The Sound Strike is proud to have played an important role in the International Boycott of Arizona after the passage of SB 1070. It is clear that it was the economic boycott that forced the business community to begin to oppose additional laws by the Arizona legislature targeting migrants. The boycott of Arizona has been a success, but as strategies on the ground shift, so must we. Our commitment to those groups remains firm, as does our opposition to SB 1070 and the attacks on Ethnic Studies in Tucson.

As we move forward we encourage artists to follow the lead of artists such as Conor Oberst, Immortal Technique, Rage Against the Machine, Girl in a Coma, Tigres del Norte, and others who have performed at benefit shows, performed for free and directly met with organizers on the ground. These artists have demonstrated models for how artists can engage their fans and connect with local organizations.  Additional benefit and community based shows are soon to be announced.

Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine issued the following statement:

The Sound Strike encourages artists to connect with local groups such as Derechos Humanos, Tonatierra, PUENTE, The Florence Project, NDLON, Save Ethnic Studies and other groups in Arizona. The movements against anti-immigrant attacks in Arizona have grown tremendously and the Sound Strike will continue to support in any way possible.

Updates will be posted here.

Background:

Since May of 2010 major musicians and artists responded to the call for an economic boycott of Arizona from grass roots migrant rights over the passage of SB 1070. Concerts were canceled by Cypress Hill, Steve Earle, Maroon 5, Kanye West, and My Chemical Romance. The Arizona boycott is estimated to have cost the state over $250 million.[1] This lead to a business coalition being formed to successfully halt further anti-immigrant measures in Arizona.[2]

Over 4,000 online and print articles regarding the Sound Strike appeared in entertainment related press. In addition, fundraisers where organized by Sound Strike artists in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Nebraska. Over $400,000 has been raised and donated by Sound Strike artists.

From Chicago Sun-Times:

Throughout the fall of 2011, we heard the questions: “What do the Occupy Wall Street protestors want?” “What are their goals?” “Who speaks for them?” By year’s end, there was another question: “Where’s their music?”

The two inquiries are inextricably related. One reason we’ve had trouble grasping why the Occupiers are Occupying is because their grievances have yet to dominate the popular arts — where spoonfuls of sugar help the medicine go down — and their songs haven’t exactly hit the charts or gone very viral.

“I had a funny conversation the other day … about the need for new chants,” says Marguerite Horberg, executive director of portoluz, which produces socially conscious art events in Chicago. “It’s still all the ‘Hey, hey! Ho, ho!’ I think it’s time for something new.”

There are new protest songs out there, some powerful and potent; they’re just not yet as pervasive as baby boomer cultural imperialism has conditioned us to expect from a modern social movement. With the music business now as decentralized as the Occupy movement itself, one has to rev up the search engine to unearth the musical voices of contemporary protest.

This weekend, though, some of the best of those new voices will be gathered in Chicago, occupying several events (official and otherwise) to sing their dissent in the shadow of the ballyhooed NATO summit. Speaking through hard rock, klezmer, Afrobeat, banda, Norteno, marching bands, jazz, country and, yes, traditional folk, these protest singers seek to both venerate and explode the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan, lone-wolf-with-an-acoustic-guitar template of musical protest.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich were arrested in March 2012 and charged with “hooliganism”. If found guilty, they could be jailed for up to 7 years.

The three women deny any involvement in the protest although even if they took part, the severity of the response of the Russian authorities would not be a justifiable response to the peaceful - if, to many, offensive - expression of their political beliefs.

Tell the Russian authorities to drop all charges and release them!

Read More And Take Action HERE

Op-Ed Columnist - Nicholas D. Kristof

I’d like to thank the makers of the “Kony 2012” video for goading me to write about Joseph Kony. With about 100 million views, it is now one of the most viral videos of all time.

My starting point is a “bravo” for film-makers for galvanizing young Americans to look up from their iPhones and seek to make a difference for villagers in central Africa who continue to be murdered, raped and mutilated by Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. Just in the last two months, the Lord’s Resistance Army has mounted 20 raids in Congo alone.

But nobody fights more wickedly than humanitarians, so there have been a series of attacks on the video. Let me try to address some of the criticisms.

Let Africans resolve their own problems. It’s neocolonialist for Americans to think that they can solve Congolese problems, when they can’t even solve their own. This is just one more example of “white man’s burden” imperialism.

When a warlord continues to kill and torture across a swath of Congo and Central African Republic, that’s not a white man’s burden. It’s a human burden.

To me, it feels repugnant to suggest that compassion should stop at a national boundary or color line. A common humanity binds us all, whatever the color of our skin — or passport.

The issue is complicated, in ways that don’t come through in a misleading video. For example, the video doesn’t make clear that Kony is no longer a threat in Uganda.

The video doesn’t contain errors, but it does simplify things greatly to hold attention. Complexity is, er, complicated: It has been a leading excuse for inaction during atrocities — during the Armenian genocide, during the Holocaust, during Rwanda, during the Bosnian slaughter. Each episode truly was complicated, but, in retrospect, we let nuance paralyze us.

It’s true that Kony’s forces are diminished and no longer a danger in Uganda, but he remains a threat in Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. Those are tough neighborhoods — I’ve been held at gunpoint in Central African Republic and chased through the Congo jungle by a warlord whose massacres I interrupted — that rarely get attention and are little understood. Yes, the video glosses over details, but it has left the American public more informed. Last year, Rush Limbaugh defended the Lord’s Resistance Army because it sounded godly.

American kids worrying about Kony accomplish nothing. The video promotes feel-good gestures — wear a bracelet! — that enrich a do-nothing aid organization but have no benefit in the jungles of central Africa.

It’s true that indignation among Americans won’t by itself stop Kony. Yet I’ve learned over the years that public attention can create an environment in which solutions are more likely.

Public outrage over Serbian atrocities in the Balkans eventually led the Clinton administration to protect Kosovo and hammer out the Dayton peace accord. The Sudan civil war killed millions over half-a-century on and off, until public outrage — largely among evangelical Christians — led President George W. Bush to push successfully for a peace agreement in 2005.

I asked Anthony Lake, now the executive director of Unicef who was President Clinton’s national security adviser during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, whether a viral video about Rwanda would have made a difference then. “The answer is yes,” he said. He suggested that this kind of public attention would also have helped save more lives in Darfur and in Congo’s warring east.

In 1999, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright paid a brief visit to war-ravaged Sierra Leone and was photographed with a 3-year-old girl whose right arm had been chopped off. The photograph, widely circulated, helped galvanize outside powers to crush the militias. Sierra Leone is now at peace, and that girl is studying in the United States.

I asked Albright, who later led a task force on preventing genocide, what she thinks of the Kony video.

“Shining a light makes a lot of difference,” she said, adding that Kony’s prospects are probably less good now than before the video came out.

The bottom line is: A young man devotes nine years of his life to fight murder, rape and mutilation, he produces a video that goes viral and galvanizes mostly young Americans to show concern for needy villagers abroad — and he’s vilified?

I don’t know if this initiative will make a difference. But if I were a Congolese villager, I would welcome these uncertain efforts over the sneering scorn of do-nothing armchair cynics.

To take action, please visit Amnesty International and sign this petition

A GREAT humanitarian catastrophe and vicious ethnic cleansing is unfolding here in the remote and impoverished region where Sudan and South Sudan come together.

For some in the Nuba Mountains, living in thatch huts far from electricity or paved roads, the sharpest acquaintance they are making with 21st-century technology is to be bombed by Sudanese aircraft.

Bombings, ground attacks and sexual violence — part of Sudan’s scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy — have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in South Kordofan, the Sudanese state where the Nuba Mountains are located. In some ways, the brutality here feels like an echo of what Sudan did in Darfur, only now it is Nubans who are targets.

“They said that they want to finish off the black people; they said they want to kill them all,” recalled Elizabeth Kafi, a 22-year-old Nuban who said she was kidnapped in December by Sudanese uniformed soldiers. She and others say that the mostly Arab Sudanese soldiers scorn Nubans partly for their darker skin, partly because some are Christian, but mostly because many Nubans back an armed uprising against decades of Sudanese misrule. In 23 days of captivity, she said she saw the soldiers use guns to execute several Nuban men, including her grandfather and brother-in-law. She described watching soldiers gang rape and then cut the throat of a young Nuban woman, and also stab to death the woman’s 3-year-old son.

Kafi said that she also saw 20 to 25 soldiers hold down two Nuban girls, whom she guessed to be about 14 or 15 years old, and gang rape them. The girls died from the rapes and beatings, she said.

It’s impossible to confirm Kafi’s full story, but others verified that she had been kidnapped. And many other Nubans recount similar attacks, or describe similar racial epithets. As in Darfur, the Sudanese soldiers often call their darker-skinned victims their “slaves.” Ahmed Haroun, a Sudanese official wanted by the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity in Darfur, is now the governor of South Kordofan, and he seems to be employing similar tactics here.

While the Sudanese government is trying to suppress an armed rebellion in the Nuba Mountains, it is civilians who bear the brunt of the suffering. In an apparent effort to starve the rebels, Sudan is blocking aid groups and food assistance from reaching the area, and the United Nations Security Council a few days ago expressed “deep and growing alarm” at rising hunger levels there. Some 28,000 Nubans have sneaked out and settled in a new refugee camp here in Yida, South Sudan, just south of the border with Sudan. Scores more straggle in most days, many half-starved.

“I came because I was starving,” said Muhasin Kuwa, a 24-year-old woman who just arrived at the refugee camp. Both her parents had starved to death, along with seven small children in her small village, she said.

The Sudanese military has tried to block access routes, making escape perilous. I spoke to members from a group of 16 who had crowded into a car, paying $45 each for what they hoped would be a flight to safety in the refugee camp. But then, the day before I interviewed them, they came to a checkpoint manned by Sudanese soldiers.

“They called us over,” said the vehicle’s owner, Haroun Suleiman, 42. “Then they shot at us with guns.”

Two male passengers, ages 41 and 25, were shot dead, he said. Two women, one with a month-old baby, are still missing. The others ran frantically into the bush and escaped, eventually making their way to the refugee camp.

The Sudanese government bombed this refugee camp in November, and, just a week ago, it bombed the nearby town of Jau, in South Sudan. Fears are growing of a new all-out war between Sudan and South Sudan, in part because of an oil dispute. South Sudan separated from the rest of the country just in July, and the two sides can’t agree on the oil pipeline fees that the South should pay. The South then shut off oil production, so both countries are now facing an economic crisis. Some experts warn that the North may try to seize oil wells from the South.

Nuban children are already growing up in war. When kids surrounded me in the refugee camp, I asked them how many had lost a brother or sister in the war. About one-third raised their hands.

When the food runs out in the Nuba Mountains, perhaps in two or three months, there will be a risk of mass starvation. I saw one 4-year-old girl at a feeding center run by Samaritan’s Purse, the aid group, who weighed only 22 pounds. Unless outside countries enforce humanitarian access into the Nuba Mountains, we can expect more famished children like her.

The Sudanese armed forces try to keep aid workers and journalists out, so the story of suffering has not received much international attention. I’m going to try to slip into the Nuba Mountains and report back. Stay tuned.

Despite proof that Peltier was convicted on the basis of fabricated and suppressed evidence, as well as coerced testimony, he continues to languish in prison 36 years after his conviction.

For nearly 3 years, Randolph and his lead researcher, Dan Battaglia have travelled the country accessing archives and conducting key interviews, some of which have never been revealed before. Randolph expresses the importance of exposing the “Reign of Terror” on the Pine Ridge Reservation, illegal operations by the FBI within the case/trial and the ongoing list of constitutional violations toward Leonard Peltier. In addition, Randolph is strongly focusing on the 36 years of imprisonment and harassment Peltier has faced through the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI’s influence on his treatment and legal proceedings.  The film is bringing not only a detailed analysis of the Peltier case, but shows the relevance and importance of this injustice to the rights of every American.

Randolph assures that this film will bring new light to the case in a unique and creative style and hopes that it will help generate major public outcry to have an impact in bringing Leonard Peltier home.

Recently, Graphic Artist Shepard Fairey used his talents in creating a poster for “Wind Chases the Sun”.

The film continues to raise production funds and pursues critical leads in the research field.

Learn more and support the film at www.windchasesthesun.com and join their facebook page at www.facebook.com/windchasesthesun

If you are interested in assisting the film in the fight for justice please communicate with producer Preston Randolph through email at cactusproductionsfilms@gmail.com

Join the fight and support the film to free America’s political prison.

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of when the first detainees made their way into the now infamous Guantanomo Detention Facility. Amnesty International and over 60 other organizations are marking this as the National Day of Action Against Guantanomo and the NDAA.

Take action NOW and tell President Obama that 10 years is too long! Guantanomo needs to be closed. Here is the link to take action:

www.amnestyusa.org/CloseGitmo

Dubbed “Love You Madly: A Concert For John O’Brien”, Morello will be sharing the stage with the likes of members of Maroon 5, Sheryl Crow, The Forest Rangers, Curtis Stiegers, Chantal Kreviazuk, Stephen Stills and a freshly reunited Velvet Revolver, including front man Scott Weiland for a very special one-off gig.

John O’Brien will be remembered most as a award-winning ASCAP composer who worked on Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Pienapple Express, to name a few. He was tragically found dead in a Chicago hotel room on August 20, 2011 at the age of 45.

Tickets for “Love You Madly: A Concert For John O’Brien” range from $49.50 in advance to $55 on the day of show.

Click Here For More Info On Tickets

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The Israeli Parliament on Monday held its first public debate on whether to commemorate the Turkish genocide of Armenians nearly a century ago, an emotionally resonant and politically fraught topic for Israel, founded on the ashes of the Holocaust and trying to salvage frayed ties with Turkey.

The session resulted from a rare confluence of political forces — an effort under way for decades by some on the left to get Israel to take a leading role in bringing attention to mass murder, combined with those on the right angry at how Turkey has criticized Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians.

Previous efforts to declare one day a year a memorial for “the massacre of the Armenian people” have failed, and hearings on the topic were restricted to closed sessions of the Parliament’s defense and foreign affairs committee because of concerns over Turkey’s reaction, especially at a time when relations were friendlier.

But with Turkey having recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv, the hearing was moved this year to the education committee, where sessions are open. The debate was on live television.

“As a people and as a country we stand and face the whole world with the highest moral demand that Holocaust denial is something human history cannot accept,” Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Parliament, who has favored official recognition of the genocide, said in his testimony. “Therefore we cannot deny the tragedy of others.”

More than 15 countries have officially labeled as genocide the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the chaos connected to World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Its denial is a crime in Switzerland and Slovenia.

Turkey acknowledges atrocities occurred, but not any specific death toll.

At Monday’s hearing, some advocates of commemorating the massacre said their efforts had nothing to do with politics or with the Turkey of today. Rather, they said, the goal was to educate young Israelis about genocide and publicly assert the need to prevent such acts.

But officials from the Foreign Ministry said relations with Turkey were fragile and that passing such a resolution could have bad strategic consequences.

After Israel invaded Gaza three years ago to stop rocket fire by Palestinian militants, Turkey expressed anger. A year and a half ago, the Israeli navy stopped a Turkish-sponsored flotilla from going to Gaza, killing nine activists aboard. Turkey demanded an apology and compensation. When Israel refused, ties were downgraded.

Otniel Schneller, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party, spoke against the commemoration, saying the region was growing more hostile to Israel in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings and that Israel had to be pragmatic.

“This is the time when we must rehabilitate our relations with Turkey because this is an existential issue for us,” he said. “Sometimes our desire to be right and moral overcomes our desire to exist, which is in the interest of the entire country.”

The committee took no action, agreeing to meet again.

Link To Original Article HERE