No human being trying to escape imperialist imposed poverty and starvation is fucking illegal. It's the assholes trying to declare them to be that should be considered fucking illegal . Fuck trump and everyone who consider themselves his fucking "ally" . The Revolutionaries and their supporters show people time and again what should be done, never mind any bullshit unjust law that's been passed. Fuck them and their fucking laws. Read:
Protests Nationwide Demand: Horrific Assaults on Immigrants Must Stop
| revcom.us
Banner on overpass at ICE Protest in Seattle. Photo: RefuseFascism.org
There were dozens of protests large and small in towns and cities around the country this weekend expressing anger and outrage at the horrific assault on Latino immigrants by the Trump/Pence regime’s Gestapo ICE agents in Mississippi, coming on the heels of the mass murder of Mexicans and Latinos by a white supremacist in El Paso.
On Saturday, August 10, about 700 protesters marched through Manhattan streets to the West Side Highway. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., 100 marchers, with signs saying “Abolish ICE” and “Close the Camps” sat down and locked arms, blocking all lanes of the very busy highway for at least 30 minutes. Immigrant rights group Cosecha, climate action group Extinction Rebellion, progressive Jewish groups, and a wide range of other political and religious organizations came together in the protest. Police arrested about 100 of the protesters for “disorderly conduct,” but not before traffic had been massively disrupted.
Also over the weekend, hundreds protested outside the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Facility; hundreds in Seattle targeted the downtown ICE facility; hundreds more protested the ICE facility in Kankakee, Illinois—these and others were part of the Jewish group Never Again Action’s nationwide campaign demanding #CloseTheCamps and a stop to immigrant deportations. Hundreds demonstrated in DC, and other actions took place in Raleigh, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Salt Lake City, Utah; Philadelphia; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and many other cities.
On Thursday, August 8, a press conference condemning the ICE raids the day before was held in Jackson, Mississippi, which included the immigrant rights group MIRA, NAACP, ACLU, and church groups.
RefuseFascism.org called people into the streets over three days, Friday August 9, to Sunday August 11, in the wake of the El Paso massacre and ICE raids in Mississippi, and fought for people to take up the challenge of driving out the Trump/Pence fascist regime through nonviolent, sustained mass protest. See here for sights and sounds from the three days.
As we write on Sunday, August 11, protesters connected with Never Again Action and #ClosetheCamps have been arrested after blocking the entrance to the Howard County, Maryland, Detention Center for over four hours this afternoon; and others have been arrested at Amazon Books in Manhattan for organizing a sit-in demanding Amazon Web Service end its technical support for ICE.
This article by Revolutionaries involved with the fight for immigrant rights and against fascism put everything into perspective beautifully. Read it.
Op-Ed: The LAPD spied on our group. Here’s why we shut down the 101 Freeway
Protesters shut down the 101 Freeway twice in the fall of 2017.
(Los Angeles Times)
By MIGUEL ALEX ANTONIO AND CHANTELLE HERSHBERGER
AUG. 9, 2019
4 AM
One of us grew up on the hard streets of South-Central Los Angeles. One of us moved from small-town Ohio to pursue a career in fashion. We are from different backgrounds, but on two separate mornings, we stood together to bring traffic on the 101 Freeway to a halt.
The first time we stopped freeway traffic was in September 2017, about a month after Heather Heyer was killed during peaceful counterprotests of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. At the time, Donald Trump said there were “fine people” among the torch-bearing white supremacists. We went back out onto the freeway two months later to unfurl a 50-foot banner that read “Trump/Pence Regime Must Go.”
Our freeway actions were completely nonviolent and had been planned carefully to ensure they were safe and well-executed. What we didn’t know until much later was that some of our meetings to discuss the state of the world and our actions in response to it had been infiltrated by an undercover spy sent in by the Los Angeles Police Department.
The city of Los Angeles waited almost a year to bring a total of 57 charges against us and nine other activists who took part in nonviolent protests, both on the freeway and at UCLA. As part of that case, police reports and transcripts were released documenting how, on four occasions in 2017, an LAPD informant secretly attended and recorded meetings of our group, Refuse Facism, at the Echo Park church where we met.
The informant reported on discussions in our meetings about fundraising, ordering pamphlets, getting a permit, planning a route for a march, and “moving ordinary people into active opposition.” At least that bit of note-taking was accurate: Moving ordinary people into active opposition against a regime we believe has descended into fascism was exactly what we were trying to do. Nothing short of removing this whole illegitimate regime from power will stop this nightmare, and that will take millions of people acting together in sustained, nonviolent, determined protest.
The infiltration of our group hearkens back to the LAPD’s past. In his book “Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD,” Max Felker-Kantor documented how during the 1970s and early 1980s, the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division spied on thousands of groups and individuals. After an ACLU lawsuit revealed the full scope of the spying, the division was disbanded, and its activities curtailed. But the department now has an anti-terrorism division, which was involved in the investigation of our group.
Our group is concerned about fascist rule. Having our private meetings infiltrated by a police spy suggests that we’re right to worry. The 1st Amendment right of free speech is being challenged across the nation. Since Trump’s election, 35 states and the federal government have either passed or introduced anti-protest legislation.
Earlier this summer, our case came to trial. When we took the stand and were asked why we blocked the freeway instead of just voting or attending the women’s march, we explained that we believed that the current threat to humanity and the planet required more from us than protesting for a day and going home.
History has shown us that fascism can absorb individual acts of resistance and gets normalized after waves of shock and outrage die down. The Trump/Pence regime has taken us through many such shocks, and “the new normal” now includes concentration camps at the border, where children continue to die and conditions are brutal. The response from civil society to this so far is shameful — which is exactly what we were trying to prevent.
Our supporters in the courtroom wore T-shirts that read: “Would you have convicted the people who hid Anne Frank?” With our action on the freeway, we were asking others to imagine what could have been different if people had acted BEFORE Anne Frank had to hide. Our trial ended with a hung jury after three days of deliberation, because the majority of jurors understood we were not criminals. But almost immediately, the city attorney’s office announced it would retry the case.
Later this month, we will once again stand trial for our action blocking the freeway. The LAPD and city attorney may disagree, but it should not be a crime to stand up against fascism. On the contrary, we hope everyone who cares about justice will join us.
Miguel Alex Antonio and Chantelle Hershberger are activists with Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club
Do the fascist motherfuckers in power and their enforcers of the "rule of law " in the u.s. deserve any respect ? Should the people just wait until the next election to drive the pigs from power ? And what if the asshole get in again ? Do you just respect the process and wait some more ? Fuck no to all of these questions. Fuck trump, amerikkkan imperialism, and their stupidass elections.
ICE Raids in Mississippi Leave Children Stranded in the Streets and Crying for Their Parents... Massive Mississippi Raids Mark Major Step in FASCISM
| revcom.us
On August 7, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raided seven food processing plants and arrested about 680 people in several Mississippi towns. The raids ripped holes in these communities, and were designed to terrorize people across the country. BuzzFeedNews reported that a pastor in one of the towns where a raid occurred said, “People are terrified. They’re scared to death.”
As the sun rose, a swarm of 600 ICE agents rolled off in buses across northern Mississippi and surrounded the plants. Gun toting agents pulled people off their lines, cuffed them and marched them in front of cameras in what ICE’s acting director called a “textbook operation.” A U.S. attorney boasted that this was the “largest single-state worksite enforcement action in the nation’s history.”
Children coming home from their first day of school found their parents gone. A Jackson TV station reported that “neighbors, and even strangers” picked up children dropped off at empty homes and took them to a local gym that became a makeshift shelter. A woman who went to the gym told a reporter she knew the mother of some boys there. She said, “[T]heir mom has been here for 15 years and she has no record.” A weeping Magdalena Gomez Gregorio, 11, said to a TV reporter, “Government, please show some heart. Let my parent be free with everybody else please…. I need my dad and mommy. My dad didn’t do anything, he’s not a criminal.”
Many people arrested were immediately transported to warehouses to be “interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by ICE agents, processed for removal from the United States, and transported to an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana,” (statement of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Mississippi). By the end of the day, about 300 of the people arrested had been released by ICE. Some of these people were juveniles, as young as 14.
Which Side Are You On?
ICE claimed it released some people on “humanitarian” grounds, to reunite children with their parents. This transparent lie is vicious even by ICE standards. ICE’s official statement says that “In all cases, all the illegal aliens encountered as part of this operation are either being placed into removal proceedings before the federal immigration courts, and for those who already received due process and have been ordered removed, processed for removal from the US.” In other words, ICE fully intends to deport everyone arrested.
The raids occurred during a week that saw mass slaughter of Mexican and Chicano people in El Paso. They came on the same day Trump visited El Paso, a city which has been central to his rabid, fascist attacks on Mexicans from the moment he launched his campaign for the presidency. These events are part of a process of ethnic cleansing, by the state, by white supremacist vigilantes, and racist mobs.
Then, on Friday after the Mississippi raids, Trump promised more of the same. “I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out; they’re going to be brought out. And this [the raids and the images of crying children] serves as a very good deterrent... I just hope they keep it up.”
Listen to what these fascists are telling you. The raids and arrests are going to intensify. They intend to deport everyone caught up in them. They don’t give a good goddamn about the kids and their families.
These horrors will continue on an even larger scale if they aren’t countered with fierce resistance by masses of people of all nationalities, immigrant and non-immigrant. A reporter for the New York Times quoted a Chicano lawyer in Texas who said after El Paso, “Many clients tell me, ‘We’re the new Jews, we’re just like the Jews.’” And remember, at the same time, Trump has been using straight-up Hitler-style language to describe the oppressed areas in which masses of Black people are forced to live, talking about “infestation” and “vermin.”
This is no time to put your hopes in the delusion that the Democrats will finally call for the kind of resistance needed to stop this fascist onslaught. They aren’t—and they can’t and they won’t. The Democrats represent the same system of capitalism-imperialism as the Republicans. This is a system whose vampire heart is nourished by ever more relentless exploitation of literally billions of people on this planet, backed up by the kind of cruel repression and violence on display in Mississippi, El Paso, and along the length of the border. If anything cries out for an actual revolution to overthrow this system, it is the demonization, criminalization, and massive deportation of immigrants—the ramping up of violent ethnic cleansing with a definite genocidal logic at its core.
Time is short, and decisions must be made. As the National Revolution Tour said in the statement on the El Paso massacre, “The question is, WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Are you on the side of white supremacy and fascism? Or are you on the side of ending this oppression?”
Everyday the Revolutionaries are out there fighting for what's right, never mind what the laws say. Laws were not created to fight injustice, but rather to perpetuate it and keep the system intact. Read this and see why you should be supporting the Revolutionaries.
Trial Approaches for Noche Diaz and Six Other Revolutionaries Illegitimately Arrested at Puerto Rican People's Parade
| revcom.us
In 2018 at the Puerto Rican People's Parade, more than a dozen police vamped on Revolution Club members in their T-shirts, grabbing as many as they could, including Noche Diaz, who was on the bullhorn. Some were brutally thrown to the ground with several police piled on top. Altogether, seven were arrested and hauled off to jail. These defendants have now been dragged through court proceeding after court proceeding for over a year on completely bogus charges. Noche is facing misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, resisting/obstructing and a violation of the sound ordinance. The other six are charged with obstructing/resisting. None of them did anything illegal. They were TALKING to people!
The authorities clearly did not want a revolutionary message to reach and challenge people who have borne the brunt of U.S. colonization and the utterly inhumane treatment of the island’s people in the wake of Hurricane Maria. The anger and outrage this stoked were still below the surface in 2018 but have since erupted into massive struggles rocking the island as the people took to the streets and forced the governor from office.
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria had landed a catastrophic hit on Puerto Rico, an island nation of over three million people.
Dozens died as a direct result of the storm. But in the days, weeks, and months after the storm, thousands more would die, hundreds of thousands would endure great suffering, and the entire economic, educational, and social infrastructure of Puerto Rico would be severely and permanently degraded. Almost all of that was completely un-necessary; it was the result of deliberate, genocidal inaction by the U.S. government and its refusal to organize a serious rescue and recovery effort for Puerto Rico.
This was the situation when the Revolution Club of Chicago went out to the 2018 Puerto Rican People's Parade and Festival which draws thousands each year. The club set up at a corner where they could maximize their interaction with people streaming by. They were met with an unjust mass arrest by the Chicago Police Department.
The Revolution Club was displaying the “5 Stops” panels and a special display about Puerto Rico, and the criminal (non) response of the U.S. government. Overhead was a banner calling for revolution. For more than two hours the club was reaching out to the crowds—exposing U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico historically and today, its crimes in countries like Yemen where a school bus full of children was hit with U.S. bombs dropped by its ally, the Saudis; of children being ripped away from their parents on the southern border with Mexico; the murderous role of the police in enforcing this system of oppression. Through it all, the message rang out: This system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. Literature about how a revolution was possible was handed out and people were being signed up to get with the revolution.
After being out at the parade/festival site for about two hours, there was a pre-meditated assault on the Revolution Club crew who were TALKING to people going to the parade! There was no prior warning. The police rolled up over 12 deep, led by a high-ranking deputy chief. One would have to ask why he was there. The deputy chief personally later claimed that Noche used the bullhorn to “incite violence” against the police. And he determined this how? After a minute or two? The video shows that what Noche actually said was that the police constantly arrest the Revolution Club for no legitimate reason (TRUE) and he exposed their general role as enforcers for a brutal system of oppression (TRUE). This does not meet by any stretch ANY legal definition of inciting violence. The very fact that the deputy chief described it that way is both serious and reveals the real political nature of this arrest and prosecution.
The police, led by their deputy chief, stopped what was clearly First Amendment activity for political reasons and then made up criminal charges to justify the arrests.
This arrest was one of 14 incidents of CPD arresting and ticketing members of the Revolution Club. But that is not all. There were another 13 incidents of almost arrests. Why did the latter stay “almost” arrests? Because there was a lawyer present who intervened to prevent the arrests, thus highlighting the other arrests should never have happened.
The pretext in this case was a “sound ordinance” violation. In light of the overall past pattern of arrests and this case in particular, the ACLU wrote a substantial four-page memo to the Revolution Club advising them of their rights. The memo’s conclusion reads, “The Revolution Club and its members have a First Amendment right to attend permitted events in public forums, including the Puerto Rican People's Parade. At such events, you have a First Amendment right to communicate your message to others who are present in the forum, and police may not make you leave the area or limit your speech based on your message, the words you use to communicate your message, or your membership in the Revolution Club…. With respect to the sound amplification ordinance in particular, you are, in our opinion exempt from enforcement because you are participating in a permitted event.” [Editors’ note: In this case the parade and festival are considered permitted events.]
On August 14, all the defendants will appear in court with a legal team put together in anticipation of the case going to trial. At this hearing, the legal team is preparing to press for the discovery that a judge granted in a pretrial motion but which the state has not complied with to date.
Word of this illegitimate arrest and prosecution has to be spread and people rallied to defend the Revolution Club members who are facing these charges. The state is very afraid of this revolutionary force growing so they try to attack and suppress it. This has to boomerang on them by more people coming forward to be part of and learn more about the revolution and by broad strata, whether they agree with revolution or not, taking the right side in this fight to not let the state silence and jail people fighting for a better world.
People should call the office of the Cook County State’s Attorney, Kim Foxx (the recently elected “reformer”) and demand that these charges be dropped: (312) 603-8600.
The Comrades are right again, it's not enough just to hate dipshit fascist trump , he and his criminal gang have to fucking go . In the meantime, they have to be resisted every fucking inch of the way. Read.
Republished from RefuseFascism.org:
In a Week of Terror Against Immigrants: It is Not Enough to Hate this Fascist Regime; We Have to Drive it Out
By Coco Das
| revcom.us
On the heels of the mass murder in El Paso, in which a white supremacist targeted Latinos and killed 22 people, the Trump/Pence regime sent ICE agents, its American Gestapo, to unleash more terror. 680 workers at chicken processing and other food processing plants in Mississippi were rounded up and detained. There are pictures and videos of their children, left behind in schools and daycare centers or picked up by other community members, screaming and crying for their parents. One pastor said about the ICE raid of the chicken processing plant, “It looked like an invasion in a war.”
A war is two-sided. This is in fact an ethnic cleansing of Latino immigrants and citizens, waged by the Trump/Pence regime and its many soldiers, from government agents in ICE and Border Patrol to young white supremacist men who are willing to follow the marching orders of a whole fascist movement, fed and strengthened by Trump’s immigrant bashing at Nazi rally after Nazi rally.
No more sacrificing our immigrant brothers and sisters to these crimes! No more sitting back and begging politicians to “do something!” The politicians are either part of the fascist GOP or part of the Democratic Party, which is funding and enabling this fascist regime, collaborating with it—while giving empty lip-service to “holding Trump accountable” and “impeaching Trump at the ballot box”—and having no way of actually stopping this fascist terror.
Driving out this fascist regime is the greatest moral obligation we have at this moment in history. Consider this quote from a recent speech by Bob Avakian: “Trump’s election—through the electoral college, not the popular vote—is, in a real sense, an extension of slavery: the people who voted for Trump are the kind of people who would have been pro-slavery, had they been around at the time of slavery in the United States. And those who find it acceptable to have the overt white supremacist Trump in the White House are the kind of people who would have ignored or would have openly accepted and justified or rationalized slavery when it existed.”
In his speech, Avakian calls out the illusion of painless progress. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglas spoke to this when he said, “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. …Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
Right now, everyone standing aside and waiting for 2020, or thinking they can stop these horrors one at a time, are asking the most vulnerable to bear the pain of this regime’s fascism. To sacrifice their lives so that too many “good Americans” don’t have to sacrifice their comfort. The blood of El Paso is on the hands of the Trump/Pence regime, but it will be on everyone who continues to cling to the illusion of painless progress. Listen to the children in Mississippi crying for their parents. They need us now.
It is not enough to hate this fascist regime; we have to drive it out. This American fascism will not be stopped painlessly, but it can be knocked off the tracks sooner than we can imagine with the right demand—that the Trump/Pence regime must go now—and millions in the streets in non-violent protest day after day, refusing to back down until their demand is met.
Refuse Fascism is looking for the thousands who are ready to start this sustained mobilization. Prepare to take to the streets and stay in the streets. Bring your anger, outrage, and determination. Join our sustained actions and donate so that we can grow and reach millions.
Get ready to go Puerto Rico on this regime, and raise your voices everywhere to say: This nightmare must end. The Trump/Pence regime must go now!
What is Refuse Fascism
RefuseFascism.org is a movement of people coming from diverse perspectives, united in our recognition that the Trump/Pence Regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet, and that it is our responsibility to drive them from power through non-violent protests that grow every day until our demand is met. This means working and organizing with all our creativity and determination to bring thousands, eventually millions of people into the streets of cities and towns, to demand: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! RefuseFascism.org welcomes individuals and organizations from many different points of view who share our determination to refuse to accept a fascist America, to join and/or partner with us in this great cause.
The other day I saw an ad from a local cable company that said something like " Adulting Is Hard". For one thing, assholes, "Adulting " is not a fucking verb, and for another thing, what the fuck does that mean ? Does it mean you have a fucking job ? Amazing. That your parents don't pay your rent ? Tremendous. You do your laundry and cook for yourself ? You deserve a gold fucking medal. In most of the world, these things aren't optional . You just do them, especially if you have children yourself. Here , it seems to be a choice. If "adulting" is hard, then how about being a child molested by an adult, or growing up in Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, or the inner cities of the united states ? Being taken away from your parents and put in a fucking concentration camp in trump's amerikkka , just because you want a better life ? Working in a sweatshop in Asia ? Was this a stupid fucking term created for marketing purposes ? Most likely, and as usual, the majority of the fucking idiots eat that shit up . Knock it the fuck off. This is just more capitalist foolishness for an already entitled population. Fuck it.
Two more mass shootings in the u.s. demonstrate once again how fucking hypocritical it is for the amerikkkan government to dictate to the world how everyone should run their affairs , and also the vicious forces that the trump regime has unleashed, all in the name of " making america great again ". Liberals will focus on gun laws and whatnot, but will anyone question why these assholes would want to go shooting down civilians in the first place ? What is their motivation ? Hatred ? Fear ? Mental illness ? All of the above ? Trump will probably blame illness alone on this, but it's more to do with actual core amerikkkan values than anything else. This is exactly what amerikkka stands for, here and all over the world. Fuck them.
