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Today Breakthrough released its new campaign, Deport the Statue, which uses humor and satire to address the need for immigration reform. Deport the Statue is a spoof premised on the creation of a fake organization, the Legals for the Preservation of American Culture, that wants to deport the Statue of Liberty because she is an undocumented immigrant who doesn’t have papers and doesn’t qualify for the pathway to citizenship.
We have the opportunity to #TakeLibertyBack — to build an America that values the freedom, dignity, and humanity of all women, men, and children who live here.
After years of advocacy, immigration reform is happening now. The U.S. Senate bill is moving fast. President Obama says he sees “no reason” reform shouldn’t be done in a matter of weeks.
We need to make sure reform happens — and that it happens right.
Reform must include protections for immigrant women like Laura who was recently deported back into the hands of a violent ex — and murdered. It must enable even those with informal employment to walk the path to citizenship. It must ensure human rights for all. With momentum on our side, we must find ways to mobilize new supporters every day. We hope you’ll explore — and share — the humorous fictional universe we’ve created and help build a larger and louder groundswell than ever.
Together we can secure reform that enables all immigrants, including women and their families, to thrive. Together we can build an America that upholds our shared values of of dignity, equality, and justice for all.
Submitted by http://breakthroughtv.tumblr.com/
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” - Howard Zinn, historian
The People’s Record Memorial Day Dedication
We wholeheartedly endorse Democracy Now!’s choice of their Memorial Day special. So along with this video, we would like to acknowledge and congratulate this Memorial Day, all those veterans who threw off their medals as an act against the United States’ imperialist wars during the NATO protests.
Click here for a complete list of The People’s Record’s Memorial Day dedications.
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From our 2012 Memorial Day posts.
(Source: thepeoplesrecord, via robert-cunningham)
The People’s Record Memorial Day Dedication (photo source)
Daniel Sandate - American Hero
Conscientious objectors and war resisters are heroes.
We are proud to celebrate Daniel Sandate, war resisters and conscientious objectors on Memorial Day. Conscientious objectors are those heroic individuals (like Daniel Sandate) who refuses to perform a “military duty or service” on the grounds of conscience, freedom of thought, and sometimes religion. They are often labeled illegal war resisters, regarded as criminals by the imperialist nations that demand their lives, and forced to live their lives in exile.
Internationally
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights defined, clarified, and broadened the international definition of conscientious objection in 1998 with a document “Conscientious objection to military service, United Nations Commission on Human Rights resolution 1998/77”. This document made it clear that those performing military service have a right to decide, during service that they have a conscientious objection to their nation’s military service.
In the United States
Until 1971, conscientious objectors could only be recognized as such for religious reasons. The Supreme Court decisions Gillette v. United States changed that, although the ruling did not allow for the basis of objection to be an objection to specific wars.
The burden to prove that one is in fact a “sincere” conscientious objector who is opposed to all war in any context (which is the criteria for one to qualify as a conscientious objector in the United States) is heavy and most war resisters in the United States do not qualify for “conscientious objector” status and are therefore forced into prison or exile.
Daniel Sandate
Daniel Sandate is just one of many conscientious objectors who have been subjected to living in exile or being subjected to military trials and imprisonment. Daniel Sandate is an Iraq War veteran who had returned home from his first tour, objected to serving another term, and was refused adequate mental and physical health care by the United States Army. He fled to Ontario, where he resided until a failed suicide attempt identified him. He was brought back to the United States, and served eight months in prison. Sandate is now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
—R.Cunningham
Click here for a complete list of The People’s Record’s Memorial Day dedications.
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From our 2012 Memorial Day posts.
(Source: thepeoplesrecord, via robert-cunningham)
How the US turned three pacifists into ‘multiple felony saboteurs’
May 20, 2013
In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protesters accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.
Here is how it happened.
In the early morning hours of Saturday June 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property. Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S.
Describing themselves as the Transform Now Plowshares, the three came as non-violent protestors to symbolically disarm the weapons. They carried bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flower, candles, small baby bottles of blood, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them and wire cutters. Their intent was to follow the words of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Sr. Megan Rice has been a Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus for over sixty years. Greg Boertje-Obed, a married carpenter who has a college age daughter, is an Army veteran and lives at a Catholic Worker house in Duluth Minnesota. Michael Walli, a two-term Vietnam veteran turned peacemaker, lives at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Washington DC.
In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.” The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
No security arrived to confront them.
So the three climbed up a hill through heavy brush, crossed a road, and kept going until they saw the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF) surrounded by three fences, lit up by blazing lights.
Still no security.
So they cut through the three fences, hung up their peace banners, and spray-painted peace slogans on the HEUMF. Still no security arrived. They began praying and sang songs like “Down by the Riverside” and “Peace is Flowing Like a River.”
When security finally arrived at about 4:30 am, the three surrendered peacefully, were arrested, and jailed.
The next Monday July 30, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli were arraigned and charged with federal trespassing, a misdemeanor charge which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail. Frank Munger, an award-winning journalist with the Knoxville News Sentinel, was the first to publicly wonder, “If unarmed protesters dressed in dark clothing could reach the plant’s core during the cover of dark, it raised questions about the plant’s security against more menacing intruders.”
On Wednesday August 1, all nuclear operations at Y-12 were ordered to be put on hold in order for the plant to focus on security. The “security stand-down” was ordered by security contractor in charge of Y-12, B&W Y-12 (a joint venture of the Babcock and Wilcox Company and Bechtel National Inc.) and supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
On Thursday August 2, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli appeared in court for a pretrial bail hearing. The government asked that all three be detained. One prosecutor called them a potential “danger to the community” and asked that all three be kept in jail until their trial. The US Magistrate allowed them to be released.
Sr. Megan Rice walked out of the jail and promptly admitted to gathered media that the three had indeed gone onto the property and taken action in protest of nuclear weapons. “But we had to — we were doing it because we had to reveal the truth of the criminality which is there, that’s our obligation,” Rice said. She also challenged the entire nuclear weapons industry: “We have the power, and the love, and the strength and the courage to end it and transform the whole project, for which has been expended more than 7.2 trillion dollars,” she said “The truth will heal us and heal our planet, heal our diseases, which result from the disharmony of our planet caused by the worst weapons in the history of mankind, which should not exist. For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons.”
“You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress … No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me.” - Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 - February 21, 1965)
Outraged against austerity, students & teachers in Philadelphia resist the machine of capitalism
May 17, 2013
Dozens to hundreds of Philadelphia students, teachers and school staff protested outside one of the city’s premiere high schools in an effort to fight proposed budget cuts to the district.
Wearing signs and handing out pamphlets to drivers, members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers lined the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts along South Broad Street Friday morning. The teachers are fighting a series of severe budget cuts proposed by the district to close a more than $300 million funding gap. The proposed cuts include ending arts and music programs, sports and cutting auxiliary staff like secretaries, librarians and counselors.
“With the austere budgets schools have received, schools will not be able to provide a high-quality education for Philadelphia’s children,” said Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Jordan says the teacher’s union has been discussing labor concessions with the district. However, he says a concession that results teachers taking a pay cut is a non-starter.
“The school district is asking for salary cuts for all PFT members of anywhere between 5, 10 and 13-percent,” he said. “I don’t think that you’ll find employee in the school district and the PFT…who are going to tell you that they can afford to take that kind of pay cut.”
The teacher protest is just the first of many demonstrations planned Friday over the funding flap.
Students from Philadelphia public schools around the city have also walked out of class and are marching on the School District of Philadelphia and Philadelphia City Hall. Similar walkouts were organized last week by students, who also marched on the same spots.
District spokesman Fernando Gallard says staff will not stop students from walking out, but says officials have asked principals remind students that leaving early will results in being marked as cutting. “Schools will follow the district’s attendance policy and will take the appropriate action which triggers at least a phone call to parents to notify them of the student’s absence, a request for a parent conference at the school, or after school detention,” he said.
Students are using Twitter to organize and document their protests. The group Philly Student Union is promoting the hashtag #walkout215 as a digital rally point during the event.
President Obama prosecutes more whistle-blowers than all previous administrations combined.
California Domestic Workers Demand Bill of Rights
The story matters - so we thank everyone who visits this site and passes the history along. This from one of our favorite historians Mr. Howard Zinn: “What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.” See you tomorrow.
Source (Bread & Roses Facebook Page)
There are now more Americans in jail than were in Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago
May 9, 2013
There are now more Americans in jail — 6 million — than there were in Stalin’s Gulag, reports Fareed Zakaria, in a column called “Incarceration Nation.”
And it’s not just a relative population thing.
The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. How does that compare to other countries?
It’s 7-10X as high:
- Japan has 63 per 100,000,
- Germany has 90 per 100,000
- France has 96 per 100,000
- South Korea has 97 per 100,000
- Britain has 153 per 100,000
And it’s a rapidly exaggerating trend: In 1980, the U.S. only had 150 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. More than half of America’s 6 million prisoners are in jail for drug convictions, with 80% of those in jail for “possession.”
Real, complete, fire-able 3D printed ‘liberator’ gun downloaded tens of thousands of times
May 9, 2013
If gun control advocates hoped to prevent blueprints for the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun from spreading online, that horse has now left the barn about a hundred thousand times.
That’s the number of downloads of the 3D-printable file for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days, a member of the group tells me. The gun’s CAD files have been ten times more popular than any component the group has previously made available, parts that have included the body of an AR-15 and the magazine for an AK-47.”This has definitely been our most well-received download,” says Haroon Khalid, a developer working with Defense Distributed. “I don’t think any of us predicted it would be this much.”
The controversial gun-printing group is hosting those files, which include everything from the gun’s trigger to its body to its barrel, on a service that has attracted some controversy of its own: Kim Dotcom’s Mega storage site. Although the blueprint is only publicly visible on Defense Distributed’s own website Defcad.org, users who click on it are prompted to download the collection of CAD files from Mega.co.nz, which advertises that it encrypts all users’ information and has a reputation for resisting government surveillance.
Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed’s 25-year-old founder, says that the group chose to use Mega mostly because it was fast and free. But he also says he feels a degree of common cause with Kim Dotcom, the ex-hacker chief executive of Mega who has become a vocal critic of the U.S. government after being indicted for copyright infringement and racketeering in early 2012. “We’re sympathetic to Kim Dotcom,” says Wilson. “There are plenty of services we could have used, but we chose this one. He’s down for the struggle.”
The most downloads of Defense Distributed’s “Liberator,” surprisingly, haven’t come from the U.S., but from Spain, according to Khalid’s count. The U.S. is second, ahead of Brazil, Germany, and the U.K., he says, although he wasn’t able to provide absolute download numbers for each country.
Update: Although Spain was initially outpacing the U.S. in downloads, it seems more Americans have now downloaded the file.
The gun’s blueprint, of course, may have also already spread far wider than Defense Distributed can measure. It’s also been uploaded to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, where it’s quickly become one of the most popular files in the site’s 3D-printing category. “This is the first in what will become an avalanche of undetectable, untraceable, easy-to-manufacture weapons that will turn the tables on evil-doers the world over,” writes one user with the name DakotaSmith on the site. “Share and enjoy.”
It’s worth noting that only a fraction of those who download the printable gun file will ever try to actually create one. Defense Distributed used an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST to print their prototype, a 3D printer that the vast majority of its fans won’t have access to.
Nonetheless the “Liberator,” which I first revealed last Friday and then witnessed being test-fired over the weekend, has caused an enormous stir online. Defense Distributed says that it received 540,000 users to its website in the two days since its printable gun was released, and its video revealing the gun has attracted 2.8 million views on YouTube.
The project has also already immediately inspired a legal backlash. New York congressmen Steve Israel and Chuck Schumer have both called for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act to ban any gun that can’t be spotted with a metal detector.
But Defense Distributed’s real goal hasn’t been to create an undetectable gun so much as an uncensorable, digital one. As the group’s founder radical libertarian founder Cody Wilson sees it, firearms can be made into a printable file that blurs the line between gun control and information censorship, blending the First Amendent and the Second and demonstrating how technology can render the government irrelevant.
“Call me crazy, but I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead,” Wilson said when we first spoke in August of last year. “I see a kind of poetry there…I dream of this very weird future and I’d like to be a part of it.”
Scary. We reported this about a year ago when they only had a few parts of the gun available to print. It got reblogs with comments like ‘yah but they won’t develop the technology in our lifetime to print the whole gun.’ Welp, as I said then and I say now, this is not some distant-future technology. It is here now, available to people who have an expensive 3D Printer, but in the next few years, 3D printers will become cheaper and cheaper and eventually, way cheaper. So I think this is important & I think we should be paying attention to this.
Today (May 9, 2013) is the 66th anniversary of the start of the first Freedom Ride.
It was called the Journey of Reconciliation, and white & black activists rode (otherwise) segregated buses through four southern states.
The interstate bus ride, lasted from April 9-23, and was designed to test the June 3, 1946 Supreme Court ruling that said Black passengers could not be forced to sit at the back of the bus. Bayard Rustin, a 101 Changemaker, participated in and helped to organize the ride. The riders were arrested several times.
Later rides and riders would be violently attacked by racist mobs.
Read more in: 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History.
Feature: Our veterans – the elephant in the room?
May 7, 2013
Apart from when the occasional veteran makes the headlines and is arrested (perhaps for carrying out a training run fully kitted up and armed; or by posting borderline material on facebook and being detained and sectioned under Section 922(g)(4) of the US Code) once our marines have stepped down from active duty, very little is heard of them and that seems to be the way the government likes it.
They must be feeling uneasy to say the least at the growing movement of veterans who are standing up and voicing their concerns about the way in which our country is governed and the Constitution being undermined by successive rafts of legislation, some of which is pushed through without adequate consultation or proper procedure. The government would have us believe that these few “voices in the wilderness” belong to misfits, miscreants and malcontents – that most veterans are happily adjusted to everyday society and living out their lives in the bosom of their family as productive citizens.
Myth versus reality
Truth is there is a huge gulf between the myth foisted upon us by the government and the reality. Many of these veterans start out their career in the US forces with high ideals and a vision of serving their country and protecting their family and others like it; young men and women with a clear conscience, a deep sense of moral duty and strong loyalty to their government. By the time they have done a tour or three they come back as different people with a totally changed perspective. We are fed images and news reports by the media of spouses and little children welcoming back the homecoming heroes and heroines, smiling faces, happy tears and a good helping of the American dream, complete with cream and sugar. We aren’t shown the rows of flag draped coffins; we aren’t told about the conditioning imposed on these service men and women to psychologically prepare them for the battlefront or about the drugs which are forced on them to make sure they remain emotionally stable during their tour of duty. In 2012 more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in the war zone. In fact, 6,500 veterans killed themselves that year alone – that equates to 1 every hour and 20 minutes.
The harsh reality is that these men and women come home, having seen things they won’t talk of to anyone other than another veteran, tired, disillusioned, often traumatized and diagnosed with PTSD, unable to easily step back into their old lives. It is no wonder that so many isolate themselves from others in the community, very often becoming reliant on alcohol or drugs (prescription or illegal) to make it through each day. It is telling that the US government has stepped up their Veterans Alcohol and Drug Dependence Rehabilitation Program, providing support for former service members at an ever growing number of drug and alcohol detox centers across the States. For drug and alcohol detox in Massachusetts, as an example, there are centers in almost every town and city across the state – something like 64 all in all. Those that make it through the transition back into civilian life and survive or avoid addiction have gone on to become some of the harshest critics of our government.
People like Adam Khokesh, who served in the US Marine Corps Reserves in Iraq, have become vocal opponents of the very government they swore to obey when they joined the forces. They have seen through the illusion that government and media have fed to communities everywhere and are joining together to voice their opposition to today’s politics specifically and to war across the board. These highly trained personnel of yesterday have become today’s conscience of the nation, highlighting injustice, false flag events and illegal or immoral activities, including wars against other sovereign states. Groups like Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans against the War now actively oppose government and governmental policy, standing against the very things they previously stood for before the veil was torn from their eyes. The treatment many of them receive only serves to underline the government’s self interest and it is telling that the government considers veterans to be a danger, with Homeland Security classifying returning US veterans as a potential terrorist threat.
With something like 20 states wanting to secede from the United States, it may be that those same veterans who no longer support the corrupt political structure will be the vanguard of our changing world. When a country as large as the United States, with the influences it has across the globe, undergoes radical change it will surely impact us all.
-Written & submitted for The People’s Record by Evelyn Roberts
Lovely submission from Evelyn Roberts. Thank you so much. Veterans are part of the story, and they are, complicated victims of the system in their own way. Of course, the communities they are trained & instructed to destroy are also a big part of the conversation – they are victims of the system and are subjected to a whole different kind of horror because it. We would be remiss to not feature stories about both.
Regarding “Jonathan Lash’s” false flag (pun intended) e-mail
May 7, 2013
On April 26th, the Hampshire College community received an email from its president, former president of the World Resources Institute Jonathan Lash, that announced his decision to flip the campus American flag upside-down and lower it to half mast. The email articulated that this action was meant as “a two-fold statement: … a reclamation of mourning, and … an act of resistance against the symbolic violence of the American flag.” He went on to make powerful assertions about the coercive ways in which the state mobilizes the flag in order to create a culture in which the state violence of the police and military is condoned, in which mourning over events such as the Boston bombing and 9/11 are channeled into a racist and bloodthirsty patriotism, and in which dissent and alternative reactions to tragedy are repressed and silenced.
Throughout the day, the email spread rapidly over social media and through word of mouth. Dozens of people thanked President Lash for his words of solidarity with those oppressed by state violence. Others marveled that such a statement would come from an administration with a “decades-long streak of complacence with neoliberalism”. A friend of mine who is of Arab descent was thrilled at the statement and sent President Lash a personal letter of thanks saying that she was “more proud than ever to be at Hampshire”.
Halfway through the day, this same friend received a response from the president. It said that he had not written the email. This was accompanied by a campus-wide response that read, “This afternoon someone falsely sent out a message under my name regarding the flag. It was not written by me. Hampshire welcomes discussion and dissent, but not by misrepresentation.” Apparently, student(s) had written the original statement and hacked his account to send it under his name.
The majority of the criticism of the action accused the students responsible for assuming that all in the community shared their sentiments. A subsequent email from the campus IT director asserted that the action had “blatantly trampled the community’s right to debate and arrive at a common position”.
Such a forum for administration-approved “discussion and dissent” was created a few weeks earlier when students facilitated an open dialogue about the campus flag. Numerous international students, some of whose home countries have long histories of colonialist oppression at the hands of U.S. imperialism, expressed outrage and personal discomfort over the flag’s presence on campus. In this discussion, the administration promised to at least partially acknowledge these concerns by putting up an earth flag on earth day and leaving it up permanently. The earth flag flew for one day and was removed.
The argument that all differing opinions concerning the American flag are valid and must be given institutional weight completely misunderstands mechanisms of oppression and destroys the prospect of solidarity. It is the responsibility of the institution and all those who benefit from U.S colonialism (via white privilege, class privilege, settler status…etc) to support those oppressed by this legacy of violence. The personal patriotism of some individuals should not obscure the real violence committed on the world and members of our community under the symbol of the flag.
Those arguing in favor of the American flag have significant power over those opposed. They have the power of the state, the power of a long history of colonial genocide, and the power of the continued legacy of white supremacy. They also have the power of the administration which continues flying the flag without the consent of the community. Advocating for a “common position” in this regard would inevitably involve compromise on the part of the oppressed. This is not solidarity. This is the perpetuation of racist and colonialist dominance and oppression in the tradition of liberal “democracy”.
Sending the email was a powerful act of resistance used to expose the oppressive nature of institutional power at Hampshire. The students responsible rejected the channels of resistance established for them by the administration and claimed the authority of the president in order to subvert that very authority. By releasing a statement that spoke forcefully and directly against state violence, the students exposed the administration for being complicit with that violence by espousing an empty rhetoric of commitment to some vague notion of “diversity” and “social justice”. The email challenged the administration and the campus to transcend the tradition of mere lip-service (http://www.hampshire.edu/shared_files/INSIDE_Spring_2013_5.2.1.pdf) and work instead toward a tradition of true solidarity with those oppressed by the state.
President Lash failed this challenge. His response did not engage with the argument of the forged email whatsoever, and the American flag continues to proudly fly over the center of Hampshire’s campus.
