Next DPP Meeting
Monday, October 3: 6:30-8:30pm, at the
Vietnamese Center/42 Charles St., Fields Corner, Dorchester.
(PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is a week earlier than usual due
the Columbus Day holiday on the second Monday)
DPPer Rosemary Kean sent this article along:
The hard truth about Terence Crutcher and Tulsa:
WHAT KIND OF WHITE PERSON DO YOU WANT TO BE?
If America were a song, the killing of unarmed black people
by the police would be a standard chord progression or rhythm, the sort of
indistinguishable background noise that you hear so often you might
not even notice it anymore… The police killing of Terence Crutcher is
also a reminder of how the ugliest parts of America’s history and culture of
racial violence against black people are still with us. As the Tulsa police
took less than 30 seconds to kill Crutcher, officers can be heard describing
him as a “big, bad dude.” Terence Crutcher is not an ogre, troll or bear. He is
a human being — a brother, son, father and friend… I implore
white Americans to watch the video recorded killing of Terence Crutcher by the
Tulsa, Oklahoma, police (or the many other examples of similar incidents) and
to ask themselves the same question: What type of white person do you want to
be? I offer a reminder as you undertake this personal moral accounting.
Do not forget that silence and inaction in the face of such wrongdoing and
bigotry are in fact complicity with them. More
If you don’t understand Black
Lives Matter after Terence Crutcher’s death, you never will
Countless studies,
statistics, investigations,
and anecdotes
tell us that a person’s race can determine the kinds of interactions he or she
will have with the police — and how likely it is that he or she will survive
the encounter. At this point, this reality is largely beyond debate. Yet
the topic of unarmed black people being killed by law enforcement officers at
wildly disproportionate rates is often dubbed “controversial,”
and is framed as an issue about which reasonable people can disagree. It’s
not… The phrase “black lives matter,” which has been used to draw
attention to the problem, has inspired its own pushback, with critics
suggesting it means that “blue” (police) lives, or nonblack lives in general,
aren’t important. That’s hugely confused. More
* * * *
WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
In
Boston only, QUESTION 5 would enact the Community Preservation Act (CPA) in the city, which would allocate
a small real estate tax surcharge (with matching state funds) to finance
affordable housing, preserve open space and historic sites, and develop outdoor
recreational opportunities. More information at Yes for a Better Boston. DPP’s
neighborhood allies like New
England United for Justice (NEU4J) and Massachusetts Affordable Housing
Alliance (MAHA) support this measure as a (very modest) measure to
address the housing crisis. NEU4J is organizing door-to-door canvasing,
which it invites DPPers to join.
DPPers
opposed Statewide Question 2, which would, if passed, allow
for an exponential expansion of publicly-funded but privately-run Charter
Schools, and which represents an attack on public education and public school
teachers (and their unions). QUESTION
2 IS BAD FOR OUR SCHOOLS:
it would
allow the state to approve 12 new Commonwealth charter schools every year
forever, eventually draining billions of dollars from our schools. Charter
school proponents have millions of dollars from hedge funds and corporate
backers, including the chair of the state board of education. People power
needs to stand up for children in our public schools.
Sign
up to volunteer at https://saveourpublicschoolsma.com/.
Big money pours into
Massachusetts to undercut public schools
This Election Day,
Massachusetts voters will be voting on whether to lift the state’s cap on the
number of charter schools allowed to open. A recent poll showed 48 percent of voters opposed to
lifting the cap and planning to vote no on question two, while 41 percent were
in favor. Dozens of local school committees, along with the state Democratic party, have already voted to oppose the measure.
But despite this widespread
opposition, there’s a very real chance the measure will pass, for one simple
reason: money. Wealthy opponents of public education are pouring money into the state. Walmart heirs Jim
and Alice Walton have given a combined $1.8 million. Hedge funders and bankers
have given hundreds of thousands of dollars more. In fact, the pro-charter camp
has put $11 million into this fight, much of it from out of state… As if to
drive the point home what kind of a fight this is, the charter backers
have hired the ad firm that did the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. More
The NAACP Moratorium On Charters
Really Matters To Our Public Schools
The National Association for
the Advancement of Colored Peoples, the nation’s oldest and most highly
recognized civil rights organization, called for a national moratorium on charter schools this summer. Soon after, a bipartisan chorus of charter supporters cried foul
attempting to present the so- called choice offered by charters, as well as
other attributes of corporate education reform, as the next logical step in the
Civil Rights Movement. It is all the more curious when many of the same people,
like Trump, have been mostly silent on other issues impacting communities of
color. They offer no support for the contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement.
But, they can hardly contain their indignation when efforts are made on behalf
of communities of color to block corporate education reform measures like high
stakes testing and unregulated publicly financed charters. More
Media Ask Which Candidate Can
Better Exploit Our Irrational Fear
The media’s tendency to focus on horserace issues—who’s up and
who’s down, what the cosmetics are of an event rather than the substance—is
routinely derided by media critics, and mocking it has become something of an
election year tradition. But one 2016 topic in particular, terrorism, has
become the hot horserace topic of the year in a way that goes beyond the silly
to the potentially damaging… Something missing from these
reports is any discussion of the relative danger of terrorism. The reporters
begin with the premise that voters are afraid of it, never challenging the
underlying rationality of those fears. The
reality is that terrorism remains, objectively, a very minor threat. (One is 82
times more likely to be killed falling
out of bed than by a terrorist.) But by framing the issue as an urgent
danger, with two candidates “dueling” over opposing ways of addressing this
menace, the media further inflate terrorism’s importance. More
Hillary Clinton is taking the black vote for granted, says
America’s first elected black governor
Former Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder thinks Hillary Clinton
has blundered by trying to turn the presidential election into a referendum on
Donald Trump. “When I ran for office, I never mentioned my opponent’s name. I
always said, ‘Vote for me for these reasons,’” the 85-year-old Democrat said
during an hour-long interview here yesterday. “Even today, she still needs to
develop a message.” Wilder, who in 1990 became the first elected black
governor in U.S. history, said he knows many African Americans, especially
millennials, who may not vote. “A lot of Democrats tell me they don’t see the
need,” he lamented. “It’s not so much that people are turned off by Hillary as
it is that they’re not turned on by anybody.” …“You cannot win this
election without the African American vote,” he added. “Hillary obviously has
the necessary qualifications. … But tell me how what you’ve done relates to
what (the black community) needs.” More
A View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump
When Rothwell matched his company’s voluminous polling and opinion
data with demographic information, Zip Code by Zip Code, he found that the
highest levels of Trump support came from places where health was poor and
economic mobility stagnant. Within these places, the most intense support for
the casino mogul came from those people who are doing comparatively well
economically: the insurance agents, the wives of contractors… If you were
applying a moral gloss, you might say that these are responsible people in irresponsible
places. If you were not, you might just say they were lucky in places where
many others were not. The conservative language of inequality
is not yet mature, in part because it is muddied by racial and national
resentments, but it exists, as an intense sense of precariousness. More
Colin Kaepernick on death
threats: if I'm killed 'you've proved my point'
Kaepernick’s stance has prompted many other athletes to show their
support. Several other
NFL players have sat, knelt, or raised fists during the Star-Spangled
Banner, and World Cup winner Megan
Rapinoe has chosen to kneel before US international soccer games. Scores of
high school and college players have also picked up the cause. But
Kaepernick has not received universal support. Donald Trump said “maybe
[Kaepernick] should find a country that works better for him”, while failed
presidential nominee Ted Cruz said: “To all the athletes who have made millions
in America’s freedom: stop insulting the flag, our nation, our heroes.”
Kaepernick said he was the target of racial slurs and other insults before last
Sunday’s NFL game at
Carolina. “There’s a lot of racism in this country disguised as
patriotism and people want to take everything back to the flag but that’s not
what we’re talking about,” he said on Tuesday. More
Hate Crimes Against American Muslims Most Since Post-9/11 Era
The trend has alarmed hate crime scholars and law-enforcement
officials, who have documented hundreds of attacks — including arsons at
mosques, assaults, shootings and threats of violence — since the beginning of
2015. While the most current hate crime statistics from the F.B.I. are
not expected until November, new
data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino,
found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the
course of 2015. Attacks on those perceived as Arab rose even more sharply.
Police and news media reports in recent months have indicated a continued flow
of attacks, often against victims wearing traditional Muslim garb or seen as
Middle Eastern. More
How corporations rig the rules to dodge the taxes they owe
In recent years, corporate profits have reached record highs, and
so too has the amount of untaxed profits U.S. corporations have stashed
offshore: $2.4 trillion. And it is estimated corporations could owe as much as
$700 billion on those profits. In short, corporations are dodging more and more
of their tax responsibilities. While the statutory tax rate on corporate
income is 35 percent, estimates of the rate corporations actually pay put the
effective rate at about half the statutory rate. Driving this divergence
between what corporations are supposed to pay and what they actually pay is a
combination of offshore profit shifting and tax avoidance. Multinational
corporations pay taxes on between just 3.0 and 6.6 percent of the profits they
book in tax havens. More
Elizabeth Warren Just Gave Hillary
Clinton a Big Warning
Warren’s speech, delivered
at the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, cast the upcoming
presidential election in stark economic terms. She described the tax-slashing,
deregulatory approach laid out by Donald Trump and contrasted it to a laundry
list of populist economic policies embraced by Hillary Clinton… But towards the
end of her remarks, Warren noted that “personnel is policy,” and continued:
“When we talk about personnel, we don’t mean advisors who just pay
lip service to Hillary’s bold agenda, coupled with a sigh, a knowing glance,
and a twiddling of thumbs until it’s time for the next swing through the
revolving door, serving government then going back to the very same industries
they regulate. We don’t mean Citigroup or Morgan Stanley or BlackRock getting
to choose who runs the economy in this country so they can capture our
government. No.” More
Clash Between Saudis and 9/11 Families Is Escalating in Washington
On Monday a constellation of lobbyists for Saudi Arabia, which has
spent more than $5 million this past year to buy influence in Washington,
called a crisis meeting to try to stop legislation allowing the families of
victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue the Saudi government for any role in the
plot. On Tuesday the 9/11 families, represented in their multibillion-dollar
lawsuits by lawyers including Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel with
deep relationships in Washington, demonstrated outside the White House to
pressure President Obama not to veto the legislation, as he has vowed to
do… The four-page-long bill, known as the Justice Against Sponsors of
Terrorism Act, unanimously passed the House and Senate, and has major national
security and diplomatic consequences for the United States. It would alter a
1976 law giving other countries immunity from lawsuits in the United States and
force them to face federal lawsuits if they are found to have played any role
in a terrorist attack that kills Americans on United States soil.
More
9/11
Victims Family Member:
OBAMA, DON’T SHIELD THE SAUDIS!
JASTA (Justice
Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, S.2040) is a well-thought out, powerful
piece of anti-terrorism legislation. It does exactly what it says — it brings
all those who fund terrorism to justice… One effective way to stop terrorists
is to attack them at the root of their enterprise: their terrorist funding… It
goes without saying that the largest benefactor of terrorist groups such as
ISIS and Al Qaeda is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is the incubator
for global jihad. Saudis build madrassahs where fiery Imams like the late Anwar
Awlaki preach hate, print and distribute school books that teach violence
against infidels, and pay large sums of protection money to terrorists like
Osama Bin Laden. Notably, the
Saudi role in radical jihad does not stop at underwriting terrorism —
it carries into logistical support of individual attacks, as well. This
logistical role is how the Saudis are linked to the 9/11 attacks. More
US Air Force Grounds F-35s It Just Declared Ready
for War
On Aug. 2, the Air Force said 10 F-35s at Hill Air Force Base in
Utah were ready
for war. Forty-four days later, those planes have been grounded in the
latest embarrassing setback for the most expensive project in
Pentagon history… The grounding order affects 57 aircraft,
some of which belong to Norway, officials said. Fifteen of them are operational
jets, the 42 others are in various states of production. The
grounding interrupts a general wave of progress for the $400 billion [actually
$1 trillion!] program, which made its debut at the
Farnborough Air Show in England this summer and has been getting rave reviews
from pilots. (In 2014, an engine fire caused the previous high-profile
grounding and scotched the plane’s first planned trip
to Farnborough.) More
* * * *
NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What
Could Possibly Go Wrong?
GARETH
PORTER: How the Pentagon sank the US-Russia deal in Syria - and the ceasefire
Another
US-Russian Syria ceasefire deal has been blown up. Whether it could have
survived even with a US-Russian accord is open to doubt, given the incentives
for al-Qaeda and its allies to destroy it. But the politics of the US-Russian
relationship played a central role in the denouement of the second ceasefire
agreement. The final blow apparently came from the Russian-Syrian side,
but what provoked the decision to end the ceasefire was the first ever US
strike against Syrian government forces on 17 September. That convinced the Russians that the
US Pentagon had no intention of implementing the main element of the deal that
was most important to the Putin government: a joint US-Russian air campaign
against the Islamic State (IS) militant group and al-Qaeda through a “Joint
Implementation Centre”. And it is entirely credible that it was meant to do
precisely that. More
Was it Mutiny? U.S. Rulers Split Over Syria
Last weekend’s American air attack on
Syrian Army positions at Deir al-Zor that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers
and resulted in a temporary victory for ISIS forces was a blatant bid by the
Pentagon and the CIA to sabotage any prospect of cooperation between U.S. and
Russian forces in Syria. In a very real sense, it
is a mutiny against a lame duck president who, certainly since 2013, has
attempted to achieve regime change in Syria without allowing the jihadists to
take power in Damascus. The mutineers include civilian and military
elements of the Pentagon -- probably including Obama’s own Secretary of
Defense, Ash Carter – the CIA and other intelligence services (but not the
Defense Intelligence Agency, whose analysts warned of the rise of ISIS in
2012). They are encouraged and emboldened by the prospect that a President
Hillary Clinton will declare a “no fly zone” over Syria – a move that would
necessitate, under U.S military doctrine, an all-out attack on all of that
country’s aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons systems, resulting in a war with
Russian forces. More
SYRIAN
PROPAGANDA WAR, Chapter XXXIX. . .
The
one-sided media coverage of the breakdown of the US-Russia agreement for a
partial ceasefire continues daily. Of course it is difficult to ascertain
the facts in any case, but the MSM seldom makes any pretense of objectivity,
even if the biases are often difficult to notice by a general public woefully
misinformed and long fed on a diet of US government – Democratic, in this case
– propaganda. If you want to hear a different point of view, unfiltered
by MSM “reportage” you can watch an English-language interview with Bashar
al-Assad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTIXZGSPl4c
(text here: http://sana.sy/en/?p=88686
if you prefer). Of course, Assad heads a regime guilty in its own
ways of many crimes. And, his assertions, like those on all sides in this
war, should not be taken as automatic truth. However, instead of reading second-hand
contempt in our press, it is worthwhile to listen and judge for
yourself.
On
another front in the propaganda war, the liberal magazine The Nation
published an appeal
by supposed Syrian secular democrats appearing to condemn all outside
interference in Syria. The well-informed and generally astute blogger Asad
AbuKhalil commented:
The
signatories to this statement,
like Sadiq Al-Azm, have been advocates of NATO intervention from the very
beginning and most of the writers here work in Gulf regimes media, which have
been calling for MORE--not less--US intervention in Syria. Burhan Ghalyun
is even one of the signatories. Their protest is not against US military
intervention in Syria but against US agreement with Russia over the cease-fire
And amid
the relentless MSM focus on opposition zones under siege by Syrian government
forces, we rarely hear about or are encouraged to empathize with the victims on
the other side – these villages, among many others, and 150,000 civilians
trapped by Daesh/ISIS in government-held Deir-ez-Zor, scene of a US air attack
against the defenders.
Punishing siege drags on for two Shiite
villages in Syria
Dozens of towns have been all but
destroyed in the 5 1/2-year conflict over Syria’s future, but this has been a
different kind of suffering. A punishing siege imposed by Islamist rebels has
cut off these two sister towns in northwest Syria for the last 18 months,
leaving them at the mercy of truck bombs, mortar barrages, and the terrifying
staccato of sniper fire. The two towns lie in Idlib province, a
predominantly Sunni Muslim region southwest of Aleppo. In March 2015, the
entire province was overrun by a powerful jihadist coalition known as the Army
of Conquest. The exception was Fuah and Kefraya, two Shiite villages whose
roughly 17,000 residents have remained, even under a devastating blockade,
loyal to the government. For most, there has seemed to be little choice: Shiite
Muslims are seen as apostates by Islamist hard-liners, and the Army of Conquest
has threatened to wipe them out. More
Senate
Approves Massive Saudi Arms Deal, "Indifferent to Yemen's Misery"
The
U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to dismiss a bipartisan bill that
would have blocked
a massive $1.15 billion weapons shipment to Saudi Arabia, to the dismay of
peace groups and rights advocates who have called on the U.S. to end its
support for the brutal Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen. The bipartisan
resolution to block the weapons sale failed
71-27, with two senators not voting… "The very fact that we are voting
on [this resolution to block the arms sale] today sends a very important
message to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we are watching your actions
closely and that the United States is not going to turn a blind eye to the
indiscriminate killing of men, women and children," Sen. Al Franken
(D-Minn.) said during the floor debate. More
--Massachusetts Senators Warren and Markey were among the 27 votes
to support stopping the sale.
--Arms makers celebrate. . . see
here
Israel used to routinely oppose and lobby against arms sales to
Saudi Arabia. Not anymore! Reflecting its new de facto alliance with the Saudi
monarchy, Israel (and AIPAC) was silent on this issue, and all of its
staunchest Congressional supporters of both parties supported the sale.
For the first time,
Saudi Arabia is being attacked by both Sunni and Shia leaders
The
Saudis step deeper into trouble almost by the week. Swamped in their ridiculous
war in Yemen, they are
now reeling from an extraordinary statement issued by around two hundred Sunni
Muslim clerics who effectively referred to the Wahhabi belief – practiced in Saudi Arabia – as “a
dangerous deformation” of Sunni
Islam. The prelates included
Egypt’s Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar, the most important centre of
theological study in the Islamic world, who only a year ago attacked “corrupt
interpretations” of religious texts and who has now signed up to “a return to
the schools of great knowledge” outside Saudi Arabia. This remarkable
meeting took place in Grozny and was unaccountably ignored by almost every
media in the world… Although they did not mention the Kingdom by name,
the declaration was a stunning affront to a country which spends millions of
dollars every year on thousands of Wahhabi mosques, schools and clerics around
the world. More
* * * *
ISRAEL,
PALESTINE . . . and the U.S.
“88
senators press Obama to uphold US policy to veto one-sided UN resolutions” Chances are you would not
have heard about this unless you were a regular reader of the Israeli press –
or a visitor to AIPAC’s
web site. The bipartisan letter
begins with the usual pious nod to “the two-state solution” but the meat of it
is to pressure Pres. Obama to oppose any realistic pressure on Israel to
negotiate in good faith and promise a veto on any “interference” from the
UN. Among the signers were Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey.
Bernie Sanders and a handful of other Senators declined. Ironically, some
prominent Republican senators -- Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Nebraska’s Ben
Sasse – also refused to sign because the letter supported a two-state solution,
which they and rightwing Republican donors like Sheldon Adelson, oppose. Some useful
commentary here.
There is an old joke based on a supposed
conversation with the late Israeli Prime Minister (and war criminal) Ariel
Sharon. “Why doesn’t Israel become the 51st US state,” Sharon
was asked. “Because then we would have only two senators,” he replied.
The
Biggest Israel Aid Deal in History Will Bolster Occupation and the U.S. Defense
Industry
The
White House has described
the recent $38 billion promised aid package to Israel, apportioned each year as
$3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million in missile defense
assistance over the course of 10 years, as an “unshakable commitment to
Israel’s security.” A better description would have been the White House’s
unshakable commitment to Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s quarterly earnings. U.S.
“military assistance,” more accurately understood as a circular flow through
which U.S. weapons firms profit off the colonization of Palestinian land and
Israeli destabilization of the surrounding states, is a long-term structuring
element of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” More
81%
of Americans Oppose $38 Billion Pledge to Israel
An
IRmep
poll fielded by Google Consumer Surveys reveals 80.8 percent of the US
adult Internet user population says they would redirect the proposed spending
toward other priorities. Caring for veterans (20.7 percent) was their top
priority, followed by education spending (20.1 percent) and paying down the
national debt (19.3 percent). Rebuilding US infrastructure was favored by 14.9
percent, while funding a Middle East peace plan received 5.8 percent of
support. Only 16.8 percent said the $38 billion of pledged foreign aid should
be spent on Israel. More
When $38 billion is “not enough”. . .
US aid to Israel takes a partisan turn
Seven lawmakers signed on to legislation
from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that would provide an extra $1.5 billion in
missile defense and direct assistance to Israel's military next fiscal year.
They object to the White House's efforts to short-circuit unsolicited annual
aid hikes by Congress as well as the elimination of a 26% carve-out for
Israel's domestic defense industry instead of US weapons-makers… The Obama
administration portrays its effort to restrict congressional add-ons as a way
to streamline budgeting and avoid recurring spending fights. As part of the package,
Israel signed a letter vowing to return congressional
appropriations beyond the MOU's agreed-upon amount during the next two fiscal
years. Earlier this year, the White House threatened to veto the House Defense spending bill for the
fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, in part because it allocates $601 million for
Israel missile defense, $455 million more than the Pentagon's request. The request for additional funding was made by the government
of Israel, according to the report accompanying the Senate's version of the
bill. More
U.S. donors gave settlements more than $220
million in tax-exempt funds over five years
Private
U.S. donors are massively funding Israeli settlements by using a network of
tax-exempt nonprofits, which funnelled more than $220 million (about 850
million shekels) to Jewish communities in the West Bank in 2009-2013 alone, a
Haaretz investigation has found.
The
funding is being used for anything from buying air conditioners to supporting
the families of convicted Jewish terrorists, and comes from tax-deductible
donations made to around 50 U.S.-based groups. Thanks to their status as
nonprofits, these organizations are not taxed on their income and donations
made to them are tax deductible – meaning the U.S. government is incentivizing
and indirectly supporting the Israeli settlement movement, even though it has
been consistently opposed by every U.S. administration for the past 48 years.
More
(More of this extensive Haaretz report here.)
The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump
In 2012, 71 percent of the $240 million
that Jewish donors gave to the two major-party nominees went to President
Obama’s re-election campaign; 29 percent went to Mitt Romney’s campaign,
according to our analysis of campaign contributors, which used a predictive
model to estimate which donors are Jewish based on their names and other
characteristics. This ratio of support mirrors
how Jewish voters cast their ballots in 2012… But in 2016, of the $372 million
given to presidential campaigns so far by Jewish donors, 94 percent went to
Democrats and just 6 percent went to Republicans. This is particularly
interesting, since this figure includes donations to all of Trump’s primary
opponents. If we ignore the primary losers and just focus on the nominees, 96
percent of all contributions went to Clinton… In raw dollars, Jewish donors
have already given Clinton nearly double the amount they gave to Obama through
the whole 2012 cycle. But donations to Trump amount to a third of what was
given to Romney. More
Two
Years after Gaza War, Not a Single War Crime Indictment
Two
years after the Israeli military
offensive on Gaza, dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” more than half of
the civilian structures destroyed during the war have yet to be reconstructed,
and Palestinian residents of the coastal strip are still finding bones amongst
the ruins. And two years after that devastating offensive, Israeli authorities
are again proving what previous experience with the Israeli system has long
made clear: Israel is unwilling to conduct genuine, independent investigations
into suspected war crimes, and does not hold those responsible to account, as
required by international law. At total of 2,251 Palestinians were
killed during the 2014 war, most of them civilians, including 299 women and
551
children. More than 18,000 civilian structures were destroyed, including
hospitals and essential infrastructure. More
* * * *
OTHER EVENTS
Saturday,
September 24: BOSTON:
U.S. HANDS OFF SYRIA DEMO, 1 PM, PARK ST STATION, BOSTON. Hands Off
Syria! Picket and Street Rally. The US bombing of Syrian Government's
Army positions in the Eastern city of Deir ez-Zor on Saturday 9/17/16 is a very
dangerous escalation in the 5 year US Imperialist campaign of Regime Change,
the complete overturn of the legally elected and internationally recognized
government of Syria. The US Anti-war movement must say NO to this US war on
Syria NOW! Call to Protest by International Action Center (Boston),
United National Anti-War Coalition, Syrian American Forum, Committee for Peace
and Human Rights-Park St Peace Vigil, Veterans for Peace, Bishop Filipe
Teixeira OFSJC, Charles Clemons Touch 106.1 FM, Women's Fightback Network,Steve
Kirschbaum VP USW 8751Boston School Bus Union, Moorehead for
President/Lilly for VP Campaign of Workers World Party Boston (partial. List in
formation) facebook event page (please share widely!): https://www.facebook.com/events/623831724443590/?ti=icl
Saturday-Sunday,
October 1 –2: HOMELAND
(IRAQ YEAR ZERO) BY ABBAS FAHDEL, The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to
present HOMELAND (IRAQ YEAR ZERO) BY ABBAS FAHDEL from October
1 – October 2, 2016 with filmmaker Abbas Fahdel in person. $12 Special
Event Tickets. Abbas Fahdel in person, Saturday October 1 at 7pm, Homeland
(Iraq Year Zero) – Part 1. Before the Fall, Sunday October 2 at 7pm, Homeland
(Iraq Year Zero) – Part 2. After the Battle http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2016sepnov/homeland.html
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) is a riveting home-movie chronicle
of life in Iraq before and after the US invasion. Offering all-too-rare images
of everyday life in Iraq, the film closely follows extended family members and
friends of director Abbas Fahdel as they brace for the long impending attack
and then struggle to survive the disastrous consequences of American
imperialism. Leaving the invasion itself eerily absent, Homeland (Iraq Year
Zero) is cleaved into two epic chapters starkly separated by a dark, gaping
chasm. Before the Fall offers a touching portrait of middle-class Iraq,
assembled from extended domestic scenes and debates among Baghdad friends and
neighbors, as well as a wedding that becomes an emotional centerpiece of the
entire film. After the Battle bravely takes to the street to survey,
with shock and unspoken outrage, the ruthless destruction of public and private
space wrought by the occupying US forces.
Saturday,
October 15: MUSIC
FOR PEACE: An Evening of French Music, 7:30pm at
the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church, 1555 Massachusetts Ave.,
Cambridge. A Fundraiser for Mass Peace Action. Featuring Ayano
Ninomiya, violin, Carol Ou, cello, Mana Tokuno, piano.
Poulenc Sonata for violin and piano, Pierné Sonata for cello and piano,
Chausson piano trio. More
Details Here ~ Purchase
Tickets First concert of MUSIC FOR PEACE 2016-2017 SERIES, Three
Sundays of chamber music to support our work for a more peaceful U.S. foreign
policy. Victor Rosenbaum, Music Director. Cost for the series of 3
concerts: $60 for Massachusetts Peace Action members, $85 for non-members, $25
for students. Purchase
tickets for the series or join
Massachusetts Peace Action now!) Cost for a single concert: $25 for
members, $35 for non-members, $10 for students.
