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Sep 5, 15

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

In Seattle (two Saturdays ago), people marched in solidarity with the ongoing Rojava Revolution in Kurdistan and against ISIS. Photos from the march by Daniel Vincent can be found here.

An almost three week hunger strike in Chicago has rejected a proposal to reopen the Dyett school as one focused on arts for the 2016-2017 school year. Hunger-strikers still contend that the school should be dedicated to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). People remain on hunger strike and the tension continues to build.

In Toronto, Rising Tide protesters occupied and protested at a pipeline site. According to one report:

About 15 protesters disrupted work at Enbridge’s Line 9B pipeline Wednesday morning. The group set up signs demanding an end to the tar sands and fracking, a procedure to extract oil and gas through creating fractures in rocks by injecting fluid into cracks to force them further open.

The 10 staff members working on the site were sent to work on other sites after the protesters arrived, confirmed Enbridge communications manager Graham White. Security staff was sent to the site. OPP officers were also on site. Mr. White said the workers were making preparations for a hydrostatic test as required by the National Energy Board in preparation for the reversal of crude oil flow in the pipeline.

In further pipeline resistance news, Wet’suwet’en tribal chiefs have worked to distance themselves from the Unist’ot’en camp and the ongoing blockade. As one article quoted various leaders as saying:

“We have long believed it is short sighted to turn down projects such as the Coastal GasLink project before understanding the true risks and benefits; that is just an easy way to avoid dealing with complex issues,” said Ogen, who is described as a spokesperson for the First Nations LNG Alliance, a group that supports LNG development.

George is quoted making a similar statement: “Our Nations support responsible resource development as a way to bring First Nations out of poverty and bring opportunities for our young people,” he said.

In response, traditional elders have come out in total support of the Unist’ot’en Camp and against the pipelines.

A Louisiana detective is refusing to leave his job in law enforcement after a photo has surfaced of him at a KKK rally. An article on Daily Kos states:

That image above is Detective Raymond Mott of the Lake Arthur Police Department (LAPD—but not that LAPD). He has admitted as much according to the Jennings Daily News. The photo began circulating on social media and was picked up by the newspaper starting quite a stir—since he’s straight up clearly in the Klu Klux Klan. The police chief of the Lake Arthur PD, Ray Marcantel is saying that if Mott doesn’t resign by today, Marcantel will ask the town council to fire him. Raymond Mott has an answer that is so frightening it begs the question how this guy got his job in the first place.

“I refuse to resign,” the detective told the newspaper. “I have been baptized – after the events and have the documents to prove that – and a short while after my baptism, I have become an ordained minister and started a charity-based ministry in Lake Arthur.”

Mott initially claimed he attended the Klan rally in Troy, N.C., while on a “secret mission” for the FBI, but he later said that wasn’t true.

Students in a small Missouri town held a rally to support a transgendered youth, Lila Perry. At the event, counter-demonstrators showed up with Confederate flags. Tensions flared on September 2nd, when kids walked out of their school when Lila attempted to use the girls locker room.

https://twitter.com/JamesFTInternet/status/639823235014635520

As of this writing, 802 people have been killed by police in 2015 in the US. Protests took place this week in Baltimore and Minneapolis, among others. Police have also begun to point the finger toward the BLM movement, saying that it is responsible for the number of police killed while on the job. According to the Atlanta Blackstar: 

As was reported in Reuters, although the number of police deaths this year—24 to date—is not out of the ordinary, and the latest fatalities were unrelated to the current climate, some police officers say they fear for their safety on the beat. Further, voices from law enforcement say that the increased attention to police deaths, and the public hostility towards cops is taking an emotional toll on officers.

“People need to have a hard look at not just the psyche of the shooters but the psyche of the enablers, and those who would encourage or celebrate this kind of activity,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “There is an element in the community which encourages violence against police officers and others who might be inclined to feel that way are enabled by what they see.”

Democrats have continued to court the movement by officially endorsing it, although key BLM leaders have not returned the favor. They issued a statement saying:

A resolution signaling the Democratic National Committee’s endorsement that Black lives matter, in no way implies an endorsement of the DNC by the Black Lives Matter Network, nor was it done in consultation with us. We do not now, nor have we ever, endorsed or affiliated with the Democratic Party, or with any party. The Democratic Party, like the Republican and all political parties, have historically attempted to control or contain Black people’s efforts to liberate ourselves. True change requires real struggle, and that struggle will be in the streets and led by the people, not by a political party.

However, Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report remained critical of both the Democrats and BLM leadership. As he wrote:

We at Black Agenda Report will not speculate about the level of interaction between #BLM leadership and DNC operatives in the days and weeks before the Democratic endorsement. That’s a fool’s game, which distracts attention from central questions of movement politics – such as the nature of demands – and from facts that are clear to any observer. In their rebuke to the DNC, #BlackLivesMatter leadership resorts to what BAR co-founder Bruce Dixon calls “weasel words” to deny any direct collaboration with the Democrats. The endorsement was not done “in consultation with us,” they say. “Consultation” is a term that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, or nothing at all.

In San Jose, over 50 people marched against the death of an inmate in custody. One article read:

Three officers — Jereh Lubrin, 28, and Matthew Farris and Rafael Rodriguez, both 27, were arrested Thursday on suspicion of murdering inmate Michael Tyree. He was found in his cell on Aug. 27, naked on the floor, covered in lacerations and bruises and bleeding to death internally.

As she marched Friday, Yesenia Velasquez carried a sign that read: “File charges on deputies,” calling on District Attorney Jeff Rosen to charge the three. Rosen’s office has until Tuesday to file charges or the three could be released. Even if that happens, charges could be filed later.

Protests continued against Donald Trump, as people mockingly held banners and dressed in KKK robes. One security guard also attacked one Latino man during the rally.

Protests also broke out against the raiding of the RentBoy website.

Wages across the US, especially for those making the least, continue to plummet. According to an article by Andre Damon:

With the approach of the 2016 elections, the Democratic Party and its trade union allies are once again ramping up their efforts to fraudulently posture as advocates of working people. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have called for raising the federal minimum wage, while the Obama administration has made much ado about a set of trivial changes to miscellaneous work rules that it claims will significantly benefit low-income workers.

But these attempts to palm off the Democrats as defenders of the working class, and in particular of low-income workers, stand in stark contrast to the actual record of the Obama administration, which has waged a systematic and determined campaign to slash the wages of workers in order to further enrich the banks, hedge funds and major corporations.

This reality was made clear in a report published Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which showed that, despite the reduction in the nominal unemployment rate and continued increases in productivity, workers’ wages fell sharply under the Obama presidency.

Overall, workers’ wages declined by four percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 2009 and 2014. But the lowest-paid workers saw the sharpest decline: those in the lowest-earning quintile had their wages fall by 5.7 percent, compared with a 2.6 percent decline for the top-earning quintile.

In Tucson, striking bus drivers now have to contend with scab workers, which will prolong the strike.

Thanks to everyone that has been sending articles into us! We are reaching our three month old mark soon and hopefully we will have some new exciting features out along with more surprises. Stay tuned next week for our other column, Bloc Party, which will round up news about political prisoners, insurgency, and repression.

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It’s Going Down is a digital community center from anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements. Our mission is to provide a resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action.

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