Tom Morello and Boot’s Riley are returning with a new EP, The Ghetto Blaster, on Aug. 10th. The Album contains seven tracks which include exciting new originals but also covers, M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” as well as L.L. Cool J’s ” Mama Said Knock You out!”

In a press release, Morello said, “On The Ghetto Blaster EP we were shooting for a combo of the first Clash record and the Ohio Players greatest hits, interwoven with tractor trailer size riffs of course. This record definitely has more of a ‘band’ feel than the first, and Boots’ lyrics and delivery have never been sharper.” For his part, Riley added, “The music Tom wrote for this EP will make you go nuts. The covers we did are done with love and our own swagger. I like it better than our last album.”

Street Sweeper Social Club Dates:

More Info: www.streetsweepersocialclub.com

Please join PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) as they celebrate 25 years of providing people experiencing homelessness with a home for today and a PATH for tomorrow. As we celebrate how far we have com, we also recognize that there is still a long way to go. Join us in the fight to end homelessness by attending PATHPorts Across America. Proceeds from the event will help transform the lives of people in need.

For more info, visit: www.epath.org/PATHPorts

Start Time: 6:00pm

Date: Saturday October 2nd

End Time: 10:00pm

With Arizona’s anti-immigrant, anti-latino law SB 1070 scheduled to take effect the following day, a federal judge has put a temporary injunction on the “controversial” parts of the laws. The blocked portions of the law include “provisions that required immigrants to carry their papers…, banned illegal immigrants from soliciting employment in public places” and allowed “officers [to] mak[e] warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.”

On top of that, the Obama Justice Department is challenging the Arizona law’s constitutionality. The above court decision makes it look as though this law will be defeated.

As we have been saying for weeks, this law seems to be a political ploy to win support from people afraid for their jobs, and people who want to scapegoat others. Immigration is a very complicated issue, and this law did not even pretend to deal with any of the problems or benefits that come from immigrants, multiculturalism, trade, jobs, racism, economics, or, well, anything. Anyone who wants to talk seriously about new immigration laws, perspectives, or policy is welcome. This law does not do that.

Protesters are planning to make their voices heard in Arizona when the law goes into effect, and resistance will continue.

Photo: AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES (KABC) — The battle over Arizona’s controversial immigration law is about to reach the boiling point as the law is set to take effect on Thursday. As the possible enforcement date nears, opponents have stepped up protests.

Many motorists honked in support of immigration rights activists perched high above the 101 Freeway Monday morning.

The Grand Avenue overpass in downtown Los Angeles is one of three spots where protesters gathered to hold up banners against the Arizona immigration law.

Protesters sought to grab the attention of commuters in rush hour traffic. They began their demonstration at 7 a.m. and ended the protest at around 9 a.m. Protesters also demonstrated again at 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

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Final Sound Strike Press Conference video !!!!! Check it out!

After announcing that they will play a benefit concert to raise money for efforts against Arizona’s anti-immigration SB 1070, they gave a press conference to talk about the issue and their views.

“Toxic ideas have led to a chain of events. This is not an immigration issue, it is a battle of basic human dignity…  we want to continue to encourage our fans to unify. SB 1070 is very divisive. I want to keep encouraging the discussion. Conor [Oberst] is doing a benefit for the ACLU to overturn the Fremont law. We want to continue the dialogue about immigration reform so it’s done within a human rights framework. A lot of youth has not been brought into the dialogue,”  said Zack de la Rocha.

Tom Morello added, “We’ll use our music to unite people to say ‘no’ to racial profiling.”

“This is not a Latino or immigration issue,” said Zack de la Rocha, lead vocalist for Rage Against the Machine, at a press conference this morning. “This is a battle for basic human dignity”

More info:

• The Sound Strike
• Rage Against The Machine To Headline Concert Fighting Arizona Immigration Law
• Rage Speak Out About Immigrants’ Rights Show
• Opponents of Arizona law to stage Friday benefit concert
• Final Sound Strike Press Conference video

We got a very positive bit of news this week, about a new clothing factory opening in the Dominican Republic town of Villa Altagracia. The clothing industry is notorious for its exploitation of some of the world’s poorest people, paying workers starvation wages, treating them like criminals, and making them live in perpetual fear of losing their only means of survival.

This new factory will allow its workers to join unions, and pay them a “living wage” that is more than three times the national average for garment workers in that country. The clothing will primarily be sports wear with college logos, aimed at American university students. The brand will be named after the workers’ home, Alta Gracia, and will be run by a now-socially conscious clothing company called Knights Apparel. The NY Times article above gives concrete examples of the way that this new factory is having a positive impact on people’s lives.

What brings this story home to me is the factory’s history (not mentioned much in the article). The factory used to be owned by a company called BJ&B, which also made college clothing for big corporations like Nike and Reebok. It was discovered that the factory was grossly abusing and exploiting their workers, who then start fighting for their right to unionize and receive better treatment. This campaign received the support of many major social justice organizations in the United States, and the workers won. They formed a union and fought for better contracts with better wages.

And then the contracts started to dry up.

I attended a conference for United Students Against Sweatshops, where a dozen workers from factories in a dozen countries came and spoke to us about their working conditions and their struggles. A Dominican worker told us how Nike and Reebok were no longer buying clothing from the BJ&B factory, and the workers were losing their jobs, and were on the verge of losing everything they had fought for. It was a terrible feeling, that even when you win, you lose. At that conference, we realized that it wasn’t enough to fight for these workers’ right to unionize, we now had to fight for big corporations to continue doing business with unionized factories. We had won a major victory, but we had to continue fighting for it to make a difference.

So now, years later, that same BJ&B factory is now owned by a company that is determined to treat their employees with respect, and pay them wages which will allow them to actually plan for a better future, not just feed their children and pay the rent. But while this is a major victory, we have to realize that victories can easily turn into defeats, that successes can become failures.

If we actually care about a new way of doing business, where workers are treated fairly, and businessmen don’t run away and look for the next impoverished people to exploit, we have to push for this, and keep pushing. We have to encourage people to buy from socially responsible companies like this. We have to push companies to imitate the beneficial model of Knights Apparel and Alta Gracia. If we don’t, this attempt could fail, and big companies everywhere could use it as evidence that their model–the one in which people are used, abused and thrown away—is the only one that “works”.

To get involved, hook up with our friends at United Students Against Sweatshops, Team Sweat, and other organizations that are fighting this fight.

Photo: Michael Kamber for The New York Times

This benefit concert will support the organizations fighting against the SB 1070 law. The SB 1070 bill is an unconstitutional regulation of immigration that allows police officers to partake, legally, in racial profiling as well as detaining and arresting people for perceived immigration violations. According to soundstrike.net, this benefit, along with donations raised by The Soundstrike Fund, are expected to exceed $300,000 dollars. Please go to these websites to find out more info and join the fight!

• www.thesoundstrike.net
• www.altoarizona.com

You probably heard about the killing of Oscar Grant. Over a year ago, the young man was shot by a police officer in a subway station in Oakland. Several officers detained Grant and some friends who they incorrectly thought were suspects in a large fight. While Grant was lying face down on the ground, Officer Johannes Mehserle shot Grant in the back. Grant died in a hospital the next morning. The entire incident was recorded on video by a handful of horrified onlookers with cell phone cameras.

Mehserle was charged with murder and was taken to trial. The verdict was announced last week: involuntary manslaughter, the lowest charge he could get without being found innocent. Involuntary manslaughter is the charge you get when you kill someone in a car accident.

This result may remind some of our older readers of injustices of days past, other cases of police officers hurting or killing unarmed black men, and receiving little or not punishment for their crimes. Rodney King was beaten by police while on the ground, and videotaped for the world to see. Cops served no time. Amadou Diallo was shot 19 bullets, of the 41 shots fired at him by four plainclothes police officers. The cops were acquitted. Sean Bell was one of a group of men shot at 50 times by NYPD, resulting in Bell’s death. Again, no cops were found guilty. All of these cases involved unarmed black men, being shot and killed by police officers who thought that they were in danger, and all of the cops were found not guilty. You can easily find more documented cases of people (often people of color) killed by law enforcement at the Stolen Lives Project. With regards to these cases, the fact that Grant’s killer is facing any jail time at all is almost “progress”.

When Barack Obama was elected president, many prominent political and media figures began to announce that we were entering a “post-racial era”, as though the election of a single person meant that all racial prejudice, and all American institutions that perpetuated racist results, had just vanished. Obviously, it hasn’t. Most white Americans did not vote for Barack Obama, much of the backlash against him has racial undertones, much of the far-right Tea Party movement uses racist rhetoric, and, as we see in the terrible Oscar Grant case, black men may be shot by police despite being no threat, and committing no crime.

Why does this keep happening? I think that this writer is on the right track: fear.

“As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, ‘American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries. … We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns…’ Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proved to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people — it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not “unreasonable.” All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes.”

While there are positive signs that younger generations are losing the racial fears and hatreds of their parents and grandparents, these traits are not simply gone. And for those who care about justice, it will be many more long years before we can undo the damage of these old fears and hatreds.

Just a reality check, obviously to anyone who has their eyes open. The death of Oscar Grant is horrific, racism is still with us, and our collective future only gets better when we work our asses off for it.