Protest Reports

Women members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are in Columbus this week. Until 5 p.m. today the their new Harvest Without Violence mobile exhibit will be stationed in the South Oval on the Ohio State University campus. 

The OSU campus location is fitting. The university's administration has chosen to renew its contract with Wendy's to keep one of its stores on campus, despite the fast food chain's refusal to join the CIW's Fair Food Program. 

The mobile exhibit highlights gender-based violence, which the Fair Food Program has made great strides to eliminate in Florida's fields. Instead of joining the program, Wendy's decided to stop sourcing its tomatoes from Florida farms. Instead, they are buying tomatoes from growers in Mexico, where sexual harassment, rape, child labor, and slave labor are still rampant in the agricultural industry.

While 25% of women experience sexual harassment and sexual violence in the workplace overall, in the agricultural industry more 80% of women are subjected to these abuses.

Yes, of course, every day that Congress goes on refusing to ban guns is more blood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It’s immoral, disgraceful, embarrassing, and in large part a function of financial corruption. But it’s also in part a government operating within a culture of violence — albeit one that the same government plays a huge role in creating.

U.S. movies, tv shows, video games, music, news, and schools are uniquely and increasingly violent. Primates’ chief form of behavior is imitation. Humans are no exception to that rule. Human cultures that have not known stories of mass-murder have also not known mass-murder. Anthropologists have studied cultures in which people have had an absolute taboo on taking human life.

U.S. culture floods us with the acceptability of violence. Check out Heidi Tilney Kramer’s Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children’s Culture for a catalogue of horrors that extends from the normalization of torture in G-rated movies to the celebration of war in song lyrics. Kramer quotes some experts:

November 11 is Armistice Day / Remembrance Day. Ninety-nine years ago, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, fighting ceased in the “war to end all wars.” People went on killing and dying right up until the pre-designated moment, impacting nothing other than our understanding of the stupidity of war.

Thirty million soldiers had been killed or wounded and another seven million had been taken captive during World War I. Even more would die from a flu epidemic created by the war. Never before had people witnessed such industrialized slaughter, with tens of thousands falling in a day to machine guns and poison gas. After the war, more and more truth began to overtake the lies, but whether people still believed or now resented the pro-war propaganda, virtually every person in the United States wanted to see no more of war ever again. Posters of Jesus shooting at Germans were left behind as the churches along with everyone else now said that war was wrong. Al Jolson wrote in 1920 to President Harding:

“The weary world is waiting for
Peace forevermore
So take away the gun
From every mother’s son
And put an end to war.”

A flotilla was organized by World Beyond War and The Backbone Campaign in front of the Pentagon on Sunday, September 17, 2017.

The U.S. military is responsible for 69% of environmental disaster Superfund sites in the United States. It's the biggest consumer of petroleum around, consuming more than most entire nations. It poisons large areas of the globe with white phosphorus, napalm, depleted uranium, and much more. It's the third biggest polluter of U.S. waterways. It also swallows up over 50% of federal discretionary spending every year, a fraction of which could dramatically transition the United States to sustainable practices.

We need to bring the peace and environment movements together. Here's a chance.

Go to WorldBeyondWar.org and reserve a spot at the #NoWar2017 conference happening Friday, September 22nd to Sunday the 24th at American University.

Read full agenda at the website. Pay only what you are able. Use the rides & lodging board.

Come join us in celebration in uplifting the Reeb Avenue Center on Sunday, September 17th in the 2050 S. High courtyard from 3-8 p.m. 

There wil be:

-2 stages with entertainment by: magician Drew Murray, DJ Bill, comedian Michelle Trimmer and musical artist Wyatt Henderson

-BBQ and Pizza 

-Photo Booth

-50/50 Raffle drawn at aproximately 7PM

-Live Silent Auction - drawn at aproximately 6:45PM

100% of proceeds from this event benefit the nearby Reeb Avenue Center, who is making major impacts in the Southside of Columbus. They focus in areas of: GED certifications, pay-as-you-can food market and restaurant, human sex trafficking, drug addiction rehab, children's education, childcare, and much more.

Purchase tickets now and join us for a rejuvenation to the neighborhood, providing hope, jobs and excitement to the Southside of Columbus and our community.

TAGS

To my knowledge, and I very, very much hope I am wrong, this upcoming conference will be the very first environmental conference in the United States to take on the single gravest threat to the world’s na

o watch America’s structural racism at work, one need look no further than the National Football League (NFL) and its treatment of nonviolent unorthodoxy as expressed by Colin Kaepernick going to one knee during the national anthem in support of the unacceptable thought that black lives should matter as much as anyone else’s. Of course, that’s still a relatively new idea in the United States, dating from 1863 in law and still not fully accepted in much of the country.

Under the new policy just announced in Charlottesville, Virginia, the city will be taking down all but the non-racist war monuments and memorials in all of its public spaces.

Three monuments to the Confederate war, fought to maintain slavery — those of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and a generic Confederate soldier — will all be removed under the new guidelines.

In addition a heroic equestrian monument to George Rogers Clark is coming down, as Native American genocide has been ruled racist.

A statue of Lewis and Clark almost made the cut as not being a traditional war monument, but the figure of Sacagawea kneeling at their feet like a dog has apparently been sufficient to bump also this statue, which stands in a major Charlottesville intersection, onto the list of those to be moved to a museum.

Further, a memorial to the war that killed 3.8 million Vietnamese — although “Vietnamese” is a more polite and less commonly used term for the people killed than several others employed at the time by U.S. war makers — is going to be removed as well.

1. Let’s start with the obvious. Charlottesville, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, are actually two completely different places in the world. The flood of concern and good wishes for those of us here in Charlottesville is wonderful and much appreciated. That people can watch TV news about Charlottesville, remember that I live in Charlottesville, and send me their kind greetings addressed to the people of Charlotte is an indication of how common the confusion is. It’s not badly taken; I have nothing against Charlotte. It’s just a different place, seventeen times the size. Charlottesville is a small town with the University of Virginia, a pedestrian downtown street, and very few monuments. The three located right downtown are for Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Confederacy. Neither Lee nor Jackson had anything to do with Charlottesville, and their statues were put up in whites-only parks in the 1920s.

On August 13, the day after activist Heather Heyer was murdered and many others injured at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, about 500 leftists gathered at Goodale Park and marched to a solidarity vigil at the Ohio Statehouse.

Several who spoke from an open mic at the vigil addressed a fundamental question: What is the most effective way for the Left to combat racism and white supremacy? Can racism be eliminated in a capitalist system? Or is racism inextricably linked to and driven by capitalism?

 “We cannot rely on the police to protect us from violence,” said Rachel Reiser of the International Socialist Organization. “Right-wing vigilante violence, in many ways, is beneficial to the state. Right-wing violence against black people, Muslims, queer people, women, leftists, and activists is not prosecuted like it should be, because they are doing the state’s job for them, which is to keep oppressed people scared to death of fighting against the system.”