previous lawsuits raised questions about whether snowmaking would harm Native American religious ceremonies and whether the U.S. Forest Service had adequately weighed the environmental impacts of using reclaimed wastewater on mountains feeding two Arizona watersheds. This lawsuit seeks to persuade judges that the city of Flagstaff’s 2002 decision to sell reclaimed wastewater to Arizona Snowbowl was not in the public’s best interest. Lodge ruled in December 2011 that these issues had already been considered and that the tribe was too late in raising them.


“The plaintiff was clearly on notice in March 2002 that the city of Flagstaff intended to contract with Snowbowl to purchase reclaimed wastewater to be used for snowmaking at the Snowbowl ski area,” Lodge wrote in his 2011 ruling. Separately, the Appeals Court stated that this case shouldn’t have any bearing on another long-running legal case bearing on tribal water rights.


Retrieved at: http://azdailysun.com/news/local/court-greenlights-hopi-challenge-against-flagstaff-s-sale-of-reclaimed/article_3198671c-782d-11e3-98c9-0019bb2963f4.html

R.I.P. Nelson Mandela, Your Spirit Will Forever Live On!

In perpetual and infinite solidarity...

Gay Rights is the Civil Rights Movement of our Time!

More often than not, in the present, a majority of folks in the USA feel change is too far off. They'll say it's hard to think about a restructuring of economy, government, and that what's generally accepted in the now-for example, discrimination against people based on their sexuality-is too much to change.

To that I say look at what happened when women voiced their opinions on the matter of voting. Look at what happened leading up to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before 1970, not one environmental rule, regulation, law or policy existed. That is exactly what's currently happening in regards to gay rights. Of course that doesn't mean everyone turned into anti-patriarchal, anti-racist activists overnight, and it certainly doesn't main justice is easily found within the present oppressive systems in place. And i certainly doesn't mean racism and sexism have been eliminated through mainstream society. But it does speak to the fact that humans have created the socially constructed systems that have largely maintained oppression, and that therefore these conditions and systems can change by "the same" hands.

Ask a lesbian women, gay man and/or member of the transgender community what it was like to live in the 1950's, 60's, 70's and so on. That reality is changing today, and while nothing is perfect, many states are now realizing how archaic and ill informed their previous stances on the issue have been, much like states did once the tide turned for other movements of human civil rights in the past.

 Don't wait to follow the leader, be one.

All it takes is one person, state or country to lead the way for everyone else. Let's keep supporting LGBT community members in this struggle! The more action and solidarity that's taken, the more the groundswell of change for the betterment of all living things will come. 

Further reading and headlines: 

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/hawaii-gay-marriage-weddings-100522.html 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/12/03/248217871/how-2013-became-the-greatest-year-in-gay-rights-history

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/12/bar_mitzvah_speech_by_portland.html 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/12/slide-show-first-days-of-gay-marriage.html#slide_ss_0=1
 

The Thanksgiving Myth

Give Thanks Everyday! 

By: popularresistance.org

Above: “Enlightened and Christian Warfare in the 19th Century–Massacre of Indian Women and Children in Idaho” published in “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated,” August 1868. 

The Defining and Enabling Experience of Our “Civilization” 

As we again plan to celebrate what US “Americans”call Thanksgiving, let us pause for a moment of reflection. Let us recognize that accounts of the first Thanksgiving are mythological, and that the holiday is actually a grotesque celebration of our arrogant ethnocentrism built on genocide.

Native Americans in the Caribbean greeted their 1492 European invaders with warm hospitality. They were so innocent that Genoan Cristoforo Colombo wrote in his log, They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They do not bear arms . . . They would make fine servants . . . They could easily be made Christians . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. This meeting set in motion a 500+-year plunder of the Western Hemisphere, which then spread to the remainder of the globe. And it has not stopped!

Historian Hans Köning concludes that what sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. Cultural historian Lewis Mumford declared, Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness, culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame men went with him.

Jump 129 years to 1621, year of the supposed “first Thanksgiving.” There is not much documentation of that event, apparently a three-day feast, but surviving Indians do not trust the myth. Natives were already dying like flies thanks to European-borne diseases. The Pequot tribe in today’s Connecticut reportedly numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had reduced their population to 1,500 by 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed, all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” took place. At that feast, the whites of New England celebrated their massacre of the Pequots in the Connecticut Valley where the Mystic River meets the sea. The Indians were in fact celebrating their annual green corn dance ceremony. But it was to be their last.

William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the supposed 1621 feast, was on hand for the unspeakable massacre of 1637. He described it thus in his History of the Plymouth Plantation (@1647): Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory.

The rest of the white folks thought so, too. This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots, read Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop’s proclamation. The authentic proclaimed Thanksgiving Day was born. Few Pequots survived.

Read the rest of the story here: 
http://www.popularresistance.org/genocide-and-the-thanksgiving-myth/  

Educate yourself, educate others and believe in a better world for all species and the earth!