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Nov 1, 15

All The News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

Originally posted to It’s Going Down

Normalistas clashed with riot pigs outside of government offices in the state of Guerrero while a “welcome” rally was held for the Governor Hector Astudillo, who recently assumed leadership of the state. According to one article:

Outside the Congress of Guerrero, hooded Normalistas from Ayotzinapa threw stones, sticks and Molotov cocktails at the building facade.  The riot police with tear gas retreated. Meanwhile, members of the United Front of Public Normal Guerrero blocked all four lanes of the Autopista del Sol. There were a few minutes until federal police convinced them to leave.

In other Mexico news, militant teachers in Oaxaca were arrested by police on various charges. According to one article the teachers were a couple of badasses:

Mexico has arrested four members of a radical teachers union in the southern state of Oaxaca, ground zero for the battle over education in the country. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office says in a statement Thursday that police served the arrest warrants overnight. It says the men are suspected of violently seizing an educational office in Tehuantepec, taking over an oil refinery and distribution center, vandalizing a military base and the theft of 10,000 textbooks.

https://twitter.com/MexicAnarchist/status/659921118518611968

In US labor news, in LA, port truckers recently ended a strike over wage-theft. They have launched claims to unpaid wages in the millions of dollars. It’s clear that the claims filing is for the sole purpose of returning the truckers to work in order to preserve the smooth functioning of the economy. New York school bus drivers also recently voted to strike as autoworkers began to vote on rejecting or accepting a sell-out contract from bureaucrats.

In scary ass far-Right news, 3,000 anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-choice activists from throughout the world gathered in Salt Lake City for the World Congress on Families. According to an article from the Daily Beast:

[T]he World Congress of Families is, in fact, a dangerous player in the global anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice movement. It is a powerful networking entity that weaves together a web of right-wing leaders representing religious, scientific, academic, political, and civil society. And it has successfully disseminated a U.S.-born culture war that’s wreaking havoc on women and queer folks all around the world.

One of the organization’s primary funders is the GFC—yes, that’s God, Family, and Country—Foundation, run by Stan Swim, who sits on the WCF Board of Directors and signed the deal to host WCF IX. Key sponsors include the Utah-based Sutherland Institute, and the LDS Church itself.

The content, not surprisingly, included a flood of homophobic, transphobic, and anti-choice rhetoric, accompanied by strategic and tactical lessons in how to resist the “gay agenda” and “radical feminists.” And yet, over and over again, WCF representatives have asserted (PDF) that they’re a harmless group of “natural family” advocates—just some neighborly champions of values and procreation that “would never advocate violence or hatred toward any group of people.”

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Anonymous also dropped a bomb this week, and started to release the names and information of members of KKK groups across the US, including several in law enforcement. Anonymous stated in one communique:

Due to your actions we will be rearranging Operation KKK. We’ve gained access to yet another one of your KKK Twitter account. Using the info obtained, we will be revealing about 1000 of your klan member identities. The aim of our operation is nothing more than Cyber Warfare. Anything you upload will be taken down, anything you use to promote the KKK will be shut down.

It should go without saying that you should verify the information yourself before putting it to use. Gosh, Anonymous has never fucked up before!

https://twitter.com/TheMafiaJoe/status/661021079377440769

In other KKK news, it turns out that the Virginia Flaggers, a group that demonstrates in support of the Confederate Flag, was found to be directing their followers to an upcoming KKK rally in Georgia.

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In Washington, DC, anti-fascists faced arrests from police as they attempted to shut down the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI) at the National Press Club. The NPI, like American Renaissance and a variety of other “suit and tie” fascists and white nationalists, are attempting to wedge themselves deep within conservative social movements and the Republican Party. Hopefully resistance to these groups continues and deepens.

One People’s Project has released a new report about continued racist attacks at Trump rallies. As the report states:

In one video, an unidentified White man wearing a red polo shirt is seen pulling protester Ariel Rojas by the back of his shirt, and when Rojas, a senior at Florida International University, falls to the ground, the man in the polo shirt then drags him along the floor towards the room’s exit and kicking him as he was still lying on the ground. Other Trump supporters also attacked protesters, [with] one group grabbing their signs and tearing them up, and another reporting hitting a protester with a sign reading “The Silent Majority Supports Trump.” Trump did little to help deescalate the situation, shouting from the podium, “Don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them. You can get them out, but don’t hurt them. We don’t want anyone getting hurt. That’s what freedom of speech – it’s all freedom of speech.” Eventually police escorted protesters off the premises, although it is not known if action had been taken against the Trump supporters that assaulted them.

There has been at least four separate incidents of aggressive action to violence related to Trump’s campaign for president since he announced his run in June. In August, Scott and Steve Leader, two brothers from South Boston urinated on and beat a homeless Hispanic man as he slept outside a bus stop, one of the brothers telling police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” In September, one of Trump’s security detail took a sign from protesters outside Trump Tower in New York that read “Make America Racist Again!” – a play on Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” – and when one of them attempted to retrieve it, he was punched in the face by that security guard. A rally in Richmond, VA this month saw a number of scuffles between protesters and Trump supporters, one spitting in the face of a supporter, and another a well-known neo-Nazi from the Carytown section of Richmond named Caitlin Goode being captured on video shouting “White Power, you cunt!” to another supporter.

In Bloomington, Indiana, students rallied against Islamophobia.

In animal liberation news, organizers with the No New Animal Lab Tour have released a new video and in the last few days carried out a flurry of actions across the US. This included a demonstration on Halloween outside of the home of Skansa CEO, banner drops, protests outside of offices, vandalism, and much more.

In other animal and ecological news, it appears that in the US, “The Bureau of Land Management, the agency tasked with protecting wild horses and cattle and their grazing lands, sold 1,794 federally-protected wild horses to a Colorado rancher who sent them to slaughter, a new report confirmed.” Not that anybody should be surprised!

In New England the group FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas) held a demonstration against pipelines. However, we might find it useful to look towards militants up north for much more effective ways in stopping pipelines than these tired activist theatrics.

Also, several reports show the linking of policies of mass animal hunting culls with the needs of the forest industry and land management. In British Columbia:

British Columbia’s government has been meeting with the forest industry to develop plans to save endangered caribou, and the province appears to have launched its controversial wolf cull program to avoid putting further restrictions on logging.

Everglades Earth First! has also announced a week of resistance to save the Briger Forest. More info here.

Also in the US, as of this writing, police have killed 996 people in 2015 so far. Protests, marches, and demonstrations have continued throughout the country and appear to have no intention of stopping, despite attempts by the Black Lives Matter leadership to direct the movement back into politics. As Glen Ford, the critical yet oh-so awesome bad ass at the Black Agenda Report wrote:

Representatives of the two wings of Black Lives Matter last weekend jousted over the merits of holding Democratic Party-sponsored town halls on racial justice, versus a formal, televised debate on issues critical to Black people, also to be sponsored by the Democrats. The exchange took place on Melissa Harris-Perry’s program on MSNBC, which acts as the Democratic Party’s corporate cable outlet. A casual viewer might conclude that the incipient movement ignited by the murder of Michael Brown fourteen months ago, has been swallowed whole by the Democratic Party. Certainly, the #BlackLivesMatter network, co-founded by Alicia Garza and two of her comrades, and its offshoot, Campaign Zero, honchoed by charter school advocate DeRay McKesson and like-minded colleagues, have encamped deep in the bosom of the Democratic Party, where movements go to die.

In Quebec, the local government is meeting with Native leaders to try and avert anger over growing allegations of sexual harassment by police officers towards indigenous women in and around the town of Val d’Or.

Back in US news, a new report shows the pervasive use of force by border patrol pigs, another that half of US workers live on the poverty line at or below $30,000 a year, and far-Right Republican Paul Ryan became the Speaker of the House. As one report wrote:

The Wisconsin congressman, who was Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate in the 2012 election, was elected speaker Thursday. He succeeded John Boehner, who was forced out by a long-simmering rebellion of an ultra-right minority, the self-styled House Freedom Caucus.

It is worth recalling that when Romney chose Ryan as his running mate, the selection was made to appease ultra-right-wing elements within the Republican Party who had backed Romney rivals such as former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich…”Ryan pick signals that the US ruling elite has decided on a frontal assault on key social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

Now Ryan has been elevated to the highest position in the US Congress, placing him second in the line of succession to the presidency, after Vice President Biden, and making him the highest-ranking Republican. His political views, once considered so extreme that even most Republicans were reluctant to cast votes for his budget plans, are presented as “mainstream” or even “moderate.”

We hope that everyone had a great and happy Halloween, even if you weren’t one of the thousands of UC Berkeley students who threw bottles at cops for hours.

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In search of new forms of life. It's Going Down is a digital community center and media platform featuring news, opinion, podcasts, and reporting on autonomous social movements and revolt across so-called North America from an anarchist perspective.

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