Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun
Let’s start with the good news. Remember those cost-of-living protests we talked about last week? Panama’s trade unions won big, pushing the government to mandate a 30% reduction on all essentials. It took a month-long national strike to achieve it, but it’s worth it. “Essentials” means food for children, transportation for workers, cooking fuel in kitchens, and so forth. The Panamanian victory reminds us that radical change is possible. It takes solidarity and determination to pull off.
Other Nonviolence News stories ask us to hold our fellow human beings in compassion. Myanmar executed four political activists, spurring protests and condemnations around the world. In Guinea, police shot into a crowd of protesters opposing the junta, killing one and injuring more. A displaced Brazilian activist speaks about the devastating pain of losing the struggle to stop a massive dam that put her village underwater forever. A 12-year-old girl pleaded with West Virginian officials to think of her as they make decisions on total abortion laws. “If a man decides that I’m an object and does unspeakable and tragic things to me, am I, a child, supposed to carry and birth another child?” And some First Nation members in Canada are responding to Pope Francis’ visit and apology for Catholic abuses at residential schools with the continued push for even deeper justice: the rescinding of the Doctrine of Discovery that set in motion colonization of Turtle Island.
Love, solidarity, and heart ache can all offer fuel for our fire for change. In this week’s stories, you’ll find articles about Chinese moms banding together to fight the patriarchal society and Indian sex workers seeking freedom from detention centers after a court ruling decriminalized their work. Youth around the world are vowing to occupy schools over the climate crisis. 40,000 railway workers in the United Kingdom are causing commuter havoc (and John Lewis’ “beautiful trouble”) as they demand safety, protections, and better wages. Despite strikes being banned, Russian workers are still pushing for their rights – even amidst chilling wartime restrictions.
My favorite story? It’s a gem from the archives of history. In 1978, 7,000 Bengali residents of East London rose up to stop discrimination, murder, and beatings. A new photo archive project shares their stories.
In solidarity,
Rivera Sun
Photo Credit: Myanmar nationals living in Thailand hold a rally outside Myanmar’s embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, Tuesday, July 26, 2022. International outrage over Myanmar’s execution of four political prisoners is intensifying with grassroots protests and strong condemnation from world governments. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
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Panamanian Trade Unions Reach Agreement With Government On Essential Commodities: After almost a month of national strike against the high cost of living, peoples’ movements win the reduction of the cost of essentials by 30%. Panamanian trade unions reach agreement with government on essential commodities. According to the agreement, the government will reduce the prices of some 72 products, including food and hygiene items, by implementing measures such as price caps, subsidies on national products, and tariff reduction with control of the marketing margin. Read more>>
‘This Victory Is Historic’: Massachusetts Trader Joe’s Becomes First to Unionize: “Our worker-led union ensures that we are protected and properly compensated—on our terms,” explained a crew member at the Hadley store. Workers at a Massachusetts Trader Joe’s on Thursday voted to become the first of the supermarket chain’s more than 500 locations to unionize, a historic development that comes amid a nationwide labor organizing wave. Read more>>
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Removed From University Course: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will no longer co-teach a course at George Washington University this upcoming semester, following calls from student leaders and thousands of others demanding his removal. Thomas had been teaching a course at the university for the last 10 years with his former clerk, Gregory Maggs. But after the Supreme Court’s latest term, in which Thomas voted for federal abortion protections to be overturned and wrote an alarming concurring judgment calling for numerous constitutionally protected rights to be reexamined, dozens of student leaders signed an open letter to the university demanding his dismissal. Read more>>
Detroit Offers To Pay Black Lives Matter Protesters Nearly $1.3 Million: The city is moving to offer nearly $1.3 million to protesters in five pending lawsuits, the vast majority going to Detroit Will Breathe which has alleged Detroit officers used excessive force during the George Floyd protests in 2020. A coalition whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Michigan Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild and Detroit Will Breathe renewed calls earlier this summer to defund the Detroit police. DPD has a “continuing pattern and practice of police violence and killing,” the Coalition for Police Transparency said in a 17-page letter to the U.S. Department of Justice that was released in May. Read more>>
Protesters Storm Iraqi Parliament In Baghdad: Hundreds of protesters, most of them supporters of the powerful Iraqi religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, danced and sang in the Iraqi parliament after storming Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone in protest against a rival bloc’s nominee for prime minister. Police fired barrages of tear gas on Wednesday in a bid to stop the protesters from breaching the gates of the heavily fortified Green Zone, but the crowds surged forward and entered parliament. Read more>>
Myanmar Executions Of Four Activists Spurs Global Outrage: International outrage over Myanmar’s execution of four political prisoners intensified Tuesday with grassroots protests and strong condemnation from world governments, as well as fears the hangings could derail nascent attempts to bring an end to the violence and unrest that has beset the Southeast Asian nation since the military seized power last year. Read more>>
Protesters Shot At Guinea Demonstrations Against Junta: In the wake of recent protests against fuel prices, new demonstrations have arisen to push the current military junta out of power. The protesters’ demands focus on a swift timeline for fair elections. (The coup leader has proposed holding them in 3 years.) One person was killed and others injured when police opened fire on the crowd. Read more>>
Book Publisher Workers Strike: A chant of “passion doesn’t pay the rent” resounded off the concrete walls of Lower Manhattan, as workers at the HarperCollins publishing company picketed outside its offices during a one-day strike July 20, some 100 people walking in 91° heat. They are employees in the company’s editorial, sales, publicity, design, legal, and marketing departments and seek a contract with “fair wages, diversity language, and union security.” Read more>>
40,000 Railway Workers Hold 24-Hour Strike: Over 40,000 railway workers across Britain are taking a 24-hour strike on Wednesday, bringing another day of widespread delays and cancellations: New Rail Strike Disrupts UK Train Services. The action by workers from Network Rail, 14 train companies, and members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), has left only one out of five trains running on average and stopped train service altogether in some parts of the country. The strike is part of the ongoing dispute between unions and companies over pay, job security and working conditions. Read more>>
Vaccine Equity Activists Denounce Pfizer’s ‘Obscene’ Pandemic Windfall: “Companies like Pfizer will always put high profit before lives,” said one campaigner after the pharma giant announced record second-quarter revenue. Health equity campaigners on Thursday called for a fairer system of developing and distributing Covid-19 medications after pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced record second-quarter revenue, more than half of which is attributable to sales of coronavirus vaccines and treatments that remain out of reach for much of the Global South. Read more>>
‘Rescind The Doctrine’ Protest Greets Pope In Canada: Pope Francis celebrated Mass on Thursday at Canada’s national shrine and came face-to-face with a long-standing demand from Indigenous peoples: to rescind the papal decrees underpinning the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” and repudiate the theories that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property law today. Read more>>
Pope Francis Says Church Must Accept Institutional Blame for Harms of Residential Schools: Pope Francis on Tuesday said the Roman Catholic Church should accept institutional blame for the harm done to indigenous Canadians in residential schools that tried to wipe out native cultures. “All of us, as Church, now need healing; healing from the temptation of closing in on ourselves, of defending the institution rather than seeking the truth, of preferring worldly power to serving the Gospel,” he said in a covered outdoor space after greeting the crowd in three indigenous languages. Read more>>
Indigenous Boycott of Rapid City Hotel Enters 12th Week: NDN Collective provided an update on their ongoing boycott of the Grand Gateway Hotel, Foothills Inn, and Uhre Realty due to racist behaviors and attitudes of the owner. The boycott has been going on for twelve weeks, with Rapid City residents picketing outside the businesses three days a week. Read more>>
Protests In Oak Lawn After Video Shows Officers Punching 17-Year-Old: About 120 people gathered Thursday afternoon outside the Oak Lawn police station to protest after a video shared on social media this week showed Oak Lawn police officers repeatedly punching a 17-year-old. In the video, an officer can be seen repeatedly punching the teen in the head as he is held down by another officer, who punches him in the leg. Read more>>
Indigenous Changemaker Showcase Highlights Transformative Organizers: The 2022 Changemaker Showcase celebrated 14 Indigenous leaders from across Turtle Island, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific Islands who are radically transforming Indigenous communities by defending Indigenous lands and rights, developing sustainable solutions for the future, and decolonizing their day-to-day lives, their families, communities and Nations. Watch here>>
Big Oil’s Record Profits and Buyback Splurge Spotlight ‘Broken Energy System’: Fossil fuel giants raked in billions in profits last quarter “by gouging people at the gas pump,” said one campaigner. “Why on Earth are we still subsidizing Big Oil?” Economic and climate justice advocates on Thursday reiterated their demands for far-reaching energy reforms after Europe’s two biggest fossil fuel corporations reported more than $21 billion in combined second-quarter profits and announced plans to buy back a combined $8 billion in shares in the third quarter—all while continuing to receive billions in public subsidies each year to wreck the planet. Read more>>
Rejecting ‘Business as Usual’ While Planet Burns, Students Vow to Occupy Schools Worldwide: “We can’t keep pretending everything is all right, studying as if the planet wasn’t on fire.” Dozens of students and student groups co-signed an op-ed published by The Guardian, promising that their new campaign starting this Fall, “End Fossil: Occupy!” will include young people from across the globe demanding “the end of the fossil economy.” Read more>>
Congressional Staffers Arrested in Sen. Schumer’s Office Over Climate Policy Sit-in: “We’re asking Senator Schumer to negotiate like this is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives (it is).” In a phone interview with Teen Vogue, Levin, 26, laughs when asked how the action came about. “It starts with the Senate not doing anything,” they say. “We have tried everything: negotiating, jamming things in, coordinating, organizing. None of these things have worked. And now the Democratic leadership, who aren’t going to live through the [climate] crisis in the same way we are, have basically thrown up their hands, and we literally can’t accept that.” Read more>>
When The Dam Destroys Your Existence: Inside the grief and loss of a fight to stop Brazil’s dictatorship-era dam project. The Belo Monte dam’s construction forced 14,000 from their homes in Brazil’s Amazon and disrupted a vital ecosystem. Read more>>
Climate Protesters Arrested At Congressional Baseball Game: Climate protesters were arrested at the 87th annual Congressional Baseball Game and fundraiser Thursday night at Nationals Park in Washington DC. Climate activists dropped a sign that reads “They play ball while the world burns” and three protesters were busted for unlawful entry at the stadium when dozens of demonstrators blocked the entrance, the DC Metropolitan Police Department told Fox News. Several groups who organized the protest outside of the stadium were holding signs that read “This is a climate emergency.” Read more>>
Report Details ‘Abusive’ Eviction Tactics by Corporate Landlords During Height of Pandemic: “These firms are buying up a lot of housing, and they’re particularly buying up housing in places that have relatively weak tenant protections,” said one eviction expert. “And I don’t think that that is coincidental.” Four large corporate landlords filed nearly 15,000 eviction actions in the first 16 months of the pandemic, with some executives and property managers engaging in harassment and deception of their tenants and deliberately inflicting cruelty on people who had been unable to pay their rent. Read more>>
Amid Eviction Crisis, Organizers Win Right To Legal Representation For Tenants: The promise of these efforts (recognizing a tenant right to counsel’s outsize potential to win) is traceable to both the dogged work of legal aid programs and the transformative power of collective action taken by tenant’s unions, community associations and organizers who seek to recalibrate the tilted scales. Read more>>
China’s Mortgage Protests: The mortgage boycott is a protest, not an inability to pay, and it raises the risk of social unrest. Despite pandemic curbs, in-person demonstrations have sprung up in various cities, such as a 200-strong protest in the central Chinese province of Hubei on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Groups of buyers have also banded together to send letters threatening to stop paying mortgages until construction resumes. Read more>>
Chinese Would-Be Homeowners Campaign Over Unexpected Costs & Construction Delays: With new home construction dragging its feet and getting derailed by corruption, people moved into action. Pooling their expertise, frustrated owners detailed their experiences into a 70,000-word script, recorded personal video stories of their troubles, and even organized offline public events. Read more>>
Indian Sex Workers Demand Release From Detention: In 19 May 2022, a three-justice panel of India’s Supreme Court ruled that voluntary sex work is not criminalized under Indian law and that sex workers should be treated with dignity. They directed police to refrain from “interfering or taking any criminal action against adult, consenting sex workers.” Now that this new ruling has been issued, detained women are rising up to demand their release from confinement. Read more>>
‘What About My Life?’ West Virginia Girl, 12, Speaks Out Against Anti-Abortion Bill: 12-Year-Old Addison Gardner issued a potent plea during a public hearing against bill that would prohibit procedure in nearly all cases. “If a man decides that I’m an object and does unspeakable and tragic things to me, am I, a child, supposed to carry and birth another child?” Gardner said. Read more>>
Medical Students Walk Out On Antiabortion Speaker: University of Michigan medical students walked out on a speech Sunday by an antiabortion speaker during their “white coat day” to mark the start of medical school. “This is not simply a disagreement on personal opinion; through our demand we are standing up in solidarity against groups who are trying to take away human rights and restrict medical care.” Read more>>
Chinese Moms Groups Band Together: Started as mutual aid to help with childcare costs, women found solidarity and empowerment … and they’re now taking on larger social issues. The mutual support and encouragement found in mom groups have even led some mothers to a deeper awareness of just how important — and overlooked — mothers are in contemporary society. Rather than accept the status quo, they have begun pushing for greater recognition for their role from society and public institutions. Read more>>
The Effects of Overturning Roe v. Wade Through an Indigenous Lens: Authored by various NDN Collective staff members across the organization, the new position paper, The Effects of Overturning Roe v. Wade Through an Indigenous Lens: How Consent, Body Sovereignty, and Self-Determination are the Real Conversation, provides historical context for the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have had their consent violated through state violence for generations. Read more>>
Georgian Queers Need More Than Pride: The annual focus on Pride parades makes queerness a geopolitical issue. And that does not help Georgia’s LGBTQ community, which faces violence and economic marginalization. Georgian queers need more than Pride. Of course, Georgian queers should be able to do what straight people here do: fully participate in the social, economic and cultural life of the country. Queer rights are universal. But the way that queer rights are conceptualized here, with a heavy emphasis on the annual attempt to hold a Pride event, ignores the particular and very real needs of Georgia’s queer community. Read more>>
Matt Gaetz Body-Shamed a Teen — Who Then Launched a Fundraiser for Abortion Rights: Olivia Julianna has raised over $230,000 for abortion funds. According to Rep. Matt Gaetz, body-shaming a teenager to his 1.4 million Twitter followers is behavior befitting a congressman. According to Olivia Julianna, the best way to respond is to use the opportunity to raise $230,000 (and counting) in donations for abortion funds. Read more>>
Pacific Peace Network Challenges RIMPAC: For Indigenous Pacific Islanders, US militarism remains front and centre in their fight for sovereignty and peace. Peace activists around the world are mounting a global campaign to stop massive naval maneuvers in the Pacific. According to the US Pacific Fleet, this year’s RIMPAC war rehearsals began on June 30 and will continue until August 4. It will be the largest maritime war exercise in the world with “26 nations, 38 surface ships, four submarines, nine national land forces, more than 30 unmanned systems, approximately 170 aircraft and more than 25,000 personnel participating.” Read more>>
After Israel Nablus, Palestine Action Invades Israeli Drone Factory: “Elbit drones are made in Britain, tested on Palestine then sold back to the British military, amongst others. The British military hold deep ties with Elbit – Britain is an accomplice in an international industry built on occupation, one where technlogy is suited not to meet human needs, but to further repression and terror. We can only cut these ties with direct action taken by the masses – ordinary people, willing to make sacrifices in order to end our collective complicity.” Read more>>
Russian TV Journalist Fined For ‘Discrediting Army’ Over Ukraine: Marina Ovsyannikova, previously fined for bursting into state TV studio, was found guilty over social media posts. Ovsyannikova gained international attention in March after bursting into a studio of Russian state TV, her then employer, to denounce the Ukraine war during a live news bulletin. At the time she was fined 30,000 roubles for flouting protest laws. Read more>>
Cuba Should Be Removed From The US Terrorism List: Cuba, rather than exporting weapons around the world, has a long history of medical internationalism with Cuban doctors and medicines being a familiar sight from Pakistan to Peru. In fact, there is an international campaign for Cuban doctors to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Why would a country that floods the world with health care be targeted as a state sponsor of terrorism? Read more>>
How Brick Lane Fought Anti-Bengali Racism UK: East London’s Bengali community came out against the murder of Altab Ali in 1978. On 14 May, 7,000 Bengalis marched from Brick Lane, in the heart of the community, to Hyde Park. They demanded an end to racist violence and discrimination. Led by young people, it was part of a fightback that helped turn the tide against far-right politics in the UK. Read more>>
Notes From Extinction Rebellion Global – Hot Take #1 “Feel the Heat”: “Climate change kills. It kills people, it kills our ecosystems, our biodiversity and destroys the things most precious to those affected.” The links between the accelerating climate and ecological emergency (CEE) to increasingly extreme weather events are well-known. The frequency of these events has increased dramatically over the last twenty years, the unmistakable connections between the human-induced climate catastrophe of continued rampant fossil fuel exploitation and use to extreme heat being the most well-established of all. Read more>>
How Workers Are Fighting For Their Rights In Russia: There are no strikes in Russia. But Russian workers use various forms of protest: appeals to the authorities, pickets, rallies, ‘stop actions’, ‘spontaneous strikes’, hunger strikes and so on. Sociologist Pyotr Bizyukov is trying to paint a true picture of worker resistance in Russia by monitoring labor protests across the country. And according to him, there were almost 400 such protests in Russia in 2021. Read more>>
Embodying Nonviolence Requires Getting Out of Comfort Zones: Kit Miller reflects on two experiences of leveraging white privilege for racial justice. As Gandhi said, “Nonviolence cannot be preached, it must be practiced.” Learn more>>
James Lawson Institute 2022 Is Accepting Applicants: The powerful, in-depth training in strategy for movements and civil resistance, guided by the Rev. James Lawson and a team of organizers, is accepting applications. (Deadline: July 30; Starts Aug 10th) Learn more>>
Online Screening of The Day After, Followed By Anti-Nuke Discussion: “The Day After” is a U.S. post-apocalyptic film that first aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. A record-setting 100 million people watched it in the U.S. – and 200 million on Russian TV during its initial broadcast. Join World BEYOND War in viewing and discussing this tragically timely film. (Aug 6) Learn more>>
Defund the Mountain Valley Pipeline: Send a message to JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, MUFG, TD Bank, PNC, and Wells Fargo and tell them that continuing to fund the MVP is unacceptable. For years, activists in Appalachia have been fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline. If built, this fracked gas pipeline would have the same climate impact as 23 new coal plants ― and it would account for at least 1% of all greenhouse gases from the US energy sector. Learn more>>
Drop Charges Against Line 3 Water Protectors: Right now, hundreds of water protectors and comrades are faced with criminal charges in Minnesota for fighting the Line 3 pipeline and rising up in defense of the water, the climate, and the treaty rights of the Anishinaabeg people. Learn more>>
CODEPINK Calls For Climate Emergency Declaration: The deadly heat waves of the past week demonstrate that climate action is long overdue. We’re in an emergency. Act now and demand President Biden declare an emergency for the planet now instead of fueling more wars. Learn more>>
Tell US Congress To Defend the Right To Asylum: Everyone deserves to live in safety and peace. But for the past two years, a federal policy known as Title 42 has blocked migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum, a human right. This Trump-era, anti-immigrant policy has further endangered hundreds of thousands of lives. Now some members of Congress are attempting to indefinitely extend Title 42 rather than taking action to ensure that our policies heal not harm. And they must hear from us today! Learn more>>
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