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After the protest young Serbs of Vancouver spontaneously gathered on the steps of Vancouver Art Gallery to sing 'Vidovdan' and tell the world that Kosovo is Serbia!Despite provocations this was a peaceful protest where students spoke about the illegality of Kosovo's secession. It is estimated that about 800 people attended.

 

Jan. 12 was the anniversary of the start of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike--one of the most significant struggles in the history of the U.S. working class--in Lawrence, Mass. A new state law had reduced the work week from 56 to 54 hours. A small gain for workers? Sounds like it. But of course the bosses found a way to gain the advantage. They speeded up the looms and cut the average measly wage of $6 a week--a last straw for workers living on the edge of starvation. When the wage cut was announced, workers shouted: "Short pay! Short pay!" Thousands of women and men started a spontaneous strike that rippled through two dozen textile factories in Lawrence. Some 23,000 people left the mills and poured into the streets. Immediately the National Guard was called out, along with 22 militia companies and 50 thugs disguised as strikers. They overturned trolley cars, smashed windows, assaulted people and planted dynamite near the strike headquarters. But even quicker on the scene was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a 21-year-old organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World--the Wobblies. Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and other IWW leaders moved in to help organize the strike. AN EARLY DEATH Lawrence was founded in 1845 as a textile city. By the turn of the century, advanced technology had enabled the owners to bring in lower-paid workers and force the skilled workers out. In 1905 the American Woolen Company built the world's biggest textile plant in Lawrence, hiring Arab, Russian and East European immigrants. By 1912, people of 25 different nationalities lived within a one-mile radius of the mill. They lived in crowded company-owned tenements. Eight to 10 people from different families shared one living space. Whole families--including children under 14 years old--worked in the mills. The mills were hot and humid. The work was fast paced, with high accident rates. Bosses made ethnic slurs. They sexually harassed the women. Workers froze in the winter because they couldn't afford the clothes they produced. Rickets were common among children for lack of milk. Nearly half died before they were 6 years old. Over one-third of the mill workers died before age 25, mostly from tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses. PROTESTING IN 25 LANGUAGES In 1912, the American Federation of Labor was a grouping of weak craft unions, made up of white men organized by trade. The AFL refused to organize Black workers. Until 1918, the federation barred women from membership--even in an industry like textiles with twice as many female workers as male. The AFL opposed the Lawrence strike, calling it revolutionary and anarchistic. The IWW, in contrast, was formed by socialists like Eugene Debs. They called for industry-wide unions and even one big union for the whole country. The IWW emphasized unity and solidarity. The Lawrence strike broke new ground in two ways. Women led it. And there was a conscious effort to unite workers of all nationalities. Every union meeting was translated into 25 different languages. There were four demands: a 15-percent wage increase, a 54- hour work week, double pay for overtime, and rehiring of all strikers without discrimination. But the workers saw the strike as really a broader struggle. They wanted to fight for socialism. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had grown up poor in New England mill towns. She watched starving mill workers leave before daylight and return after dark. She was familiar with the rats, cockroaches, lice and disease that plagued their families. The strikers had a strong spirit of class struggle. They sang, put on shows, dances, debates and parades. The Lawrence strikers are remembered for inventing the moving picket line. Police had been arresting them for loitering--so they linked arms and formed a moving human chain that wove around the mills 24 hours a day, preventing scabs from getting in. Flynn led meetings about the special oppression facing women and immigrants. Women led the picket lines and were better at intimidating scabs. Cops threw the women in jail but they refused to pay the fines. As soon as they were released they returned to the picket lines. One freezing morning, cops drenched the strikers with fire hoses. The women caught a cop on a bridge, stripped off his uniform and nearly succeeded in throwing him into the icy river. One lawyer commented, "One policeman can handle 10 men, while it takes 10 police to handle one woman." The children grew weak as the strike continued into February and March. Flynn gathered food and set up soup kitchens. Arrangements were made for hundreds of children to be sent to the homes of socialists in other cities for the duration of the strike. This drew national and international publicity, and donations began to pour in. The cops responded by attacking women and children at the train station so the children couldn't leave. Cops clubbed them, threw them into a heap and dragged them into military trucks, clubbing them again if they cried out. They beat one pregnant women so hard she had a miscarriage. That was the turning point. The national and international outcry forced Congress to open an investigation. The pressure on the bosses built. THE BETTER THINGS IN LIFE On March 14, the strikers won a 25-percent raise for the lowest-paid workers and smaller increases for higher-paid workers, time-and-a-quarter pay for overtime, and no discrimination against strikers. The workers celebrated their victory by singing "The International," the communist anthem. The IWW kept the strike committee going to fight for the release of Ettor and Giovanitti, leaders who had been framed soon after the walkout began. They were charged with the death of a woman whom 19 witnesses said was shot by a soldier. The strike victory resulted in easily won wage increases in mill towns throughout New England. But once the Lawrence struggle ended and the IWW left town, the bosses stabbed the workers in the back. They instigated a 50-percent speed-up in the mills. The Catholic Church joined the bosses in a campaign to discredit the IWW and harass union members. By the fall of 1913, IWW membership in Lawrence had fallen to 700. An economic recession in 1913-1914 brought wage cuts and unemployment to the mill workers. Later, after the Russian Revolution, the Wobblies faded from the scene. The IWW's best, including Flynn, left to form the Communist Party, while others turned toward anarchism. However, the Lawrence strike had shown that low-paid, oppressed workers of diverse nationalities could unite, organize and wage a powerful struggle to win concessions from the bosses. It stands as a shining example of how to build multinational, anti-racist unity with women in the lead. Today, labor is turning toward organizing these same groups--low-wage workers, women, immigrants. The struggle to organize workfare workers is in the tradition of the Lawrence strike. One reporter wrote of the Lawrence strike: "It was the spirit of the workers that seemed dangerous. ... They were always marching and singing. "The gray, tired crowds, ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills, had awakened and opened their mouths to sing, the different nationalities all speaking one language when they sang together." The strikers wanted not only decent pay, but a chance to enjoy the good things of life. They carried signs saying, "We want bread and roses too!" And they sang: "As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days. The rising of the women means the rising of the [human] race. "No more the drudge and idler, 10 that toil where one reposes--but a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!" http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45b/073.html

 

Jim opened this edition of Crosstalk by interviewing Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association. Tim reviewed the events leading up to the latest call for a boycott of McDonald's.McDonald's admitted they made a $20,000 contribution to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and they were given a seat on the NGLCC board of directors. While McDonald's has tried to couch this as being about tolerance and diversity, AFA was concerned that this was about taking sides in the culture war rather then remaining neutral. According to Tim, McDonald's believes that disagreement with their pro-homosexual position amounts to hate.While this shows how McDonald's has decided to dig their heels in on this issue, they aren't the only corporation putting the weight of their corporate name behind the homosexual political and social agenda. After listing other corporations showing such support, Jim opened the phone lines to obtain listener feedback on this vital issue.Jim also reported on two other stories. The first one involved a multi million dollar lawsuit being levied by a homosexual man against two Bible publishers: Zondervan and Thomas Nelson. The suit alleges that the Bible versions printed by these companies caused the homosexual emotional pain because they refer to homosexuality as a sin.The final story presented information about a lawsuit against a wedding photographer in New Mexico. The photographer was declared guilty of discrimination for declining to shoot photos of a homosexual dedication ceremony.

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break SilenceStarting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church — exactly one year before his death — King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.""Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.""At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor."Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minister by training, King became a civil rights activist early in his career, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, raising public consciousness of the civil rights movement and establishing King as one of the greatest orators in American history. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.Martin Luther King - A Time to Break SilenceMartin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence - Vietnam MLK IraqMartin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence MLK

If any New Yorker were to become the theoretician for a new secessionist movement, it figured to be Kirkpatrick Sale.Mr. Sale, 70, was a campus rabble-rouser at Cornell in the 1950s long before Berkeley made being one fashionable, a model for a character in Richard Fariña’s classic ’60s novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,” a writer who worked briefly with his college pal Thomas Pynchon on a musical called “Minstral Island.” For half a century, he’s written more or less from the left on issues of decentralization, the environment and technology — in praise of Luddites, envisioning with dread the rise of the Sun Belt, lambasting Christopher Columbus as a despoiler of the American Eden and predicting environmental doom in a way that is making him at the moment look more prescient than cranky.And though he once described the personal computer as the devil’s work (its efficiencies producing more “social disintegration, economic polarization, and environmental devastation”), there he was Tuesday at his modern Adirondack-style house in the woods looking in delight at the inbox on his laptop.“Look at this,” he said. “There are 177 more messages from people who want to get on our mailing list. There’s nothing that has brought right and left together like this.”“This” was the Second North American Secessionist Convention, held Oct. 3 and 4 in Chattanooga, and attended by 15 delegates representing 25 states, plus 40 sympathetic observers. It followed, amazingly enough, the First North American Secessionist Convention, held the year before in Burlington, Vt.In this country, secession has not had the greatest odor since the 1860s, when it produced a movement now seen as racist, violent and a loser. But the spirit of Mr. Sale and his pro-secession Middlebury Institute actually has more to do with Vermont.There, a group called the Second Vermont Republic has become a small-bore local phenomenon, with its call for a “genteel revolution,” opposed to “the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government,” and committed to “the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union.” Hence those “U.S. Out of Vt!” T-shirts. Similarly, the language of the convention’s Chattanooga Declaration decries excess corporate and governmental power, says that the deepest issues of the time go beyond left and right and declares that liberty can survive only if political power is returned to local communities and states. “The American Empire is no longer a nation or a republic,” it says, “but has become a tyrant aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”Even those ill-disposed toward the idea of an independent Vermont, Hawaii or Alaska or to the new Confederacy envisioned by the League of the South might see some logic here. Back in 1981, the journalist Joel Garreau published “The Nine Nations of North America,” mapping out how economics, geography and culture really made it more logical for the United States, Canada and Mexico to be nine nations than three. Mr. Sale argues that the big theme of contemporary history, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the evolution of the United Nations from 51 nations in 1945 to 192 now, is the breakup of great empires. And some on both left and right agree that the only cure for a federal government that’s too big and too powerful is to make it less big and less powerful.His relentlessly bleak vision is that catastrophic events, long term (collapsing dollar, out-of-control oil prices, climate change) and short term (Iraq, Katrina, government-sanctioned torture), will produce the downsizing of America, secession movement or no.“The virtue of small government is that the mistakes are small as well,” he said.Still, he concedes, there are a few roadblocks. Another 177 e-mail messages might feel like a revolution, but in that big, bad, computer-fueled world it’s just another tiny blip in the din. Local control might look fine in green, crunchy Vermont but perhaps looks less fine if it meant Southern states maintaining segregated schools and water fountains through the ’60s. Who is going to pay your Social Security, build interstate highways or finance NASA? And just how to make secession happen — legally and geographically — is, he concedes, still a work in progress. One option might be state by state, but then there are those Neo-Confederates in the South, or advocates of independent New England, Cascadia (Washington, Oregon, British Columbia) or New Acadia (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and the four Atlantic provinces of Canada).Mr. Sale was asked what nation he’s prepared to live in.“I’d like the Hudson Valley,” he said. “I’d even include New York City, the whole Hudson watershed. It would be rich in resources and culturally unified. That’s the whole point of secession. If you want to leave a nation you think is corrupt, inefficient, militaristic, oppressive, repressive, but you don’t want to move to Canada or France, what do you do? Well, the way is through secession, where you could stay home and be where you want to be.”Of course, there might be problems here, too. What about the poor orphaned folks in distant Buffalo or Rochester or the vast empty acres upstate? What if the city didn’t want to join and wanted to be its own smug Cosmopolitania instead? Where would the Bronx, the one borough on the mainland, end up?Oh, well, life’s difficult.“You would call it Hudsonia,” he said, warming to the thought. “That’s the thing about secession. It fires up the imagination like nothing else.”

 

\ Three years after the start of the Iraq war, one thing New York police do not lack is experience in dealing with protesters - so when they were called to a disturbance at the military recruitment centre in Times Square last October, it sounded like just another routine demonstration.Instead, they found 18 elderly women, many in their 80s and one aged 90, blocking the entrance and demanding to enlist in place of young men. They called themselves Grandmothers Against The War, and after they ignored polite requests to move on, police had no option but to arrest them, making sure the handcuffs weren't too tight, and cart them off - complete with canes and walking frames - to the holding cells.They were finally acquitted yesterday, after a trial that caught New Yorkers' imagination, even as it seemed to agonise the prosecutors saddled with the job of arguing that the "peace grannies", as they became known, should be jailed.At the height of the proceedings, Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who became a celebrity for camping for months outside George Bush's Texas ranch after her son was killed in Iraq, showed up to lend her support.The women are part of a growing network of American anti-war groups made up of senior citizens, including the Raging Grannies of Tucson, Arizona, and Grandmothers for Peace International, who use the positive social stereotype attaching to grandmothers - and the reluctance of the authorities to come down too hard on them - to further their cause.Banners held by sympathisers outside the Manhattan courtroom read "Arrest Bush, Free the Grannies" and "Can't whip the insurgents? Whip Grannies!""I'm very happy," Joan Wiles, 74, who founded Grandmothers Against The War two years ago, said yesterday. "Our goal was to put the war on trial, and I think we did that. Mission accomplished."Ms Wile, a former cabaret singer and songwriter who wrote the original music to Lynn Redgrave's 1975 film The Happy Hooker, said she had protested only twice before in her life: once in the 1980s for nuclear disarmament, and then in 2000 in the Million Mom March, which demanded tighter gun control.Their experience in detention, where they were kept two to a cell for several hours before being released, had been "very unpleasant", she said. But the arresting officers, who in some cases had to hoist the protesters delicately up from the ground in Times Square, had been "absolutely darling".Their profile got a significant boost when the case was taken on by Norman Siegel, a veteran New York civil liberties lawyer. "I think the grannies really resonated with the public," he said. "First, everybody has a grandmother. And second, these are very accomplished women who are incredibly passionate, intelligent, witty and charming. My strategy was to put every one of them on the stand so that the judge and the public could see who they were: people of conscience."That strategy led to amusing scenes in the courtroom, in which it sometimes seemed as if the youthful judge and prosecutors were being cross-examined by the defendants.One defendant, Judy Lear, was asked by district attorney Amy Miller if she really would have moved out of the way had someone wanted to enlist that day. "I'm a very polite person," she responded sternly. Ms Miller hastened to agree. "I'm sure you are," she said.The peace grannies intend to march with Ms Sheehan in a demonstration in New York today, and plan a second demonstration in Washington on Mother's Day, May 14 in the US.Prosecutors insisted that the case was a simple public order matter that should not have been turned into a civil liberties issue. But Mr Siegel was blunt: "Once they decided they were going to put the grannies on trial," he told the Guardian, "I said: 'Look. Let's put the war on trial.'"It was a matter of some frustration for Ms Wile that the women had technically won their case, which was tried without a jury, not on arguments connected to the right to protest, but on whether or not they had been blocking the recruiting-centre door. She refused to be drawn on what other factors might have swayed his decision. "The judge was charming and funny," Ms Wile said. "Whether he was influenced by the fact that we were grandmothers, I couldn't say."

Hendrix's popularity eventually saw him headline the Woodstock music festival on August 18, 1969.

Bad weather and logistical problems caused long delays, so that Hendrix did not appear on stage until Monday morning. By this time, the audience (which had peaked at over 500,000 people) had been reduced to, at most, 180,000, many of whom merely waited to catch a glimpse of Hendrix before leaving. Festival MC Chip Monck introduced the band as "The Jimi Hendrix Experience", but Hendrix quickly corrected this to "Gypsy Sun and Rainbows" and launched into a two hour set, the longest of his career. As as well as the two percussionists, the performance notably featured Larry Lee performing three songs and Lee sometimes soloing while Hendrix played rhythm in places, most of this has been edited out of the officially released recordings, including Lee's three songs, reducing the sound to basically a three piece.The concert was relatively free of the technical difficulties that frequently plagued Hendrix's performances, although one of his guitar strings snapped while performing Red House (he kept playing regardless). The band, unused to playing large audiences and exhausted after being up all night, could not always keep up with Hendrix's pace, but in spite of this the guitarist managed to deliver a memorable performance, climaxing with his highly-regarded rendition of the The Star-Spangled Banner,[80] a solo improvisation which is now regarded as a special symbol of the 1960s era.[81]The band did not last long. After the Woodstock festival they appeared on only two more occasions. The first was a street benefit in Harlem where, in a scenario similar to the festival, most of the audience had left and only a fraction remained by the time Hendrix took the stage. Within seconds of Hendrix arriving at the site two youths had stolen his guitar from the back seat of his car, although it was later recovered. The band's only other appearance was at the Salvation club in Greenwich Village, New York. After some studio recordings, Hendrix disbanded the group. Some of this band's recordings can be heard on the MCA Records box set The Jimi Hendrix Experience and on South Saturn Delta. Their final work together was a session on 6th September[82]. Hendrix's 9th September appearance on TV's Dick Cavett Show, backed by Cox, Mitchell and Juma Sultan, was credited as the "Jimi Hendrix Experience"[83].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix#Woodstock

Butner, N.C. — They banded together in the late ‘80s, fighting to keep a proposed incinerator from coming to Granville County. Now, that same group – the Granville Non-Violent Action Team, or GNAT – is reuniting with a similar goal. GNAT wants to stop a proposed bio-defense lab from coming to Butner.GNAT says it’s committed to its cause, but others in Granville say that getting the federal facility would be a "win-win." Edie McKellar is a veteran of the 1989 incinerator battle“It's a scary thing they're bringing here, and we don't deserve something like this,” McKellar says.Johnny Balmer, president-elect of the Granville County Chamber of Commerce, voices the opposite argument. “It's a no-brainer. It's good for Granville County,” Balmer says.Both sides are talking about the National Bio- and Agro-Defense facility. Butner is one of five communities in the country on the short list of sites for it. Balmer says 350-450 jobs, about 1,500 short-term construction jobs and a $1.65 billion impact on the local economy make it too good to pass up. The group is concerned about the environmental impact of the plant, and they say it could be a target for terrorists. John Pike, an opponent says, “We certainly don't deserve to be dumped on, and we certainly don't deserve to be dumped on two, three, four, five times.” The incinerator battle was hard fought. McKellar, a GNAT member, said she remembers all too well sitting under a drill that was ready to strike and getting arrested. “We fought for what was right and I'm proud of it,” McKellar said. “A lot of times when people have the not-in-my-backyard mentality they don't think through the process of the economic benefit to the county,” Balmer says.

GNAT vows not to give up. The members believe they're protecting their families and their community from a potentially risky situation, just like they did nearly 20 years ago. A final selection on a lab site is expected about a year from now. If Butner is chosen, the lab could be up and running by 2013.

From August 20-21, 2007, Stephen Harper welcomed his American idol George W. Bush and Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon to Montebello, Quebec to review the progress of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

The SPP – which is being implemented without any public or parliamentary scrutiny – is about eliminating Canada’s ability to set its own independent regulatory standards, environmental protection measures, energy security, foreign, military, immigration and a frighteningly wide range of other policies. Read the report Behind Closed Doors: What they're not telling us about the Security and Prosperity Partnership.

The Council of Canadians was on the ground, both in Ottawa and Montebello, as the leaders met. We brought hundreds of people together at a public forum on Sunday evening, packing an auditorium at the University of Ottawa. Maude Barlow, along with civil society representatives from the U.S. and Mexico, condemned the SPP and promoted a vision of a more just and sustainable North America.

We had of course originally planned to hold the forum in Papineauville, Quebec, just 6 kilometres from where the leaders met on Monday and Tuesday, but the RCMP forced the municipality to cancel our reservation at the last minute (see media release). So we made due with a smaller room in Ottawa, and unfortunately had to turn away at least 100 people on Sunday night, as people stood and crouched in the aisles of the auditorium, hungry for more information about the SPP and how to fight it.

http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/summit/index.html

 

Here’s an excellent example of pwnage: when the white supremacist group VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK tried to host a hate rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, they were foiled by … clowns!

Unfortunately for [VNN] the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/09/03/clowns-kicked-kkk-asses/