March 19, Fayetteville, tomorrow…

This is reposted from the March 11 Counterpunch, at www.counterpunch.org.

This story came out last November.

On March 7, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) led a seven-member
delegation from the U.S. to visit Haiti’s constitutional Prime Minister
Yvon Neptune and Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert, both of whom have
been imprisoned in the National Penitentiary on trumped up charges by
Haiti’s illegal government.

While the middle class pours into the Plaza Murillo, to cheer President Carlos Mesa in his palace, the stalemate between the right wing (with the government leading) and the left (with all the social movements united) continues…

In a precedent-setting move, fast-food industry leader Taco Bell Corp., a division of Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM), has agreed to work with the Florida-based farm worker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.

Fayetteville is really popping y’all.  The Friday night concert is blowing up.  The program on Saturday is amazing and we’re hearing from folks all over the country who are coming.  The Sunday organizer’s conference and meetings of Gold Star Families for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Military Families Speak Out, are all falling in place.  In short, Fayetteville is going to be something else!  Check out the website www.ncpeacejustice.org for all the updates. 
 
Problem is…we’re just about out of money.  Unfortunately, there’s much less access to organizing money down here, and we’re going about this about every way that we can imagine right now, but there are still huge gaps to fill. 

One of the Chicana/o community’s most important living treasures, Elizabeth Betita
Martinez, the author of “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, and of other
important books like “Viva La Causa” and over 500 articles since the early
50’s, had a stroke a few days ago, and has been left with several physical problems,
like a difficulty walking and seeing.  She just made it to her 80’s, and was working
as hard as usual, speaking at colleges, community centers and k-12 schools about
Latina/o issues and many other subjects.  She is in need of much help right now.

In June 1990, the members of the rap group 2 Live Crew were arrested and charged under a Florida obscenity statute for their performance in an adults-only club in Hollywood, Florida. The arrests came just two days after a federal court judge had ruled that the sexually explicit lyrics in 2 Live Crew’s album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, were obscene. Although the members of 2 Live Crew were eventually acquitted of charges stemming from the live performance, the Federal court determination that As Nasty As They Wanna Beis obscene still stands. This obscenity judgment, along with the arrests and the subsequent trial, prompted an intense public controversy about rap music, a controversy that merged with a broader debate about the representation of sex and violence in popular music, about cultural diversity, and about the meaning of freedom of expression.

from Robert Jensen’s web site at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/pornography&cruelty.htm

After an intense three hours, the workshop on pornography is winding down. The 40 women all work at a center that serves battered women and rape survivors. These are the women on the front lines, the ones who answer the 24-hour hotline and work one-on-one with victims. They counsel women who have just been raped, help women who have been beaten, and nurture children who have been abused. These women have heard and seen it all. No matter how brutal a story might be, they have experienced or heard one even more brutal; there is no way to one-up them on stories of male violence. But after three hours of information, analysis, and discussion of the commercial heterosexual pornography industry, many of these women are drained. Sadness hangs over the room.