redFlags

It's worse than you think: Video Teach-In on why the Bush regime must be stopped

Webcast of the World Can't Wait NYC teach-in "It's Worse Than You Think."

If all the recent changes brought by the Bush administration, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, has started to blur: this Oct. 30 teach-in is a necessary summation of what the stakes really are.

Where the Bush regime is taking the world and why it must be stopped, featuring:

Larry Everest
author, "Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda"

 Bill Goodman
Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights
   
Chris Hedges
author of bestseller "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"
   
Cristina Page
author, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex"
   
Les Roberts
An author of the recent study revealing that over 600,000 Iraqis have died since war began.

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Click here for a list of dozens of teach-ins around the country through Nov. 5

Click here for more on organizing showings

And one black flag for Brad Will

Covering the ongoing popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, NYC Indymedia journalist Brad Will  was shot and killed at the Santa Lucia Barricade by paramilitaries repotedly linked to the besieged state governor's paramilitary forces. Several others were also shot and killed during the incident, including a schoolteacher associated with the militant teachers' union whose strike precipitated the political crisis on Mexico's southern Pacific Coast.

Brad Will was in Oaxaca to take video and report on the state-wide popular uprising and teacher strike that began in June with the violent attempted removal of the striking teachers from their encampment in the center of Oaxaca City by federal police forces. Since then, the teachers and other groups formed the APPO, the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People, and have called for the removal of the governor of state Ulises Ruiz of the PRI.

Brad Will is the first North American Indymedia journalist to be killed while reporting. There have been several other incidents where IMCs were targeted, and Lenin Cali Nájera, an Ecuadorian Indymedia activist, was killed in 2004.

Always skeptical, never the cynic; Brad Will was a committed anti-authoritarian who always sought to bring the stories of people in struggle to the whole world. An early volunteer with the Indymedia movement, his coverage of local struggles, such as the movement for public space and gardens in New York, were only one part of his internationalist vision. From the tree sits obstructing clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest to the indigenous, proletarian uprisings of Bolivia, Brad was there to help people tell their own stories.

Brad Will died as he lived, on the barricades armed only with a video camera.

Read Brad's last communication from Oaxaca.

Adapted from reports on Indymedia by Jed Brandt. [photo by Erin Siegal]

On Your Own Terms: An open letter to activists regarding World Can't Wait

Jed Brandt writes:

This letter is a personal appeal for your active involvement with World Can't Wait, on your own terms, starting now.

Momentum is building for the Oct. 5 protests, but many activists have yet to step up -- or even investigate for themselves the scope of this effort. The lull in the protest movement since the start of the war, exactly as the population has turned against this disaster is more confusing than it should be and, I'd argue, related to a passive orientation towards the elections.

Let's stop waiting. Let's stop pretending like Bush will change his mind or the Democrats will "grow a spine." They have backbone, but they don't as a party represent us. After literally years of this same wishing game, we have to learn the lessons that are there in plain sight. That's right. I'm using the imperative "we have to." We have to act consciously, resist, and stop politically pussyfooting around.

Too many of us have been involved in day-to-day activism that isn't taking into consideration the political root of the current situation. Massive popular revulsion at the legalization of torture,  surveillance without warrant -- and Bush's recent legislation exempting himself and his cabinet from war crimes prosecution must be galvanized, mobilized, given tangible expression. This requires experienced activists, media workers, community-based organizers. It requires that we put distrust aside, and work like what we do matters.

If you are not now involved, please question why. What is holding "radical" movements from radical action? It certainly isn't that people aren't ready to move. Hardly. The problem as I see it is in the habits of the organized left and its refusal to get with the times, leave comfort zones and challenge all the orthodoxies of political passivity.