Charlotte ISO

Nat'l Mobilization and Week Against Criminalization

2010-07-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

PROTEST AZ's SB1070

CHARLOTTE, NC

Thursday, July 29th, 5:30PM

Marshal Park

Charlotte, NC will Rally on Thursday, July 29th, 2010, Charlotte United: A Coalition of Community Partners, will host a rally and live theater performance, followed by a candlelight prayer vigil.

WHO: Charlotte United: Action NC, Grassroots Leadership, Unity Group of Charlotte, Bonilla Community Services, American Friends Service Committee, Immigrant Solidarity Committee, Saint Peters Catholic Church Social Justice Committee, Glenn Hutchinson, Tom Strini.

WHEN & WHERE: 6:30 pm on Thursday, July 29, 2010 at Marshal Park
(555 S McDowell St Charlotte, NC 28204)

BACKGROUND: Opposition has sparked across the state of Arizona and the country to defeat SB1070 and any policies that further criminalize people and separate families. We know that if SB1070 is not stopped in Arizona now, similar laws will spread throughout the country. In North Carolina, legislators are considering an Arizona like bill.

In May of this year, Senate Joint Resolution SJ1349 was introduced in the NC Senate. The federal government needs adopt a comprehensive immigration reform that will not only protect American jobs, but will also lead to a path to citizenship for the close to 12 million undocumented people in our country. An enforcement only approach is unreasonable and will not solve the root causes of undocumented immigration. A comprehensive approach from the federal government is the answer.

As a state that has led the civil rights movement in the 60’s, it us up to North Carolina to set an example for the rest of the nation and say, this is not acceptable. This law can only terrorize communities if the federal government cooperates with it. We demand that the Obama Administration take decisive action and not comply with Arizona’s SB1070. We as North Carolinians, stand firm in our belief that “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere”.

Contact:
Roxana Bendezú
704-264-4444
Roxanabendezu@gmail.com

Stacey Bonilla
704-737-7124
Stacey.bonilla@yahoo.com

For Charlotte Students @ UNCC, CPCC, QUEENS, etc, contact:
Ken Love
704-909-9276
Ken.Love@gmail.com

Kick off meeting at UNCC TBA soon!

2010-07-05T14:34:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone: stay tuned. Our first meeting of the Fall semester will be announced within the month.

2009-11-25T15:38:00.001-08:00

A day to give thanks?

Paul D'Amato tells the real story of the "first Thanksgiving"--and the history of conquest and resistance that followed after it.

THE THANKSGIVING myth is intertwined with this country's origin myth.

Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 in search of freedom. Indians helped them plant corn and survive. They made a compact that is the basis of our first constitution, and they held a feast, together with some Indians, to celebrate and give thanks to God for their first bounteous harvest.

The story has elements of truth, but not much more than elements. What children learn is the overarching message--that Pilgrims were everything good about America: European, Christian, sober, democratic, generous, God-fearing, and so on and so forth.

True, an Indian named Squanto did teach the Pilgrims how to plant corn and saved the invaders from total starvation. What we aren't told is that Squanto learned English because he had been abducted and made a slave in Europe some years before, and the place where he taught the new settlers to plant corn was the village he had grown up in, Patuxet, now depopulated by the impact of European diseases.

WHAT ELSE TO READ

For a biographical sketch of nine American Indian leaders that are often glossed over in textbooks, check out Alvim M. Josephy’s The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance

James D. Drake’s King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676, looks at the 1675 war between the English colonists and the indigenous people of New England, which decimated the region's native population.

Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion and shows Puritan actions in the light of material interest and expansion.

Gary B. Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North Americapresents an account of the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans and Euroamericans during the colonial and revolutionary eras.

The colonists planted their first crops in an abandoned field cleared by Indians, and found the area strewn with the bleached bones of dead Indians, which the surviving ones, having fled elsewhere, were unable to bury.

There are other problems with the story. The Pilgrims' relations with the first Indians they encountered were not initially friendly; short of provisions, the Pilgrims stole corn from a granary of the Nauset Indians, and later robbed a grave and some Indian houses they stumbled across.

What has in hindsight been described as the "first" Thanksgiving was a typical English harvest feast. It took place almost a year into the existence of the settlement, whose numbers had dwindled by half because of disease and starvation to only 50 people. According to the account of William Bradford, 90 Indians, led by Massassoit, the Wampanoag chief or Sachem, attended the feast, bringing five deer with them.

In all the Thanksgiving stories and plays, the Indians are really a kind of sideshow to the Pilgrim "fathers"--even though all the foods were Indian foods; the Indians outnumbered the Pilgrims; and without the Indians, the Pilgrims would not have survived. Yet the thanks are never to the Indians, but to God, to the Pilgrims themselves--anything but to Native Americans.

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THIS IMAGE of Indians as props for the occasion still persists. It reflects a not uncommon view of the "New World," peddled from the beginning by Europeans who aimed to conquer and settle it--that it was a sparsely populated place, inhabited by nomadic people.

Capt. John Smith, who had helped settle Jamestown in 1609, argued that Englishmen could rightfully seize Indian land because God intended land to be cultivated, and this land was "unmanned wild country" that Indians "range rather than inhabit." (Did the Zionist leaders who founded Israel read Smith?)

The truth was very different. On the Eastern seaboard, Indians did "tame" the land. They grew three types of corn, with at least two growing seasons, as well as squash and beans, and they supplemented their diet with fish, shellfish, deer and birds. They cleared land not only for farming, but also set controlled brush fires in forests in order to create better hunting conditions. They made extensive systems of trails and roads for trade and travel, and more. The English settlers found wooded areas that looked like parks and large open fields that reminded them of home.

In New England, what may have been bubonic plague, brought to coastal Maine a few years before the arrival of the Mayflower, had reduced Massasoit's Pokanokets from 12,000 people, with 3,000 warriors, to a tribe able to deploy only a few hundred fighters. Indeed, the reason Massasoit was so friendly to the Pilgrims was because he felt too weak to fend off his rivals, the larger Naragansetts, and hoped to form an alliance with the newcomers to strengthen his position.

The myth also obscures the purpose of the colony. While it was true that some of the Mayflower passengers were English Puritans attempting to find a place to practice their religion without persecution, more than half of the colonists were not Puritans. Moreover, in order to be able to travel to this "New World," the colonists had to secure the backing of a joint-stock company whose investors expected a return on their investment.

Plymouth was both a profit-making venture and an outpost of English imperialism. There had been a spate of colonizing efforts by England in the region, in competition with other European powers Spain, France and Holland. England, like its competitors, aimed to claim this "New World" and its riches by any means necessary, including the outright extermination of entire peoples.

The historian Francis Jennings outlines the policy adopted by English conquerors that had already been established in Ireland:

(1) A deliberate policy of inciting competition between natives in order, by division, to maintain control; (2) a disregard for pledges and promises to natives, no matter how solemnly made; (3) the introduction of total exterminatory war against some communities of natives in order to terrorize others; and (4) a highly developed propaganda of falsification to justify all acts and policies of the conquerors whatsoever.

Listen to this Jamestown colonist, writing after the Powhatans had risen to drive out the English settlers in 1622:

We, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground then their waste, and our purchase...may now by right of War, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby we shall enjoy their cultivated places...and possessing the fruits of others labors. Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situated in the fruitfulest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us.

The Indians were not prepared for the level of savagery meted out against them.

In 1621, the Plymouth colonies' military commander, Captain Miles Standish, ambushed and massacred a group of eight Massachusetts Indians north of Plymouth in order to set an example to those who might consider challenging the Plymouth settlement. "This sudden and unexpected execution," wrote colonist Edward Winslow, "hath so terrified and amazed them...they forsook their houses...living in swamps...and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof very many are dead."

After this incident, the invaders acquired a new name among the indigenous people: "Wotowquenange," meaning stabbers or cutthroats.

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IT SHOULD be clear, then, that the first Thanksgiving was not the end of the story. The Indians very quickly discovered they had little to celebrate.

As the European settlements grew and began to outnumber the Indians, the invaders became more arrogant, more land-hungry and more powerful. The increasing encroachment on Indian lands built to a tension that eventually provoked some Indians into decisive and desperate action.

Some 64 years after the colonists feasted with Massassoit, in 1675, Massasoit's son, Metacomet, known by the Pilgrims as "King Philip," fought a war of resistance against the New England colonists. At the war's end, 600 were killed and 1,200 houses burned in the English side; 3,000 Indians were killed, many of them victims of outright massacres by the colonists. Survivors were sold into slavery.

Philip was finally hunted down and eventually murdered. The colonists displayed Philip's head on a pole in Plymouth, where it remained for 25 years.

This story of conquest and resistance is not part of the "Thanksgiving" myth because the myth is meant to sanitize history and make the invasion of the Americas by European conquerors a benign and sublime national origin story.

Indeed, in 1970, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Before Wamsutta Frank James could read his speech, though, it had to be approved by the people in charge of the ceremony. Here is what they decided not to allow him to read:

Today is a time of celebrating for you...but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my people...The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn...
Massassoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his people welcomed and befriended the settlers...[B]efore 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags...and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them...Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts...
What has happened cannot change, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature are once again more important.

In response to the censorship, a group calling itself the United American Indians of New England declared the Thanksgiving holiday to be a National Day of Mourning.

On that day in 1970, protesters boarded the Mayflower II (a replica of the Pilgrims' original ship, built in 1957) and tore the Union Jack from the mast. It was replaced with the flag that had flown the year before over liberated Alcatraz Island when Indian activists in California had occupied it, and offered to buy Alcatraz from the government for $24, the same price the Dutch paid for Manhattan.

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THE UNITED American Indians of New England have held a Day of Mourning every year since in Plymouth.

Thirty-two years later, at the Day of Mourning in 2001, Moonanum James drew the connection between the resistance of Native Americans in the past and the struggles they face today:

Back in 1970, those who started Day of Mourning spoke of terrible racism and poverty.
Racism is still alive and well. Our people still are mired in the deepest poverty. We still lack decent health care, education and housing. Every winter, thousands of our people have to make a bitter choice between heating and eating. Our youth suicide rates, our rates of alcoholism continue to be the highest in the nation. As the economy crumbles around us, these conditions will only worsen.
Today, we mourn the loss of millions of our ancestors and the devastation of our beautiful land and water and air. We pray for our people who have died during this past year. We join America in grieving for those who lost their lives at the World Trade Center.
And I hope that you will join me in grieving, too, for the immense suffering of our sisters and brothers in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Iraq--human beings who are referred to by this government as "collateral damage." We remember all too well that our people throughout the Americas have for centuries been the "collateral damage" of the European invasion.
The events of this past September were tragic and have affected all of us. Many innocent people lost their lives. We condemn all acts of violence and terrorism perpetrated by all governments and organizations against innocent civilians worldwide. And we condemn the racial profiling and detentions that are being directed against our Arab, South Asian and Muslim brothers and sisters in this country.
But the events of September 11 were certainly not the first acts of terrorism to have occurred in this country. Since Columbus and the rest of the Europeans invaded our lands, Native people have been virtually nonstop victims of terrorism. I think of the slaughter of the Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut, in 1637. I think of U.S. military massacres of peaceful Native people at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, and so many, many other places. I think of the armed assault by the FBI on a peaceful encampment at Pine Ridge in the 1970s.
In fact, the very foundations of this powerful and wealthy country are the theft of our lands and slaughter of Native peoples and the kidnapping and enslavement of our African-American sisters and brothers. And the U.S.-assisted terrorism against Native peoples continues to this day in all too many countries in Central and South America...
These are indeed difficult times. But our ancestors and our traditions will give us the strength that we need. Always we must remember that we shall endure. A handful of us somehow managed to survive Columbus and the conquistadors and the Pilgrims and the French and all the other invaders.
Beautiful Native youth: Remember what your ancestors went through to bring you here. We are like the dirt, like the sand, like the tides. We shall endure. The struggle will continue. In the spirit of Crazy Horse, in the spirit of Zapata, in the spirit of Metacom, in the spirit of Anna Mae Aquash, in the spirit of Geronimo: We are not vanishing. We are not conquered. We are as strong as ever.

This article originally published at: http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/25/day-to-give-thanks

2009-10-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

Read an opinion piece on Socialist Worker:
"As the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan said in a statement sent to international antiwar activists:

Afghan people and especially its women are still living in disastrous conditions under the occupation forces and its puppet regime which is full of many criminal warlords who have been responsible for war crimes and brutalities against Afghan people.

Afghan people know very well that the so-called war on terror is a hoax and a dirty game played by big powers led by the U.S. government. So they reject this occupation. We want liberation and democracy and an end to this occupation. We know no nation will liberate another nation; it is the obligation of our own people to fight for their liberation...

Please continue your antiwar efforts, and voice your opposition to the wrong policies of your government and stop Obama from sending more troops to Afghanistan because it will bring more sufferings and civilian deaths to our country."

Film screening and discussion

RETHINK AFGHANISTAN

7PM Thurs., Oct. 29th

UNC Charlotte, Fretwell 121

2009-09-30T11:36:00.001-07:00

2009-09-18T18:15:00.001-07:00

Socialism: What it is and why we need it! from Kristin Lubbert on Vimeo.

NAT'L SPEAKING TOUR: author/activist Sherry Wolf on "Sexuality and Socialism: the struggle for LGBT liberation"

2009-09-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Monday Sept. 28th, 8:00PM

UNC Charlotte, Fretwell Bldg.

Room 121

directions

SHERRY WOLF is author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics & Theory of LGBT Liberation, associate editor of the International Socialist Review, and member of the National Equality March Steering Committee.

COME TO A PUBLIC FORUM to discuss the history, politics and theory of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender oppression and how we can fight to end it.

And find out how you can GET INVOLVED in mobilizing for the National Equality March on Washington, D.C., on October 11, 2009.

Get the facts! Read the book! Go to the March!

for details on the local march mobilization, contact Ken (704) 909-9276

Why we need rebels

2009-09-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Decline of California, Mike Davis and David Bacon Part 1 - Socialism 2009 from International Socialist on Vimeo.

MEETING: "Socialism: What it is and why we need it"

2009-09-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

The word “socialism” has returned to the mainstream of American political debate. But there are widespread misconceptions about what socialism is—and what it isn’t. Republicans fret that the U.S. is fast becoming a socialist country—with government spending on bank bailouts and Barack Obama’s proposed health care reform. But the genuine tradition of “socialism from below” means something more than state intervention in the economy. Socialism is really about the struggle to oppose discrimination in all its forms and to put the needs of working people before corporate profits. Come to this meeting to discuss the idea of socialism—and socialist strategies for changing the world.

Thursday, Sept. 17th, 7:30PM

UNC Charlotte, Fretwell Bldg.

Room 121

National ISO meetings

Why the free market can't cure health care

2009-09-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

From Socialist Worker by Brian Jones

We need a guaranteed right to health care--and while we're at it, the right to nutritious food and to have a decent place to sleep at night.

THAT THE free market is the surest guarantor of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is an article of faith among today's assault-rifle-toting, town-hall-disrupting brownshirts--and, to be sure, among their allies in America's corporate boardrooms.

The right can howl all they want that Obama is a socialist. In truth, he is supporting a health care plan that will be a huge bonanza for private insurance companies. First, we are all about to be mandated to purchase their product. And second, the government is going to subsidize that purchase for unknown numbers of people. Can you say "ka-ching"?

Meanwhile, the "public option" (itself a far cry from socialized medicine) is fading fast. "Choice and competition" are Obama's new buzzwords for health care reform. That's politician-speak for free-market magic.

And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, along comes John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, with a Wall Street Journal op-ed article in which he argued that Americans should not think of health care as a "right":

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care--to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter, it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.

If there's any idea worth rethinking these days, it's the idea that our needs are best met through "voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges."

That we rely on such exchanges to organize the delivery of health care means that the organizers--private health insurance companies--have an incentive not to provide treatment. Health care, as mediated by the free market, is anything but "mutually beneficial." No wonder that here, in the richest country in world history, our free-market health care system ranks 37th among all nations. In a moment of blunt honesty, Obama called this system "perverse."
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MACKEY IS correct that we don't have a right to food or to shelter, either. But shouldn't we? It occurs to me that these markets are equally perverse.

It is precisely the fact that food is a commodity, not a right, which explains why so many people around the world are starving.

According to a 2007 study, 37 million people in the U.S. live in "food insecure" households. "Food insecure" is really just a euphemism for "hungry." The United Nations estimates that there are 854 million people worldwide who are undernourished.

That's right--nearly a billion people don't have the money to participate in enough "mutually beneficial market exchanges" to get the food they need to survive.

And here's the kicker--there's plenty of food. Increases in the rate of food production continue to outstrip population growth.

But don't hold your breath waiting for Whole Foods to do anything about hunger--giving away food would cause their prices to drop. Yes, the free market contains a built-in disincentive to feeding the hungry. Now that's perverse.

You'd have to be a pretty cold-hearted SOB--or perhaps a CEO who's gotten rich by selling overpriced food--to argue that the free market is the best way to feed people. But we're not done with Mackey yet, for he has gone out of his way to remind us that we also don't have a right to shelter.

For the 3.5 million people estimated to experience homelessness each year in America, the housing market is altogether out of reach. And now, thanks to the bursting of the sub-prime mortgage bubble, home foreclosures rose 81 percent from 2007 to 2008, for a total of about 5.6 million foreclosures filed in those two years alone.

And we mustn't forget to thank free market "magic" for the millions of jobs lost as the dominoes keep falling through our economy.

Surely, when it comes to jobs, we are dealing with perhaps the most perverse market of all. Put aside, for the moment, the disturbing possibility that there are actually more slaves today than at any point in human history. I'm talking about the buying and selling of labor power on the "free" market.

Think of your latest job-hunting experience--your gut tells you there's something unholy about the process. Marx revealed the reason behind your nausea in his description of the position of the modern employee--the contradiction of "freedom" for the worker under capitalism:

Free laborers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own.

In other words, having no means to produce a living on our own, we are both free to choose any employer we wish--and "free" to starve if we find none.

Which brings us back to John Mackey's argument, and to what, in my mind is the real heart of the health care debate: what will be the future of the "exchanges" on the most important market of all--the job market. Will we, the wage workers, confront our potential employers in the marketplace as people armed with a whole array of rights, or as desperate, indentured servants?

I'm reminded of the scene from Michael Moore's film SiCKO, where he sat down with a small group of Americans living in France. One of them, an African American woman, commented that in America people are afraid of the government, and that in France, the government is afraid of the people.
Could there be a connection between free health care, free college education and the higher level of protests, strikes and demonstrations in France?

Perhaps if you don't start out in life tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and if you don't live in perpetual fear of getting sick, you might be a little more "uppity" at work? Perhaps you might have the nerve to speak up, to protest, even to strike against your employer, if you know that your basic needs will be taken care of?
Could it be that Mackey doesn't want you to have a "right" to food, shelter, or to health care because such rights would embolden his employees in their struggle to unionize Whole Foods?
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BACK IN October 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked point-blank by Tom Brokaw whether health care should be considered a privilege, a right, or a responsibility. Obama didn't blink:

Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills--for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition, and they don't have to pay her treatment--there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

Yes, there is something fundamentally wrong about that, and yes, health care should be a right. But you can bet your bottom dollar that "choice and competition" are not going to get us there.

We need a universal, single-payer system to guarantee an "intrinsic ethical" right to health care. And while we're at it, we should have the right to nutritious food and the right to have a decent place to sleep at night.

We can't wait for our employers--or the mainstream political parties they sponsor--to give us those rights. They must be wrested from the government by a movement of working people motivated by their own independent interests and liberated from the shackles of free-market ideology.

NO NEO-NAZI'S IN GREENSBORO, NC!

2009-08-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

Join the Charlotte ISO carpool traveling to Greensboro, NC on Saturday, August 29th to protest the NSM's National Conference. These racists need to know they are not welcome in Greensboro nor in the United States. Come with us to protest them!

Saturday, Aug. 29th
Carpool leaves Charlotte at 1:30PM

and will return no later than 10PM.
Please call (704)909-9276

2009-08-21T16:03:00.001-07:00

Rocky Mt. Health Care Town Hall Meeting from Ajamu Dillahunt on Vimeo.

2009-08-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

2009-08-21T15:52:00.001-07:00

2009-08-21T15:51:00.001-07:00