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Photos by Eric Ribellarsi

How Gender Violence in Movements Enables State Violence

NOTE Thanks to Alvo for finding this.

by Courtney Desiree Morris of make/shift magazine

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

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Introduction by Mike Ely, originally posted at Kasama.

Arizona has become a lightening rod of anger — from those who hate the persecution of immigrants. That is a good thing — an exciting and much needed jolt!

But we all need to ask whether there should also not be much more attention on those actively doing the deporting: I.e. the Obama Administration.

We should ask ourselves if there isn’t some conscious and calculated misdirection  involved in the Democratic establishment  denouncing specifically a very mean-spirited Arizona law (passed by Republicans), while their team (which after all has power!) has escalated the deportations nationally.

Let’s be clear on a key point:

The White House accuses the Arizona law of unjustly profiling Latinos who are legal — while they themselves escalate the deportation of those who are illegal.

Is that a stand we want to take? No.

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By Joel Olson
 
In the struggle over the notorious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-working class law SB 1070, a person might be tempted to see this as a conflict that plays out among the elites of Arizona politics: legislators, governors, sheriffs, newspaper editors, judges, lawyers, and nonprofits. This view would be understandable, but wrong. The real battle is at the grassroots.
 
On the one hand, there is a strong nativist movement afoot in Arizona that is overwhelmingly white, mostly over the age of fifty, and largely male. They fear that “illegals are invading” and causing all manner of mayhem, from home invasions to overcrowded emergency rooms to automated voices forcing them to “press 1 for English.” They are represented by the Tea Party and local politicians such as State Senator Russell Pearce. Their goal is to hound and harass all “illegal aliens” out of Arizona—and if they have to check the papers of every brown-skinned person in the state to do it, fine. “Attrition through enforcement,” Pearce calls it. That phrase is now written into Arizona law. At their demand, SB 1070 turns every cop in the state into an immigration officer, practically requires racial profiling, and denies the freedom of Arizonans to associate with whoever they please, documented or not. With the passage of 1070, nativists are confident that they control the territory.

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Thanks to the KOE for posting this video and report.

"Precariously working teachers "invade" the studios of public TV, the day before general strike.The teachers interrupted the news broadcast and demanded to participate in a TV program with Ms Diamantopoulou, Minister of Education. The TV administration called in the Police Special Forces, who attacked brutally the teachers. Their representative Stathis Katsoulas, member of KOE, was wounded (after the conclusion of the mobilization he was transported to the hospital with his leg broken by the police). However, the teachers resisted and obliged the TV to broadcast live their declaration (see at 7min 30sec). Meanwhile, more than one thousand people gathered outside the TV building, supporting the teachers, and then, at around midnight, marched in the city with slogans against the government, the IMF and the EU."


by Eric Ribellarsi

On May 1st and 5th, two very important demostrations against SB1070 took place here in Houston. The stakes are enormous. Arizona's SB1070 is one of the most racist bills in decades, and threatens to criminalize an entire people. It has emboldened racists who are now trying to bring it here to Texas and spread it throughout the state.

Houston's May Day rallies were the largest since 2006. Between 6,000 and 8,000 protestors hit the streets in a celebratory fashion, and demanded an end to SB1070. We really got a sense that people were truly outraged. Four days later on May 5th, protestors again hit the streets, demanding the boycott of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Yet, in some ways, the message from much of "the stage" was disconnected with people's outrage.

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